Some sprites I'd appreciate some criticism on

[Seiseki]

And the guy's got a monitor face

Maybe there shouldn't be the brightest point of the character on it then or else it's a really shitty monitor that reflects all the light and makes seeing things on it impossible, especially since the helmet seems to reflect absolutely no light.
That highlight should probably go on the head since it's armor and would look harder that way.
The brightest red could also be one note brighter so he pops out more and if the darks on the screen are black, the value range on him is so high, he'll stick out on every background.

The dark monitor looks pretty cool actually..

I tried messing around with the idea for a bit.


Now it looks more like an actual monitor and it's not sticking out as much, rather it looks inset into the head.

I used colors from a palette I found here: http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Games/Hacking/Wiki/index.php?title=NES_Palette

[astraldata]

@9_6:
You're right, I could have provided edits. I grew up on Megaman, and keep forgetting there are people now who don't even know who Mario is. I simply assumed the look of them at first glance was proof enough to anyone who knew the game. However, that being said, my reply was to the OP, so I didn't think that an edit would be necessary because I was sure he knew what I meant. I wasn't trying to prove a case to anyone because I'm with you on the "innocent until proven guilty" idea -- I wasn't trying to accuse (although it apparently did sound that way at first) I just didn't know another way of saying what I wanted to convey at the time. I certainly wasn't trying to be argumentative. I only wanted to help.

@TomSmith
Apparently it came across as an accusation, so I apologize for being careless with my wording. I shouldn't have said "blatantly ripped-off" because I didn't mean to sound like I was saying that you stole anything from anyone. I stand by the fact that I do feel it was "more than inspired" by megaman, but I couldn't find another way to say it. However inspiration means something a little different to me than it does to you as far as I can tell.

In my opinion, being "inspired" by a design means you *can* use some unique elements of another's design in your own design -- but -- that unique element should be applied to your own design in a way that reinterprets the element rather than just reuses it in a way that simply recycles it.

Upon looking at it further, it appears that you up-scaled some graphics a bit (like the clouds that were mentioned) and tried to tweak them from there. That said, it's really not a big deal how you do it. Once again, your methods are your business -- it's up to you whether or not you want to improve your pixel art skills or not by doing all your assets from scratch. Some of your assets do look somewhat original (like the baddies), but, at first glance, it really does look like Megaman graphics (because of the colors and tiles in the level, and the shape of the main character's body, etc.) so don't be surprised if others point this similarity out (after all, only you know what methods you used -- everyone else can only speculate).

All suspicion of your methods aside, I only intended to say that, if you didn't paint it all from scratch, it's not very good practice if you really plan to move forward as a pixel artist. If nothing else, trust me on this: I wasn't aiming to spew "garbage" at you. I've got better things to do with my time. I only wanted to help.

My other point about your sprites/tiles/etc. looking flat still stands. It's clear you're not using any NES restrictions, so why does it all seem so formless and non-specific? Seiseki's edit brought out more form and made the character look a lot less "Megaman" (despite the similar body style and added colors). I assure you if you study the tiles you were inspired by, you could achieve better form.

A final note on the sprites -- the reason they chose to use 2 colors for a majority of the smaller sprites is likely because they wanted clean-looking clusters of color on the stuff the player would be paying attention to, making it stand out more clearly. Nothing wrong with that. But they had a bit less room to work with and their pixel size was a lot fatter than yours. You can afford to add an extra pixel blob here and there to address form, light, and shadows. And guess what? It might even set your visual style apart from Megaman a little further if you did. Seiseki's edit shows how form is easily possible to represent at your current resolution -- no matter the amount of colors you want to use.

That also said, your game does look very nice and it has quite a lot of potential. As said before, I grew up on Megaman, so I love that you're making a game inspired from it. I'm only trying to help your art reach the potential it has to make both your art and your game able to stand on its own.

[9_6]

Oh yeah, one basic thing that wasn't mentioned so far, try to avoid singular pixels wherever possible.
If you go out of your way to minimize them, the image will be a lot less noisy and have better readability which is crucial in a fast paced game like this.
At the resolution you're working at, you should be able to describe everything you need without a single 1 pixel cluster.


The lavafall and bricks are especially bad about this. Way too busy, especially for a background.


Try to avoid line dithering like in the highlights of the head.
High contrast single pixels are especially distracting and you should only use them if you have a very good reason why it has to be this way.

[mtmbTomSmith]

Oh yeah, one basic thing that wasn't mentioned so far, try to avoid singular pixels wherever possible.
If you go out of your way to minimize them, the image will be a lot less noisy and have better readability which is crucial in a fast paced game like this.
At the resolution you're working at, you should be able to describe everything you need without a single 1 pixel cluster.


The lavafall and bricks are especially bad about this. Way too busy, especially for a background.


Try to avoid line dithering like in the highlights of the head.
High contrast single pixels are especially distracting and you should only use them if you have a very good reason why it has to be this way.

Done and done, i'll go change things that qualify. I'm a small details, zoom in on it kind of guy generally, so i figured it was the way to go but what you said there makes perfect sense. I'll take care of it.

I tried messing around with the idea for a bit.


Now it looks more like an actual monitor and it's not sticking out as much, rather it looks inset into the head.

The only time i've got something really monitor-looking going on is when you take damage. the screen goes dark, and then washes back in, but it happens real fast amidst some bright damage-flashing, so i imagine no one really notices it. It's not a bad idea to add that to the rest of the animations, to better get it across.

But in order to avoid reactions like you've already gotten, you might just say right up front in your marketing something like "homage to the blue bomber". Ya know . . . something to quell the comments before they even begin.

That should probably preface it before i bring it up anywhere, yeah~

If his face is a screen, why not flash crazy RGB patterns and symbols and different colors and stuff per certain events? Something dynamic like that. It never changes. Only displays rarely-changing eyes therefore doesn't give off a screen impression, to me.

Another really good idea. I'll play that up a bit more, especially if it isn't coming across at the moment.

One thing that you inherited from Megaman the wrong way is the posture of the character:

His stiff, slightly incorrect posture is on purpose. I wanted him movements to be sort of rigid, and his standing posture is a sort of rigid arms down back up pose. I could lean him forward for the walk animation, but his face is so big it'd stick out of his hitbox a bit, and it might look odd bumping into enemies. A lot of games had badposture walkcycles, (castlevania, mario, journey to silius. well really, everyone. They all did) and it was to keep the sprite really close to the hitbox. it's not beautiful, but it keeps the art within the game logic as best as you can. Still, i could offset the art to make the hitbox line up with his face? It's worth considering.

A final note on the sprites -- the reason they chose to use 2 colors for a majority of the smaller sprites is likely because they wanted clean-looking clusters of color on the stuff the player would be paying attention to, making it stand out more clearly. Nothing wrong with that. But they had a bit less room to work with and their pixel size was a lot fatter than yours. You can afford to add an extra pixel blob here and there to address form, light, and shadows. And guess what? It might even set your visual style apart from Megaman a little further if you did. Seiseki's edit shows how form is easily possible to represent at your current resolution -- no matter the amount of colors you want to use.

That also said, your game does look very nice and it has quite a lot of potential. As said before, I grew up on Megaman, so I love that you're making a game inspired from it. I'm only trying to help your art reach the potential it has to make both your art and your game able to stand on its own.

The reason they, and most all other nes games used 3  color sprites was because you could only apply 4 values to a sprite at one time (usually alpha, black, and 2 colors). Mega man himself apparently cheated this by layering another sprite on top of him, his face. I've tried to keep the color count on my enemy sprites low, usually 5, to not look too detailed or too out of place.

I was actually rather impressed with the alternate ideas you guys came up with for the player sprite. I think the biggest issue (barring the design for him itself being a little boring) is that i didn't shade him at all. He's flats, period. That was originally to keep the color count down, and secondly to not have the issue of his apparent light source changing direction whenever he did. HOWEVER, i've shaded some enemies and never once has it stood out to me that their shadow turns with them. Do you think i should shade the guy?

[astraldata]

I personally think you should at least shade him from a front-top source wherever possible (especially where his armor is) to give him some sense of depth. Even if this is where an appendage overlaps another, it would be great because it adds depth.

Here's what I mean:



versus



The above only uses the colors in your current sprite. Figured you might be able to see the depth better in greyscale.

And just FYI -- Megaman's face was created from 8x8 tiles (4 colors, including transparency, per each 8x8 tile), so they didn't cheat much. Kasumi, our resident NES specialist should be able to verify that. As far as I'm aware though, true layering wasn't possible on the NES without some real complex voodoo. Overdraw, flickering and the like when sprites overlapped one another would make it hard to use multiple sprite layers just for his face I would think.

[Probo]

And just FYI -- Megaman's face was created from 8x8 tiles (4 colors, including transparency, per each 8x8 tile), so they didn't cheat much.

I think he knows that dude!

Its tough trying to make something high-res look like the nes. the extra real estate really makes me want to add more colours and shading, but then you can lose some of the 8bit vibe. its a balancing act!

[astraldata]

@Probo
Yep, lol. He did. I just didn't finish typing out my thought completely. My bad.

Judging by this comment:

Mega man himself apparently cheated this by layering another sprite on top of him, his face.

I didn't think he realized that the NES most likely couldn't layer sprites in a single draw call since he didn't seem to realize that both black could be any other color in the palette and transparency could even be an opaque color.

That being said, maybe I'm wrong (I'm no expert), but I was pretty sure the NES didn't allow you to layer sprites on top of sprites in a single draw call -- after all, I remember all that flickering when enemy sprites overlapped the player sprites. It looked pretty bad, and I doubt Capcom would have left this flickering in there on purpose if it could have been avoided. A separate draw call just for Megaman's face would be even more expensive and exacerbate that flickering problem most likely.

The only way I could see around this (if sprites couldn't be layered) is using carefully drawn and repositioned (upon displaying them) metatiles for the sprites, making sure the face didnt enter a portion of a tile canvas that was using transparency. After all, Megaman's face fit pretty well inside a single 8x8 tile if you were drawing carefully.

With that said, maybe TomSmith is right -- maybe they really *did* layer the face somehow. It wouldn't surprise me. The NES is a surprisingly versatile system.

I do agree though that trying to retain the NES look with hi-res graphics is pretty tough, but shading is still possible while retaining the NES look if you're careful -- and it's actually a lot easier with more space on the canvas since you can give more definition to stuff.

There are some NES games out there that look pretty close to their SNES counterparts, but the limiting factor is usually the number of colors allowed per tile chunk on the character/bg/etc. than a certain number of colors overall. That's really the main difference between my edit of the running guy and the OP's original sprite (style-wise at least) since they use exactly the same number of colors. Mine just looks more SNES-like than NES. However, at the same time, at that higher resolution, you have no excuse to not add better shading or form because it starts to look bad without it if there's shading on anything else.

[Probo]

if i remember rightly, the flicker was programmed into games to get around the amount-of-sprites-per-scanline limit - without programmed flicker the nes would just stop drawing the amount of sprites over the limit, the flicker alternated this between sprites so that although flickering, the sprites were still there as far as the player is concerned. I dont think theres a problem with overlapping in and of itself

[Kasumi]

I didn't think he realized that the NES most likely couldn't layer sprites in a single draw call since he didn't seem to realize that both black could be any other color in the palette and transparency could even be an opaque color.

Transparency for sprites could never be opaque.
This is exactly how it works:

3 colors+transparent in a sprite palette. Because transparent is one of the colors, you can draw sprites on top of each other. Note that 0x00 is both black and transparent in that image. The number in the transparent slot can be any color in the palette, but it will still be "drawn" transparent for sprites. (The transparent color controls the "background" color, so one way to look at it is that background palettes are also only 3 colors + transparent. The background color fills the screen. The background tiles of 3 colors+transparent are drawn on top of it if they're set to be. The sprites of 3 colors+transparent are then drawn on top of that if they're set to be.)

I'm not sure what draw call means. The NES does the same logic for all sprites every frame they're enabled. If there are more than 8 in a scanline, the extras straight up don't get drawn. It depends more on what the programmer wants to do, the hardware is like, "Should I draw sprites this frame? y/n". And that's it. To "not draw" a sprite, you have to actually set its y position below the screen (or make it use an entirely transparent tile, but then it will still count against the 8 sprites per scanline for the sprites you might actually want drawn), but either way it's like... still being drawn.

Flickering is caused by the programmer changing which sprites are the "extras". So if draw call means ensuring all sprites of his head are drawn first so that none are ever considered extras, that's possible. As well, it's possible to make only whole objects not be drawn instead of random parts of them going in an out. Either one doesn't really take more CPU time (some methods might take longer to actually implement, but they'll generally run just as well on the hardware), it just depends on what behavior you want. Some games decide the player character should NEVER disappear (which as you stated means the enemies usually will much more). Even more off topic: Maybe some day I'll make some actual ROMs to throw into the giant guide, so people can just run the rom in an emulator and press some buttons to how 8x16 sprites work, or how different flickering methods look or whatever else. I guess the text is pretty dense.

Sorry I'm always that guy about this stuff, but with all the posts going back and forth on this... here's what really happens.

Edit: WOAH! I've been using that image for years, and I only just realized it seems broken, hah. 0x20 (which is supposed to be white) is also drawn transparent. I guess I'll fix that. Regardless, Megaman's sprite layering is a single extra sprite for him, so it wouldn't affect sprites per scanline much. (It's probably one sprite precisely because of that.)

Edit 2: Oh... maybe not. It's not white, just a color that's REALLY close to the current forum background.

Edit3: Okay, one more edit. Even though in the above image the parts of the helmet are transparent to make room for the "face", this isn't necessary. Those could be non transparent, and it would still work with one caveat: The face must always be drawn on top or the non transparent parts of the helmet would show through, which is harder to manage when you're constantly changing the draw order to get around 8 sprites per scanline. With the way Megaman did it, draw order doesn't matter. But it's certainly possible to layer even over non transparent stuff, it just requires some extra checks. (which don't affect CPU time much either.)

[mtmbTomSmith]

a million billion things

That was all pretty fascinating. I knew his face was somehow separate, but i didn't know how it worked. 

I spent most of the day shading, undoing, highlighting, undoing, etc. Nothing seemed to look right. At the moment i'm sticking with the new runcycle, and i simplified the reflection on his face.  I'd put the highlight on the top right, but all the tiles in the game are lit from the top left :T

i mean the enemies flip around, and their shading goes with them. How odd would it be to have his highlight be on the wrong side whenever he's moving right (which is at least 2/3 of the time.)?