Introducing Butt Pie

[PsylentKnight]

Ok, I've been watching your edits over and over to see what the difference is and I see what you mean now. In mine, the head moves an equal distance from frame to frame. In your's, the head moves smoothly during the trajectory and then jerks down at the recovery frame, giving a lot more impact. It looks much better. I can't see a huge difference in the arms, but I suppose readability has been improved.

The round highlight on the belly definitely looks better and adds to the bounce of it. I also notice how the belly rebounds up slightly after he lands.

I think I'm still going to add a few tweens to smooth the arms out a little, they still look pretty bad.

Thanks a lot for all your help man.

[astraldata]

I don't mind helping out man -- I'm a huge fan of your characterization skills.

One suggestion though -- assuming you are, instead of trying to view these from the browser, I would suggest viewing these from inside something like Graphics Gale and rolling the mouse back/forth to look at the frames individually. If you've got the program, set a keyboard shortcut for "Frame -- Forward Frame" and "Frame -- Back Frame" to Alt+F11 and Alt+F12 respectively so that you can use your mouse wheel to roll between the frames like a flipbook.

When looking at these through my browser (Firefox), the frames seem to be skipped randomly when the screen is refreshed causing 'tearing' on slightly weaker computers like my own, leading to some jerky/inconsistent-looking animations.

I would definitely suggest viewing in Gale because I didn't edit the head position at all -- only the arms and the gut on this guy. I expected you to scroll through these a frame at a time when I edited them, even overlaying them on your own animation on different layers, to see the differences. They may be subtle, but they're all important.

Just food for thought. Great stuff as always though dude.

[PsylentKnight]

Alright, I've analyzed at your edit frame-by-frame and made necessary adjustments. I really should add some tweens, but oh well. I'm pretty satisfied with it, so unless you really want to see it I'm not going to bother uploading it.

 Here's my newest character:



A fearful daredevil. He won't do this in a constant loop. Mostly he'll just hide behind his pillows and shiver. Maybe this animation will display when you talk to him, or maybe he'll do occasionally instead of the idle. I don't know. He'll also have a motorcycle with training wheels.

And thus the four emotional themes of the game are fully represented by the carnival staff. Each emotion will also be represented by a themed area (sort of like Majora's Mask), each also having a theme of a related element.

Meaninglessness

• Element - Earth
• Locale - Wild West
• Carnival staffer - The emo girl

Despair

• Element - Water
• Locale - Fountain
• Carnival staffer - The clown

Anger

• Element - Fire
• Locale - Volcano
• Carnival staffer - The ring leader

Fear

• Element - Wind
• Locale - Haunted ??
• Carnival staffer - Daredevil

Anyway, of course that has nothing to do with pixel art but I just wanted to share. Any critiques on the daredevil are appreciated. [/list]

[astraldata]

Great looking character as always man.

Not sure what the dark thing is that's moving on his head when it begins to move upwards though, so I can't offer any critique on it yet. Everything else, form-wise, looks great.

The only other issue is that you're using actual greys -- I suggest giving them some sort of color hue because they really suck the life and vibrancy out of an otherwise great-looking character -- and this is especially true due to the quantity of that grey in the image. Grey is usually used in very low-color palettes to blend multiple colors of varying hues, so using it as its own color is somewhat of a no-no due to the fact that it dulls the overall image the more you use it.

Pixel-art aside for the moment --

Why not make your 'emotional' themes a bit more bizarre to go with the look of the characters a bit more? For example, if you need an element for meaninglessness, try 'space' or 'void' or something not so cliche? Maybe space could be the moon or the void could be imagination-stuff like kids' drawings as enemies or other oddities. Your game just screams bizarre worlds, but not Earthworm Jim bizarre -- bizarre with substance. Maybe some underlying and relatable wisdom beneath the bizarre appearance. Majora's mask is a slightly similar feeling in terms of the sort of 'weird' I get from your stuff, which is why I suggest this. It's more of the kind of unsettling feeling that comes with knowing/learning something inevitable.

Is your goal to help these characters overcome their negative emotional states somehow? If so, I really like that concept. It's just the sort of vibe I get off of your characters up to this point and the world outline you mentioned above. I'd love to see something like this in a game.

[PsylentKnight]

Great looking character as always man.

Thanks!

Not sure what the dark thing is that's moving on his head when it begins to move upwards though, so I can't offer any critique on it yet.

I'm not sure what you're referring to. The near-black thing is his mouth, and the red thing is a helmet.

The only other issue is that you're using actual greys -- I suggest giving them some sort of color hue [...]

Good catch, I don't know why hue-shifting didn't even occur to me. Going to fix that asap.

Why not make your 'emotional' themes a bit more bizarre to go with the look of the characters a bit more? [...]

Good ideas, but without going into too much detail on here, cliche fire, water, earth, and wind elements are pretty much set in stone for core gameplay reasons. If you want to know more, let me know and I'll shoot you a PM. The locales, however, are not so rigid. The emotions are similarly non-rigid, but I want them to be general and identifiable enough that people can catch onto these themes without them being explicitly stated.

Maybe some underlying and relatable wisdom beneath the bizarre appearance.

That's what I'm trying to go for.

Is your goal to help these characters overcome their negative emotional states somehow? If so, I really like that concept. It's just the sort of vibe I get off of your characters up to this point and the world outline you mentioned above. I'd love to see something like this in a game.

Yeah, thats more or less what I'm going for. Completing each locale will somehow help resolve the associated character's problems. I really haven't gotten that far yet lol.

[astraldata]

You know the blue stripe going across his helmet toward the back of his head? That dark spot just to the right of that stripe is what I'm talking about. Just beside that dark spot looks like a shine or something that seems to move oddly when his head goes up. Maybe the going-up head is an older version of the character's head with the helmet shine/shadow misplaced? Just guessing here.

Aside from that and the aforementioned stuff in my previous post, everything with this character is top-notch so far. Have you got any environments for this game yet? That, or visual design concepts / mockups or anything like that? I ask because I'm concerned about the characters blending into the backgrounds. Not sure how you plan to deal with that particular aspect with your current sprite style, so I was just curious if you had a plan.

Also, yeah, I would like to know more about the game, so definitely shoot me a PM about it if you would. This is just the kind of thing I would like to play with in my spare time. It would really help to loosen me up a bit if I could help you flesh out some of this stuff in the event that you're up to it. It's a really fun and interesting concept so far -- I'd really like to see where it goes.

[PsylentKnight]

Ah yes, that's a shine. I didn't notice that it moved oddly until right after I posted, but I didn't fix it until I went back just now to play with the pillow colors. Here's my update (roughly fixed shine, tinted lightest grays yellow, added motion blur)



And nope, no environments. Working with such big pieces is a bit daunting for me and I'm also concerned about characters blending in... but thats next on the agenda.

[astraldata]

Pillows look a lot better now with colors, but I would probably lighten the brightest color to near-white or hueshift toward blue because the pillows look more like sandbags now unfortunately, and blend in a lot with the rope (perhaps too much.)

Aside from that, I really don't think a motion with this many frames needs a motion-blur -- it looked great without it.

If you really want to get that blur in there for a 'pop' sort of action, you'd be better off using a bit more lag before the downward motion, and that downward motion would be maybe 2 frames, tops -- one frame with the blur of the entire motion, and the next with the head settled where it ends up. You might also want to convey that blur with more of an actual 'blur' look than the spiky look you have now (spiky generally conveys rough, 'textured', movement through the air like when swinging a broom or hair to attack, whereas straight/rounded blur edges convey a switft/blunt motion through the air.)

You could get  that same 'pop' in your motion by reducing the frames in certain places however, so aim for that first -- and if you're still missing something after that, feel free to use that set of frames as your starting point for a blunt blur of around 2 frames or so before the head shakes.

[PsylentKnight]

An embarrassingly rough mockup. Just trying to get ideas down and figure out the overall composition and color scheme. I think I like the simple silhouette backgrounds... they look good, add to the dark vibe I'm going for, are easy to make, and help make the character pop since he doesn't have outlines. I'm going to make the foreground a little more detailed... add some texture or bricks or something to the yellow road, make the area below the road rocky...

Any crits on composition, color, and resolution are welcome.

(note the hearts aren't mine and are just placeholders, though what I make will basically be the same)



EDIT: Oops, disregard the red lines. I meant to take that layer out. Those are just for reference.

[astraldata]

I like the direction you're going with the graphical design.

That aside though -- if you're going to tell any kind of a story with this visually, you characters either need to be larger or your screen and hearts need to be smaller. With your character so small, players aren't given any sort of emotional vibe except through your environments (which will eventually need to be more detailed because your chars are so small relative to the environment and screen).

In film, zooming in toward a character's face/eyes or even just their upper-body tends to lead to more emotional impact than seeing them as tiny figures against a great background. Your strength is your characterization, so you might want to play that up more by making the character-to-screen ratio a lot less distant. If this were an action game with a lot of high-speed shooting/movement, I could say this could work a little bit, but it's not, and even then, it still doesn't work that well unless your characters were of a much higher pixel resolution than they are currently being drawn at.

All in all, when a single blip on your health meter is that much larger relative to the screen than your player character himself, you've got big problems -- but those problems mainly come in the form of a potentially memorable character being easily forgotten since he's so difficult to relate to from that far away.