How and what can I improve?

[koolcat]

Hello boys and girls! I just started Animation and Games course at college and decided practice with pixel art to gain some skill. Would you please give me some tips and tell me what I can improve? Also what do you think is it good or bad?


C.Shepard Walking:


Running Template


PS: Thanks

[Zintendo]

Being a pixel noob, I will stick with abstract advice and lean away from actual in depth pixel art techniques..

I think:

1.  You should post any other background/sprite examples you may have so we can see how it coalesces and fits in.  Imagine if in the beginning stages of Minecraft, a pixel artist sent in the pickaxe sprite for editing here, and some forumgoer made it all badass, but guess what, now it doesn't fit in with the style of the rest of the project.
2.  You could tell us how much time you have for this project (college, cool) and how long it took you to make this so we can make an accurate judgement of how much work you may put into your project.  1,000 hours is a lot more time for shading and dithering than 50 hours.  Also are you going for a decked out game along the lines of Final Fantasy, or following a concept as simple as Frogger?  That weighs in big time.



I like it.  You obviously worked at it to make it a smooth walk transition.

[breakfast]

Your animations look nice. I think you could benefit from playing around with color contrast. You should zoom out all the way to 100%, if you can't differentiate shades relatively easily then those colors aren't serving a big enough purpose and should be made darker or lighter. From far away your C Shepard looks like he only has 2 color blocks used for his body, a navy blue and a darker navy/black area. But you DO have shading there, you just need to up the contrast and your shapes & details will be more apparent. Your skin tone isn't really working with that lightest shade, it needs to be less yellow and more pink like the other shades, and lighten it up a notch.

[r1k]

the animations pretty smooth.  The whole body should move down a pixel when the legs are furthest apart though.
On the run, when the leg nearest the camera is in the furthest back positon, it seems to lag there for a frame.
When the arms move, the movement should start at the shoulder.  So when the arm comes foreward, move the shoulder foreward too.

[koolcat]

Being a pixel noob, I will stick with abstract advice and lean away from actual in depth pixel art techniques..

I think:

1.  You should post any other background/sprite examples you may have so we can see how it coalesces and fits in.  Imagine if in the beginning stages of Minecraft, a pixel artist sent in the pickaxe sprite for editing here, and some forumgoer made it all badass, but guess what, now it doesn't fit in with the style of the rest of the project.
2.  You could tell us how much time you have for this project (college, cool) and how long it took you to make this so we can make an accurate judgement of how much work you may put into your project.  1,000 hours is a lot more time for shading and dithering than 50 hours.  Also are you going for a decked out game along the lines of Final Fantasy, or following a concept as simple as Frogger?  That weighs in big time.



I like it.  You obviously worked at it to make it a smooth walk transition.

Thanks for your response here are some objects I made



I was thinking of the whole thing being Earthbound or Pokemon RPG like.



Oh yeah also this isn't what I'm planing to do for college this is just a side project I'm working on to improve my skill.

[koolcat]

the animations pretty smooth.  The whole body should move down a pixel when the legs are furthest apart though.
On the run, when the leg nearest the camera is in the furthest back positon, it seems to lag there for a frame.
When the arms move, the movement should start at the shoulder.  So when the arm comes foreward, move the shoulder foreward too.

Thank you for your tips I will try to improve on my templates

[Phlakes]

I can't remember whose it is (ptoing?) but this is still a great bit on running.

[koolcat]

Your animations look nice. I think you could benefit from playing around with color contrast. You should zoom out all the way to 100%, if you can't differentiate shades relatively easily then those colors aren't serving a big enough purpose and should be made darker or lighter. From far away your C Shepard looks like he only has 2 color blocks used for his body, a navy blue and a darker navy/black area. But you DO have shading there, you just need to up the contrast and your shapes & details will be more apparent. Your skin tone isn't really working with that lightest shade, it needs to be less yellow and more pink like the other shades, and lighten it up a notch.

Thanks for taking your time. I will make the shading darker and few other things lighter but if I was going to make something with that character I would make him "medium" size so you can see all the shades and "detail" on him lol

[koolcat]

I can't remember whose it is (ptoing?) but this is still a great bit on running.

This is very useful, thanks.