[wip] My Hunter

[freespyryt]

Hey all
I'm just starting to make a treasure hunting type game with my boyfriend and I'm doing the art for the game, including the characters. This is my first time doing any kind of pixel art so critique and tips are both greatly appreciated.
Update:
That's my first attempt at a character which I'm hoping will eventually resemble:

I'm not terribly pleased about my shading, but I'm totally new at this so again, please help me make this usable! I don't want him to look exactly like that, obviously my proportions are aimed to be different as this is supposed a top down 3/4 kind of game (like Pokemon) rather than face on. Thanks for taking the time to help me with this!

[Chrispy]

That is very, very tiny. I don't think I'll be able to critique this correctly with its small size. It's hard to make out most of it.

[Lizzrd]

I disagree. The size is quite ok.

You should "sew" together the arms and the torso though.

[freespyryt]

Thanks to both of you!
Lizzrd: Do you mean like, delete some of the darker lines that separate the torso and the arms? I'm just wanting to clarify what you meant.  

[7321551]

Too small? He's a few pixels taller than Link in Link To The Past! & fighting inhumanely small dimensions is half the fun, right?

He looks nothing like your reference, but I wouldn't bother - he's got enough character of his own, & the ref is far too detailed. Anyway, I made you an edit.

step 1:

step 2:


*I drew over it with a new grayscale ramp, to try to get an idea of the shape. Yours had emphasis on uniform detail - little dots scattered around to represent hair, etc., which was making it a bit flat.
*As a consequence, I decreased the amount of colors used. I just like to do that.
*Tried to give it a light-source.
*When the shape (values) looked alright, I just adjusted hue & saturation until I thought it looked good.
edit: & good luck!

[EyeCraft]

Hello and welcome to Pixelation 

Quite a good start, especially considering you haven't pixelled before. I think 7321551's edit has hit most points, but I wanted to mention that you should avoid off-centre light sources like the one he has used. This is because it prevents you from mirroring directions of your sprites without them having jumpy/inconsistent lighting.

Can you give us any information about the game? Mainly what resolution it's in and any colour restrictions? Also what environment(s) will it be set in?

[freespyryt]

7321551: Thank you!!! I really appreciate the effort you put into that. It looks amazing! I'll try and implement that--the lighting was definitely needing to be fixed.
EyeCraft: My boyfriend and I are still working out the resolution. We may have to increase the character's size to fit in a 640x480 resolution game, which I think is what we're leaning towards. The settings I think is mostly going to be a mountain town in caves and mountains and dungeons, but we're unsure on the specific theme (we were also thinking kind of steam punk as a general theme). But that's all a work in progress, and we were just sure we wanted our main guy to look like that. I don't think there are really any color restrictions, but for the character we'd like to stick to greens and browns and blue for the goggles, yellow for the belt. The main character will be "treasure hunting" and he's going to be carrying weapons. Again, we're not sure on complete specifics but I'll let you know any updates I get. Thank you again for your help, that's awesome!

[Kælaar]

god, 640x480 is so yesterday >.>.
hit up the standard 1024x768 imo, also when designing a game its useful to work everything out before hand and make either a document,wiki, or notebook containing every detail about the game.
you dont want to "play it by ear." i know thats a bit OT but i think its important to be aware of.
As for the Character, it is very small but, small can be a great way to learn with pixel art. Animation is waaaaay easier the smaller it is.
The sprite looks very flat, the boots and body mainly Although i must say
for a first attempt its pretty good =P. Adding a light source from the center would make it more 3Dish and would eliminate any lighting issues in the game as Eyecraft suggested.
also i dont know what program your using, but if you want a pretty good pixel art program check out: http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/ Although not as professional as say photoshop
its simplicity and design make for a pretty sweet combo. Good luck =) hope that helps at least a little bit.

[freespyryt]

Kaelaar: We're still not stuck on that. At this point we're using google docs to document the entireity of the game, but we're still ironing all the details out as we speak. And thank you! I was unsure of how it would go but I'm proud of my little hunter. I was trying to add a center lightsource without making him look fat, so I'm trying to figure out how that's going to work out. I'm currently using graphics gale as my pixel program and it's working great! Thank you for your input!

[7321551]

Woah. 640x480 & 1024x768 might be appropriate resolutions for large, truecolor graphics (ie. smooth color transitions & automatic-antialiasing), but for pixel-art it will probably be prohibitively time-consuming, & maybe pointless. To put it in perspective, here are some low-res overhead examples: 1, 2. Do you anticipate needing to depict more detail than that? If not, I would just use something like 320x240 & scale-up by x3 or x4.