[C+C][WIP] 1st Attempts at Pixel Art - Shmup Sprites

[Softdrink]

Hello all!

I'm on several arcade related forums, and usually go by Softdrink or Softdrink 117. I'm a huge fan of 2D shoot 'em ups (shmups), with a decent handful of arcade 1CCs and some relatively good scores in a few games. I'm a very active member of the community at shmups.system11.org, and I'm part of the staff of STG Weekly, a webseries focused on shoot 'em ups which has recently branched out into live commentary, live broadcasting from gaming events, and public demonstration.

I've recently been inspired to work on a vertical shooter of my own as a personal project. For various reasons, I've decided to try making at least some of the art assets myself. However, I don't have any experience with pixel art -- so I figured I'd come here and ask for some help. 

This will probably turn into a worklog of sorts for the game's art; however, my updates will likely be sporadic at best given my busy travel / work schedule.


The sprite that I chose to start with would represent the player's ship. It'll be very distinct in style compared to the enemy vessels. It's based on a newer version of a design that I sketched on paper a couple years ago, and made a vector image of a few months back for fun.
Spoiler for large non-pixel illustration     Spoiler

Flickr did a terrible job of resizing this -- artifacts everywhere. Ugh.

The first version (and 2P side colors, just to show the color scheme I plan to work with for the 2P variants). Posted this on twitter and got some very useful feedback from ptoing and some developer friends of mine. ptoing also suggested that I stop by here -- thanks man!


Based on feedback from the above (particularly comments about using too many colors and the design being too front-heavy), I made this.


Then I realized that the shading doesn't make as much sense as it should, and overcomplicates the image. So I switched to front/overhead lit, and made this, in "clean" and "weathered" versions.


At this point, I'm kind of stuck. I think that the engines are still pretty noisy, but I'm not sure how to reduce the noise level while maintaining detail. I'm also not sure that there is much "style" to it yet -- it feels kind of plain. The weathered sprite was an attempt to remedy the plainness, but I think it makes things kind of noisy and lowers the effect of the new shading.

I'd really love some input on how to improve this!

[XbearT]

Hey there, for a first attempt these are pretty neat! I like the design you came up with for the ship, but with the last sprites it feels as though you're trying to cram every detail you can into them; what you'd want to do, imo, is to emphasize the most 'important' aspects of it


Not the greatest edit ever, but I tried to simplify some parts of the sprite as well as emphasize others, you'll notice I also messed a bit with your design but that was mostly me getting a bit carried away.
Colour wise, I feel you could do with even less colours given the size of it, so I merged some of the colours (the left hand corner), and edited the palette here and there. (To the left your palette, to the right with my edits).
Hope I could be of help with this.

[Softdrink]

Thanks XbearT! I'll definitely keep that in mind. I don't think I'll change the silhouette, but I agree that I might want to reduce details in the engines and reduce the palette a bit.

My sincerest apologies for taking so long to get back to this -- this project isn't dead, it's just been shelved for a while because I'm working on a different game project right now as part of my university studies. It's a 2d platform game using hand-drawn assets -- but not pixel art -- so it's been eating up tons of my time. In-game screenshot of on area from a development build below.
Spoiler

As far as this project is concerned, I haven't messed with the player ship in a while. I've been working on a launch track environment for the game start, and using it to practice technique. It's been very slow going since I'm still so new to this -- and working on so many other projects -- but I think this is a reasonable point to show off some progress.


Here's the current version. I'm working to a 3:4 aspect, in 240x320. At the moment, my biggest issue with this is just deciding whether or not I like the shading effect. I think it would also look really good flat shaded, with a single uniform highlight direction.

In the current version, the idea is that there are spotlights angled down onto the ships and launch elevators from an upward and forward position; it's been an interesting challenge trying to visualize that, but I'm really not sure it's worth the effort. On a technical level, I couldn't decide whether or not I liked dithering the shading, so the left half of the image uses a random dither between tones, whereas the right side uses a smoother and more regular edge.

Criticism welcome -- and I really hope I can respond more quickly this time!  /facepalm

EDIT: Just noticed some asymmetric details in the image -- looks like I forgot to erase some stuff I was playing around with. Oops!
Also, here's a quick gif animatic (made much earlier in the design process) showing some of the planned animation for this area.