[WIP] Partisan Tactics Battles : Animations, woah

[Ben2theEdge]

First of all I've been following this thread for a while and I love this work, it's brilliant! Keep it up!

Now for the mean part: It looks to me like the biggest issue here is the amount of detail you're trying to cram into these tiny sprites. I tend to be a detail freak, but particularly with your main character, there are some severe readability issues going on. At 2x it takes a while to figure out what he's supposed to be wearing, and at 1x it's pretty much illegible. I think of these characters, by far the most successful one is the little guy with the long red coat. Instead of having fifty zillion different colors and little details you gave him one or two very iconic, recognizable features that people can notice right away, and a much more simple color scheme that makes him very readable.

Also, this is more of a personal preference but you might want to try giving your main characters more unique hairstyles too. It could be as simple as the one stray lock of hair that the character in Final Fantasy Tactics has. But some might say that's a cheap way of making recognizable characters.

[ndchristie]

Since the character can choose the appearance, he can choose from any of the 8 (possibly more later) regular hairstyles available and a couple of the short beards.  However, once a hairstyle is chosen for the main character, it gets "locked" in that no other character can take that hairstyle.

As for readability - these are not meant to be seen at low sizes, else i would not include the level of details they have.  What resolution do you have? your 1x and 2x could be half the size of mine.  I find than an appropriate size for these guys is about 3cm high on my screen (2x for my res), and I have no trouble (at all) telling what they wear, nor do passersby.  Based on the very specific references to the pieces of clothing people have made, I can only assume that this is not a widespread problem.

The game also is meant to be played either on extremely clear monitors (a decent LCD) or for CRT users (and just oldschool fans in general), a fullscreen version.  Even on a *very* blurry resizing to what is on my computer full screen (8/3rds of the original size), it remains pretty clear to me.


With that in mind, does it still have readability issues?  More importantly, do other users have readability issues?





In other news, I've half given up looking for a portraitist, so I have decided to go with the ultra-simple ultra-cliche manga style for the faces; i'm not proud but it's what we can do, it fits with the sprites, and it still has pretty good mass appeal.

Here is my first WIP of a particularly boyish face with 2 of the different hairstyles on the set


Portraits will be made of a base shape (same shape for all), a hairstyle, a mouth and chin style (includes beards), a nose style, and an eye style.  each mouth and eye style *may* end up with variants to deal with emotion, depending on what Fil wants.  I know it's popular but i find that changing portraits with emotion = tacky and that it actually robs dialogue of it's value by drawing attention the face instead of the writing and the actual situation, cramming a myriad of emotions into 3-4 different images *just in case* the player didn't know that the character was angry at the bad guy.  [/rant]

[Zero]

To be honest, the portrait looks more like a girl to me.

[ndchristie]

boyish = young; in anime, teenage boys are girly and teenage girls are rediculously girly.  adult guys will be much less androgynous .

here's how a girl with the same hairstyle (on her a bit tomboyish) might look :

[TrevoriuS]

Next time don't make your blog french cause results are awesome, I love the style in the sprites.
Now on that portrait the light on the hair seems to come more from the front according to the light on the face and shoulders, there its more like directly right (viewers) - if you would reshade the face on a more front angled lightbulb, like is on the hair, It should give nice results ;P

Nonetheless the jawline should be shown a slight tad stronger, the hear is plain incorrect whilst looking at anatomy, and you should take notice of the fact that anime knows a really wide variaty in style and that some are more realistic than other. I personally prefer the latter

[Faceless]

Looks male to me.
The ear is horribly misplaced though.

[Helm]

Jesus christ stop it no no no resampling no no no no nooononon

(yes there are readability issues. Simplify.)

[ndchristie]

Jesus christ stop it no no no resampling no no no no nooononon

i'm just posting as examples, relax, there's only one image being worked on


slight update trying to fix problems in the sketch boefre they become problems in the product.  Manned him up a bit too, the youngest fighters are 17, which a bit off historically, i should be taking from about 15 and older for any war fought before 1850, but raising the age limit is nothing compared to magic and robots .

anime knows a really wide variaty in style and that some are more realistic than other.

Yeah, but for something that I am not partiuclarly inclined to, it's more sensible at this point to practise the better stuff and put the more practical way into use.  As long as it isn't sub-par, it doesn't need to be stellar if that takes too much time away from the things I can execute properly.  It's really a question of "in what ways will this detract least from the project" and I think that this is the best way to go: fairly quick and presentable.

[Helm]

Then again you could look at it as a learning procedure primarily and put the effort needed into using a more realistic style if you so desire regardless of whether this slows down production of a game that you're making on your free time anyway. The game may come out or may not, but the anatomy and aesthetic knowledge will stick with you forever.

[ndchristie]

That is a viable way of doing things, but it is more productive and educational for me to separate this from my hardcore practises, which have hardly ceased, and it's not as though sticking to a faster, simpler style is effortless, or even better known to me: the fundamentals of portraits are still a part of this, and still something I need to work on.  This style is much farther outside my "comfort zone" than a realistic portrait, it just happens to be a much faster way of working as well as a well-established format for videogame portraits.  Also, because this is for the most part pretty monotonous, it is far better for me to keep practising with fresh subjects rather than do 30 practises of the same style.  By doing a larger number of faster portraits, I spend more time thinking and less time fuddling with a set that will not look much better if I did it another way, and I maximize time spent not doing these, which can be much better spent doing a broader set of exercises, which in turn will help me when I do these.