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Messages - Azuyre
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41
General Discussion / Re: Sprite Animation software for Sprite sheets?
« on: April 25, 2013, 09:22:11 pm »
I guess the question has long since been answered but I figured I'd mention what I use too. I came across a plugin for Paint.NET that works fairly well, you just select a box on the canvas and select animation under effects and it brings up a window that animates however many frames you'd like after that box with the possibility of a border between frames, you can also export as a .gif but it's still under development and tends to compress the animation poorly.

Your program seems pretty useful Arne, I like the choice of name too. :lol:

42
General Discussion / Jumping Sprites?
« on: April 25, 2013, 07:33:58 pm »
I've been working on some graphics for a platform game for a while now and I've somewhat gotten the hang of doing walking sprites, but I realized recently that I don't really have a clue on how to go about making jumping sprites. It seemed like a simple enough thing to do when I first thought about it, and it very well might be, but since I started trying to make them I've had a bit of trouble.

I looked around for tutorials on the subject and couldn't seem to find any, the only times I saw it mentioned was when someone was going for something more realistic with a buildup and a landing for an actual animation rather then a game. When it comes to most of the older platformers they usually were pretty limited when it came to jumping sprites, a lot of the big platformers only used a few, usually one for jumping and one for falling, or sometimes even just one rotated fours times for a flip.


Lately I've been looking at X's jumping from Mega Man X, which seems like a good smooth example, it has about 7 sprites for jumping, it animates through sprites 1 and 2 and stops at 3 while rising, then when you begin to fall it goes through 4 and stops at 5 and when you hit the ground it plays 6 and 7 and then its back to your idle pose. I'm not sure if I should aim for something similar of possibly go with a bit less then that. My walking animation is 8 frames so I should probably go with something smooth to match it but I'm not exactly sure how many frames is enough and how many ends up being too much.

Besides length I'm also having a bit of trouble figuring out the positions the character should go through during the jump, the rest of the team I'm on and myself have been trying to mimic different jumps from games to get some ideas but for the most part the jumping done in platformers is pretty unrealistic since the character has to be able to quickly jump and land without stopping.


TL;DR: I'm basically wondering how to determine the amount of frames in the jump animation and how to decide on jumping positions that are realistic but don't slow down the game's flow with a long buildup or landing. If anyone knows of any tutorials or topics that discuss this it would be a great help. :D

Thanks in advance to anyone that replies.

43
Pixel Art / Re: [C+C] Platformer Character Sprites
« on: December 11, 2012, 04:45:09 am »
Quote from: TheMonsterAtlas on December 09, 2012, 03:12:29 pm
Everything looks relatively clean and follows a lot of the pixel placement rules that I know of. Something I realized is the megaman like one has metal on his left arm and left leg which would make walking extremely awkward. It's really not that big of a deal, but when you think about it, it seems odd that one person would have one entire side of their body to be weighed down more than the other. (Or those parts weight roughly the same as they would if they were flesh.)
I hadn't really thought about that, my main idea was that he had been in an accident that had mostly hit the left side so that would be the cause for the parts. I'll think a bit about it and see if I can make him feel a bit more balanced.

Quote from: TheMonsterAtlas on December 09, 2012, 03:12:29 pm
Everything else looks appealing, well done, the suspenders could use some touching up to look like they being pushed out by the stomach on the Mario-esque ones. Other than that, pretty impressive work!
I tried making a small change on their suspenders based on what you suggested, I think it looks a bit better. Thanks for the compliment by the way. :)

Quote from: Ashbad on December 09, 2012, 06:04:27 pm
Had 10 minutes free, so here's a quick edit:





I only really edited the girl on the far left well-enough to show improvement, so I'd mostly ignore the edits of the others.  With that in mind, these characters are a bit hard to read at this size -- they're better at a 2x zoom, but since you made no mention that they're going to be displayed like that, so:

  • Removed most of the really small details, since they read as noise (except for the eyes, which should at this size read more like eyes than what you had due to the higher contrast across the surrounding skin/hair/eye, but it's also a bit more of a style thing I suppose on my part to have them so JRPG-ish)
  • Reduced color count, made colors contrast more internally (I think you could contrast them even more than I did)
  • Kept the dark outline color to outline almost exclusively on the very outside -- makes things less flat, and also helps the character stand out more (I should have shown this more myself in this edit, but I didn't really think about it until now.)
  • Larger and simpler pixel clusters, reads better at 1x resolution
  • Skin is a bit too bright to effectly portray facial features like eyes well -- I might have gone a bit *too* dark, but something a bit lighter could work well.  You also don't have much room to effectively cast much light/shadow on most of the faces (the only ones where it could work is with the bros), so I'd go with more flat coloring.

I think these problems were most pronounced in the large blaster-master vehicle and the girl, and least obvious in the cape dude (He could go on his way with the least amount of modification, actually.)

I think when I have time again later today I'll try to modify the girl a bit more to better show what I mean with a better edit ;)

Thanks for taking the time to do an edit. :) Regarding the size, for anyone with an hd capable monitor they would likely appear at about 4x size:


We'll probably have support for using 1x-4x though.

I've edited the characters a bit based on what you've said and some stuff you did in your edit, here's a normal size version with the changes:


I'm a bit unsure about making the colors as dark as you have them, though I think I might try changing the skin color to something just a bit darker, I guess it was a bit of a strange choice to have used such a light color right next to white for the miners (mario/luigi). As for the ninja girl I was aiming for the scarf to cover the bottom of her face and for her hair to cover most of the top so you kinda get the feel of the ninja masks that cover all but their eyes. Do you have any suggestions for making the scarf work a bit better that way? Or do you think I should lower it like you did? I did some small changes to the tank too but nothing major yet, I'll probably post with an updated one sometime soon.

I've had a few other people not realize at first either but the caped character is female too, I had been having a bit of trouble with her, I wanted her to look a bit tough but she usually comes across as male when people see her without knowing. Any suggestions on how I might be able to make it more obvious that shes female?

Thanks for all the help so far! :D

Edit: I ended up changing the ninja girl's face to something similar to what you did with it:

44
Pixel Art / [C+C] Platformer Character Sprites
« on: December 09, 2012, 01:39:25 am »
Lately I've been working on some graphics for a platformer and I was hoping I might be able to get a bit of feedback on how things look so far:

It's probably a bit obvious but each character is based off of an old nes game. The games they're based on are; Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania, MegaMan, Mario, and Blaster Master.

I was originally just going to post asking if anyone could give me tips on the wheels for the tank at the end but I thought that I might as well post all the characters and see if anyone notices any glaring issues with them. I've been going over these two threads a lot lately to try and learn what to avoid and other ways I can improve. The only people I've really shown all the graphics to are the rest of the team for the game but for the most part they just say it looks good and leave it at that. :P

I was hoping that by posting them here I could get some tips on fixing any issues that may be present so I can avoid repeating them later as I continue working on new graphics.

45
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Platform Game Tiles [C+C]
« on: December 02, 2012, 12:17:35 am »
Made a bit of an update:


I've made small changes throughout the original tiles as well as adding 25 new tiles for intersections that might occur. I also made a few tiles for 1 tile thick areas. The programmer is working on putting the tiles into the game and making a stage where I can test all the intersections to make sure everything fits together well, as far as I can tell from testing myself they all should though.

My plan is to make it so I have two variations of each edge tile.

So in the picture above each blue tile would be replaced by an alternate version that could be used and still fit with the surrounding tiles, that way I can get a bit of variation throughout the stages and have patterns like tile 1, tile 2, tile 1, etc. across the edges. I've already done 2 alternate tiles for the center tile and 1 for the thin vertical tiles.

Does this seem like a good idea? Or am I just doing more work then necessary?

Edit: Realized pretty soon after posting that the left and right edges of the thin horizontal tiles at the bottom didn't match up so those have been fixed.

46
Pixel Art / Re: Character Portrait [C+C]
« on: November 28, 2012, 02:43:08 am »
Thanks for all the help so far. :D

I'm not sure how I didn't realize that half my colors were similar to another. :P Anyway, I've edited it a bit based on what you've said:
>

I went over the whole thing looking for banding and made some fixes based on some of the stuff you did in your edits. I think it's looking a lot better then the first version, thanks again for the help so far.

I wasn't quite sure about your edit of the eye, I was mainly going by the sketch and the angle doesn't seem too off on that. Though I think there probably is something I could change to make it look a bit better. I'll try a few things and see what I come up with.

47
Pixel Art / Character Portrait [C+C]
« on: November 26, 2012, 07:14:30 am »
Trying to get a bit of practice in so I made some pixel art based on a sketch. The character's name is Red and the sketch was done by Endling from dA.


48
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Platform Game Tiles [C+C]
« on: November 11, 2012, 10:40:41 pm »
Thanks for all the tips! :)

I made some more changes based on what you said and some of the stuff you had done in the edit:


I wasn't able to make them look less tile like but I'm gonna try a few more things after posting this. I'm not sure how I managed to not put shadows in such obvious places :P I think it's starting to look a bit better with those added in, I tried something similar to what you did with the grass, where you use the lightest shade for highlights. I forgot to try changing the colors to match the ones you have in your edit though, they don't seem too different but it is noticeable, I'll probably change them in the next version.

I guess it might help to show an example of the sprites that would be used with the tiles as well:


The character sprites are mainly gonna be about 18x36 though that sprite is a little taller and not as wide. I guess it is pretty strange to be using 18x18 tiles over 16x16, personally I had planned to use 16x16 at first but eventually me and the other team members wanted to try slightly bigger sprites, after trying a ton of sizes I ended up on 18x18 for the tiles to match the average 36 px height of the sprites. The programmers seemed alright with it so I wasn't sure if there would be any problems.

Are there any specific issues you can think of that pop up when not working with a tile size that is a power of 2? Thinking about it I suppose a half tile might be a bit strange since it would be an odd number. I've done a bit of programming work myself but I always stuck to 16x16 so I'm not sure what could come up from a size like this.

Do you think 16x16 might still work alright with bigger sprites like what I'm using?

49
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Platform Game Tiles [C+C]
« on: November 11, 2012, 07:54:40 am »
I forgot to leave the old version in the first post so both the versions on the topic were the newer ones, I added the older version to the first post again.

I did change a bit on the second one but you're right that it wasn't really enough.

Here's another version:


I took out most of the shading at the top and just left the dark green outlines and a little bit of shadow under the lower spots.

50
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Platform Game Tiles [C+C]
« on: November 10, 2012, 06:59:00 pm »
How does this look?


I lightened up the whole top and moved the highlight up more as well as adding some shadow below the grass.

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