Iterating on a zombie monster

[Daimoth]

Created for a bizarre SCP-themed Pokemon rom hack I'm taking part in. This one's SCP-106.

The sprite in the middle is as close to 106 as I could figure out how to get, given a canvass size of 64x64. I also had to leave room for its "evolved" form to be bigger.

My problem is that this particular character always appears to be gleaming or slimy. I can't figure out how to convey that. I threw on a few specular highlights, but I really want them to drip with nastiness. Any ideas, guys?

And of course any other C+C is appreciated as well!

[Probo]

i think you were on the right path thinking about specular highlights man, you just need to take it further id say. I think when things are really glistening with slime, the specular highlights are very bright, contrasted against the colour of the rest of the object.

maybe you could also define the shapes a little bit more in some places, like the (our) left arm on the first pic

ill try and get an edit done

[Daimoth]

Something like this?

[Probo]

id try sticking some proper white in there, feint heart never fucked a pig!

edit: be sparing with it though! one pixel in the right places, where the highlight would be brightest. and think about the scale, yes there may be a white highlight in some places if this was a real-life slimy killing machine, but it might be so small that a pixel is too large to represent it here, and you can use a dimmer colour instead to suggest the blending.

[Daimoth]

Current iteration.

[lachrymose]

Maybe have some slimy goopy stuff come from his hands?

I know its bad slime dropping off his hands and gooping up the ground?

[Daimoth]

I ended up putting some slime kind of webbed between the middle sprite's arms. You can barely tell it's there, but I'm fine with that until I figure out how to indicate drippy slime on the surface of the skin. I also sprited the character's "larval" form and tweaked the colors to be truer to the character.

[lachrymose]

Well remember the original pokemon sprites for the gameboy relied heavily on the individual lore of each pokemon to convey to the player at an instant what type of pokemon you just encountered and what type of move-sets you could expect from them, not so much the detail of the sprite. The original game boy had a palette of like 4 different greens.

Not sure which generation of gameboy the rom is for or if you have color limitations.
But you could take a look at Cure's(AKA PaintPixelPrint) work for hints at dripping effects, specifically:
Spoiler

[Daimoth]

Ah, I get it. Nearly every single drip on those sprites hangs over a deep shadow or has a black outline. Drips need pronounced contrast to read correctly.

This is a GBA-era rom hack, so I get a bit more to play with. I'd like to take full advantage of that. Unfortunately, the way I've designed these sprites there's nowhere to use that technique. I'll just have to let the specular highlights speak for themselves.

[lachrymose]

Yeah I think it is going to take and redesigning the sprite a bit.
I tried experimenting, because i'm curious as to how to create this illusion myself on sprites this small.



I think i'm narrowing down on a solution. Might mean getting rid of a lot of the noise from your first version.

[Daimoth]

Oh man, I think I'll cut my losses before I redesign everything just to work in the drips. Besides, it's just a detail I wanted to push. SCP-106 just kind of gleams in the dark, anyway. That's actually key; this character is always depicted in the dark. But this is sprite will live in a well-lit battle screen, so I think I'm as close to "juicy" as I'm going to get without overkilling on the contrast.

All the bony limbs and sinewy forms did make it hard to keep the noise down. I just wanted to go beyond the simplistic shading of the vanilla sprites. Speaking of which, have you ever noticed how inconsistent the lighting is on pokemon battle sprites? Not that it bothered anyone, but pokemon games are extremely high budget projects, aren't they?

[lachrymose]

I tried to look up stats but all ive found was something like 10-20 million budget for(the latest) pokemon games.
Not sure how accurate it is.