[WIP] Boss ship

[Lazy Brain Games]

I've been working on a nifty NES Raiden type game with a twist, and I thought I'd do a boss that had a bit more going on visually. I'm only using 4 colors (1 for transparency) although I'm layering some of the sprites on top of each other as was done back in the day I'm going for a dark techy kind of look for this boss. I'm pretty happy with the rendering (even though I just copied over the right side) and I'm looking for some critiques on it in general. I know the palette is a bit odd, what can I say? I like weird palettes apparently

Boss before the handles are pulled out


Boss with all handles pulled out


If there's any trouble spots or inconsistencies in this boss, let me know!

-Johnny B.

[Decroded]

Ooo I love raiden :-)
so its 4 colours per sprite?
Seems like u could do more with the main sprite if as u say u can overlay the eyes for example as separate sprites.
Oh wait have u done that already?
It wasnt until I zoomed in that I saw that blue u have so seems such a waste to have such similar colours...

[Ichigo Jam]

It'a a nice design, but you should definitely bring up the brightness of the green - it's almost exactly the same value as the blue at the moment, which makes it very hard to make out the shading.

Quick (kind of unfinihsed) edit:


I also fiddled around a bit with not using all 3 colours in all areas to try and make it pop a bit more

Also, you could use an extra colour on the eyes if you wanted to, since they can rely on the object underneath to provide the black.
I may have gone a bit overboard with trying to make the central eye reflect the other eyes...

[piffany]

The texture is quite good already. You should add some shading and highlights to make the whole thing look more 3D. Also, for a more menacing look, perhaps the red eyes (?) could be glowing.

[Lazy Brain Games]

Changed the color of the ship to something a bit more readable. This pic has kind of a breakdown of the layering...

1) Top one: This is just the ship layer, black, green, dark green, and transparency.
2) Middle pic: Shows the other layers that go on top of the ship, the jewel colors have been changed for gameplay, and the black outline is just to help visualize it a bit.
3) Bottom pic: Shows all the layers together, I've changed the color of the guns in the front to grey, which I think is an improvement



Next step is to draw the jewels as damaged, although I find myself having a really hard time doing that! Are there any tutorials on how to draw things that are damaged/being destroyed?

Here's a pic of this bad boy in-game, the supporting projectile animations still need some work


Thanks for the feedback all!

-Johnny B.

[Decroded]

Cool mockup but I still think those two shades on the boss aqre too similar.
Try different colours or cool/warm or something.

And the player ship looks a bit hard to make out against the black background.
It needs some colour strips or something and some booster exhaust so you can see where you are on screen without looking directly at the ship.
Having something like a light blast on the front of the ship every time you shoot would help with this because it would flicker in the corner of your eye.

[Lazy Brain Games]

Here's an edit with a bit more contrast, I often have issues with color Mainly because I keep pulling colors from an NES palette, which is pretty limiting.



The readablity of the ship is a very good point! The background does move pretty fast, which does help out quite a bit, but there's always room for more readability!

Thanks again for all the help

[Candy Man Criminal]

the newest one kinda hurts my eyes, i think you need to tone down the bright color a bit

[Decroded]

Agreed, I liked Ichigo's edit for example.