Deep Blues Gang lineup

[KaiserFate]

Just a little something I whipped up in GraphicsGale. These characters will eventually be animated.
No doubt you can tell I was feeling more confident with every subsequent sprite, they are shown in chronological order of completion.

If you're wondering, the Deep Blues Gang is a small mob of gangsters who are also chess nerds. Each character is based off a chess piece. From left to right, they are Elvis Gloom, Victor Hedwig, Jean-Baptiste, Castello, Bauer and Art Galahad.

[KaiserFate]

Another character from the same project. He's one of the goodies, a cyborg called Winston. I deliberately wanted his weapon to be about as big as him in kind of a stab at characters like Cloud. Ended up just looking like a huge assault rifle, though, which I guess is okay.

[blumunkee]

Hey, these are some funky characters! You've got some nice flash animations on your gallery so I'm interested to see how these animations come out. Now on to the critique.

My biggest issue: these are too messy! The main culprits seem to be too many black lines and too much dithering.

Too many black lines can overpower a sprite. Try coloring the outlines in places, and even completely omitting outlines. The internal details especially can get lost with lots of outlining. You have really direct control of lights and shades at this resolution. Try thinking more in terms of rendering solid forms rather than laying down flat images.

Dithering... I'd say drop most if not all of the dithering from the sprites. You can better show form by adding a "buffer" shade between your highlight and shadow. And I imagine it could be a chore to animate those dither-patterns.

These characters are all very unique, and they aren't served well by using the same palette. I'd like to see them all get unique skin tones and different colors themes. I'm not sure what your restrictions are, if any, but traditionally sprites like these might each get a unique 16 color palette.

I made an edit of this Winston fellow to address some specific points.



- Colored parts of the outlines, removed much of the internal outlining.
- Cleaned up internal details, especially on the gun and face.
- Removed lots of specular highlights. It was a bit overkill methinks.
- Added another blue shade to act as a buffer.
- Tweaked skin colors for a less pale look, utilized some of the browns from the hat/armor for skin tones.

The biggest change I made was eliminating most of the single pixels that stood out. Wilson in particular suffers from this, and it contributes a  great deal to the messyness. There are lots of places, I'm thinking his vest especially, where there are little bright or dark pixels sitting all by themselves. Pixels tend to want to stay together in clusters. When left along they tend to stick out like a sore thumb.

[KaiserFate]

Wicked critique, thanks a lot.

Let me explain myself for how I approached these sprites, but I will definitely be taking your advice into consideration.

-The internal lines and very limited pallette (I deliberately avoided using more colours than necessary) were attributed to the fact that I want this to look like a game from the 8-bit era, i.e. the NES. If anything I almost felt like I was using *too* many colours for this purpose. A lot of your advice (which is excellent, and duly noted, by the way) applies more to 16-bit consoles; they'd look much better on the SNES or GBA. Internal black lines and dithering seem to be very common on the 8-bit systems out of necessity.
As for the wayward pixels on Winston's chestplate, I was trying to go for bolts running up his chest, but the resolution here is probably too slow.

As it happens, I am actually thinking of making two sets of sprites for all these characters - one set for use on an isometric plane (the sprites you see here), limited to a more 8-bit look, and a second more complicated set once I've warmed up in a sidescrolling shooter look. I had intended these second sets to look better qual, higher resolution etc, so perhaps I will bump it up to 16-bit altogether with those sets using buffer shades and coloured inner lines.

Sound good?

[blumunkee]

I did misinterpret these as 16-bit era sprites. The NES limitation thing sounds like great idea. Check out the Cinematendo thread, it's got some details on the restrictions of NES graphics.

[HughSpectrum]

Ditch the dithering on the sprites.  I don't think I've ever seen an NES sprite or enemy built of tiles use dithering for shading, so there's no obligation to use it just for NES sake.

May need to adjust your color ramps to take account the black in the sprite too.

[KaiserFate]

How about this? I tackled the three main offenders for dithering and decided to just flatten them out.
Are these an improvement?

I also realised that since drawing these sprites, I added a new grey for Winston which I implemented as a buffer shade for Bauer at the bottom.

[Helm]

They definitely are much improved however for 8-bit aesthetic you sorta need to use 3 colors+transp *for the whole sprite segment* (as cut up by 8x8 attributes). This is what makes the NES/commodore 64 aesthetic what it is, really. ZX Spectrum is even harsher where sprites often where 1bit affairs (as is commodore in hi-res mode), but still.

Here is for example an approximation of 8-bitfying your sprite



It's made out of 6 8x8 tiles and most of them only have black, two colors and transparency. This is better than the NES can do for example, and the green on the eyes would probably not even be there.

To make things even more complicated on a real NES you couldn't just pick some pleasing colors and use them, it had a built in palette of 64 if memory serves and you'd use the colors you were going to use for a lot of other game artifacts that use the same palettes too, usually all the powerups and projectiles from the same character would use his palette. So Your guy would throw out a lot of 1bit green projectiles probably heh.

However are all these restrictions worth it? Yes in my opinion because they make the sprite look more authentic 8-bit and for those that 8-bit matters I guess that plays an interesting part. What you've going going right now actually reminds me of a very real time in game development: the shift from 8 bits to 16 bits on consoles like the mega drive and the turbo gfx 16, where developers were used to making games for the NES and they didn't know what to do with their more colors-per-sprite so their art looked like reskinned NES art heh. A *lot* of early mega drive games look like that.

[KaiserFate]

Interesting point. Reminds me of when I used to compare Super Mario World to Super Metroid.



Super Mario World sprites look a bit more colourful than what you see on the NES but not much more complex than the spritework on some of the better games on the NES. The way it's shaded is more like how I've approached these ones, except I kept the NES black outlines prevalent in many games.
Then there's Metroid, which while not infinitely more complicated, is much more sophisticated in its approach than the Mario sprites. They sat down and thought hard about how to use the resources to look like solid, real-looking 3D shapes. I wasn't going for that, myself, aiming for a more primitive look.

I think for the time being I'll probably keep going with these sprites in a kind of limbo "12-bit" - the project itself is purely for fun and is not a diehard Nintendo tribute by any means - but in future I'll always know to pay special attention to what my imagined "system" can handle. Let's say these were made for the ill-fated GameStation X. :I

[Jad]

I think you're suffering from line-art-itis!

As in you (or some part of your brain) put the lines of the line art in very high regards and work with that as the base of everything - giving your art a very relief-like appearance.

Let me explain - I think that some parts of your sprites would greatly benefit from not having highlights/shadow at all, and that you should issue shading and highlighting in a manner that maximizes the readability of the sprites - whereas I felt you often go down the route of 'this area is enclosed by lines - this is the direction of the light source - this part gets shadow and this part gets highlight'

see what I mean? The brown agent guy would probably benefit from having his farther arm completely dark for example, just to really push it into the background and emphasize 3dness.

Blue guy looks pillow shaded, even. I'd recommend you go with a light source straight from the top and shade accordingly. If you did this, his coat would probably shadow his legs so much there would be no highlight on them - so be it. I think it'd look better that way.

Sculpt more with the lighting - build more shapes! And if there's anything you don't get about what I'm saying then I'll be glad to make an edit for you when I'm less tired!