AuthorTopic: [WIP][C+C]Beginner Fighter Sprite  (Read 2055 times)

Offline Telek

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[WIP][C+C]Beginner Fighter Sprite

on: January 11, 2015, 03:57:02 am
Hey everyone.  I found this forum not too long ago and was hoping you could give me some pointers.

A little while back, I came upon the idea that I wanted to make video games.  With little programming experience outside of business applications, and no art experience at all, I'm pretty much learning everything from scratch in any way I can.  I've made some simple card games, arkanoid, some basic top-down stuff, and even helped out doing some sprite work for a freeware project, but I still have a long way to go.  As far as the art aspect goes, I've read a great deal of forums and guides, and copied, modified or emulated what I liked and tried whipping up my own stuff when I was feeling brave.  That said, I don't have a very good grasp of perspective and form, or of color and lighting, and it takes me FOREVER to pick and poke at things to get them remotely complete and even then it's "try it until it looks right".  It's pretty much brute force trial and error.  I'm hoping much of this will come easier with time, but I also hope that you guys could help to get me on the right track in any way that you could.

A fan project that I've been toying with is a fighting game in the vein of Smash Bros., but with characters from the MOBA League of Legends.  Obviously this is ambitious (and necessarily non-commercial) but it's varied enough and complex enough to give me something to fiddle with in my free time between learning projects until I get something playable or I totally lose interest.  To that end, I've been trying to practice sprites and animations for some of the various characters.  I've posted the latest attempt at drawing Zac below. 



Is something like this a reasonable size for this kind of project?  And practical to animate, considering how many different frames I will need to make? How are the colors and, especially, how can I make the lighting/form better?

Thanks for reading my spiel, please let me know what you think!

Offline lachrymose

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Re: [WIP][C+C]Beginner Fighter Sprite

Reply #1 on: January 11, 2015, 04:41:02 am
I'm going to say it isn't practical, speaking from experience.

My first time animating was for my 1st year programming final project. Just doing basic animations for a 32x32 sized character for a simple platformer was a chore. One main character and like 3 mobs.

I'd say it would be more practical to learn 3D modeling and animation.

But hey, where there is a will there is a way.

Offline yaomon17

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Re: [WIP][C+C]Beginner Fighter Sprite

Reply #2 on: January 11, 2015, 08:21:02 am
Well with no art experience, I think ambitious might be a tad of an understatement here.
I'm posting this from what I believe is the first Super Smash Flash just to give you a general idea of the workload per character (which is also about 1/3 the size of Zac here). A lot of the frames are very similar to be fair, but simple copy and pasting of parts will make the animation look sub par and  you will most likely nitpick at it for hours. Taking on making something like that by yourself without a team just isn't practical. If I were you, I think I would consider focusing purely on improving your art at this point and focus on that, then move on to remaking simple projects with new and improved art, just so you can get a feel of how much work it is going to take.

So focusing on the art, Zac is a big slime blob. You will notice in his art he has lots of specular highlights to define a sort of "anatomy" in which the blobs make up sort of fake muscles. Also the pose you have right now is a bit boring and it looks like Zac is a bit off balanced and also wouldn't be facing his opponent in a smash like game.

In the edit, the first thing I addressed was the palette. You can see in Riot's official spash that the darkest shade on Zac is almost blue. You have very odd hues where your darkest and lightest shades veer toward more yellowish and the midtones are more green. It is very important to use the shades to define Zac's fake slime muscles to make the piece look interesting! Also don't forget his underbite :}

Offline Telek

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Re: [WIP][C+C]Beginner Fighter Sprite

Reply #3 on: January 11, 2015, 04:36:19 pm
I thought that was just a mock-up high-res painting of what you were talking about, but nope, you just blew my mind.  Super Smash Flash was, unsurprisingly, part of my inspiration for that idea.  I knew I was in over my head, I guess I didn't realize quite how deep  :huh:.  Besides this I am currently working on some small enemies/powerups/effects/backgrounds for fleshing out that arkanoid game to be more interesting, and creating a number of different ground tiles and menus for a simple top-down racer (Tsugumo's tutorial helped a lot with that!).  Those are certainly more my speed, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't just doing things that I'm somewhat comfortable with.  After this not even those will be safe, I'm gonna have to look at how I can make them better.

                    

In any case, this was exactly the kind of response I was hoping for.  I've got a lot to process, so forgive me if it takes a little while for me to post an update.  Thank you both for your help!
« Last Edit: January 11, 2015, 04:56:04 pm by Telek »