Platformer Sprites (WIP)

[PypeBros]

I love most of those animations. There are two points that looks a bit odd,
- arms are curiously arked in the "idle" and the "falling" animations, with no obvious relationship between the rest of the animations (e.g. holding helmet while running).
- the jump and the slide static frames introduce a significant shift against the other animations. Granted, your body doesn't move that much during those phases, but not having the slightest detail that moves makes it a bit odd. I'd suggest that either some part of the clothes flap with the wind or that the helmet moves a little bit to keep some movement and say "no, this is no mistake, this is no ATARI 2600 sprite used where some other sprite should have been".

[snake85027]

just wanted to say really awesome animation, I can feel the physical force in it.

[||||]

just wanted to say really awesome animation, I can feel the physical force in it.

Just wanting to 2nd that. I like the little explorer sprite too. The jump is simple yet effective.

[ericbloom]

@snake85027 & |||| : Thanks! That means a lot. Animation has always been really interesting to me, and it's a lot of fun to have a project to get into.

@PypeBros : I'm not sure what happened, I typed up a response a week or so ago and it seems to have been lost. Basically: Thanks. That was really helpful feedback.

I've gone into all the sprites and made the arms with continuity in mind. The earliest sprites had the more stylized arms. I did so thinking it would create a nice silhouette. In practice I found giving the arms more substance (on a sprite this size that means another pixel in width) made for better animations. Here are a few cleaned up versions:



Note: The army crawl is unchanged. I'm posting it to show all his movement states. The sprints are pushed a little more to add some oomph. I added a more detailed idle too. Idles are a lot of fun, and I might pack more into it.

I'm still scratching my head as to what I can add to the single frame slide and hurdles since there's minimal amount of shading to add subpixel animation, and they're really small sprites to jitter an entire pixel. I might add dust effects to the slide?

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

I'd add some more contrast to all of your sprites, some details are hard to see even at the upscaled resolution. I, like most everyone else, love the trench guy! Keep up the good work! 

[ericbloom]

Not an animation yet, but check out the tank I'm working on.



Well, not a tank, per se, but a robot with treads. This fella' will act as out moving platform. On top we can add different environmental objects like pillars, barbed wire, or enemies. That's the plan, at least.

It's pretty close to animation time, every relevant piece is layered (the wheels and cogs are actually fully rendered separately under the treads, the treads are several layers for easy animation and texturing, etc).

The hangup I'm having now is rethinking my palette.

On the right I've used the greyscale range I've used on the other robots. It's very soft. On the right is a quickly adjusted fix with deep shadows and highlights. What do you all think? Can this be added with extremes in shadow and reflection and still fit in the 'world'?

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

Its really nice but the style seems quite different then the rest of the enemies.

[yaomon17]

I agree. The dithering, sharp highlights and reflected light makes the style very different. I think it would be more consistent if the robot were to look something like this:

I wouldn't suggest changing the robot though since you have already animated it. I simply edited it instead of the tank since it would be faster in showing the point of the style inconsistency.

[ericbloom]

Good point. I got pretty carried away. The larger size gave me more room to play, plus I'm getting more comfortable making these and I think detail is a natural feature creep.

Edit:

Here is a current WIP of the background by another artist. We still need to tweak colors to get characters working with the background. The idea behind the additional detail on the tread creature was to make it more of a background element having the same level of detail.

Any advice on keeping the character visible on the background?



The background artist, Harry, also has a webcomic worth checking out! http://demonsmirror.com/

[yaomon17]

Increase the character's saturation and maybe up the contrast a bit.