Improving my pixelation

[madmenyo]

Hey again, haven't been here for a while. I have been super busy developing my programmer skills. I released my first game on the Google Play store in December and I participated in the 72 hour GameJolt GDC jam #gjgdcjam last week  where my game got placed 9th which I am super excited about. Here is a link to all the entries (I hope that is allowed here), just scroll down to the 9th to see mine 

I guess to make more popular games I have to improve my art skills significantly. So I started creating some "larger" pixel art attempts. I'm actually quite proud of it and it took me ages. I would like to ask you to be so kind to stomp me back into reality with constructive criticism, I'm sure there is plenty of that in this place.



Reference on fandom wiki posted by GuyGombaa



Reference is actual pixel art by Revelation of square boy but I stopped the video before he cleaned up his linework.


And then I have a final question apart from the critique. Let's say I want to use these 2 characters in my game, am I allowed to use them? Where is the actual line since I see games that almost copy other games one on one (WoW vs a ton of mobile games to name some). I am not looking too steal any ones design and would really want to follow the guidelines and unwritten rules to improve my work. But I feel I really need reference when creating these things, once I start designing myself it won't work out at all.

Thanks, and I  hope to post here a lot and really improve my game art now.

[Reo]

Hey I did an edit of your orc.

Pixel tech. The way you have rendered the orc is riddled with both banding and pillow-shading http://i.imgur.com/SMDVCsx.png. A trick to avoid this is to start thinking about pixels as clusters, the idea is that the more your pixels fit in neatly together like little tetris blocks the more coherent your piece will look. Less noise, more shapes. Always mind where your light source is,

Anatomy. Your muscly orc has a six pack but no rib-cage. When I did my edit I shrunk the reference down to 25% so it's easier to spot proportion errors. It is however okay to exaggerate a little bit when working on a small scale. I think you can afford to make the face a bit bigger to introduce more details. Giving the face the typical orc features of massive jaw+tusks goes a long way. The feet also looks a bit awkward like they are just floating in the air, we need an indication of them touching the ground.

Contrast. Your darkest color is relegated to simply the ponytail and the outlines of  the boots, by spreading it around we create depth between dark and light, and make the different parts pop.Right now we have a uniform color depth on the entire sprite, there's no contrast that catches the eye. By letting different colors appear in different parts of the sprite we also unify the sprite, making every part seem part of the whole.

This was a fun sprite to do an edit of, hope you can take something from it!

[madmenyo]

Wow that's a awesome edit. And his hands look like hands now, been pixeling those 80 pixels for hours . I actually tried to avoid pillow shading, but I can see my mistakes here. You still kept the darker edge but contrast it with light pixels as well instead of me trying to blend it with slightly lighter pixels. And I really like the fact you used so much of those darkest colors inside the model too, really makes it pop. But what about his left arm, isn't that a bit too much of a dark edge? My anatomy is not great bit it looks his arm comes from behind his back.

Your mention of banding directed me here http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299 and I have read about the banding. I still don't fully understand it, I can see the hugging and degree banding, the fixed ones look a lot smoother since they are not revealing the grid. I guess I can see the skip one too, the lose purple pixels seem wider when they end at the same height, I guess this occurs only when using high contrasting pixels. But how should I avoid fat pixels, it's just one color on top of another? There is no example there and I'm struggling to understand whats wrong with it.

Too late now to start some experiments, I hope to grow quickly to get result close to your edit. A long road lies ahead of me since I know even less about animating then pixeling and cannot wait to make some decent looking art for my future games.

[Joe]

But how should I avoid fat pixels, it's just one color on top of another? There is no example there and I'm struggling to understand whats wrong with it.

The form he shows is isolated, you usually find it integrated with the surrounding colors. There's a perfect example at the jawline of your sprite. See the stair-stepping? I've also highlighted some other areas where you can find banding. Like Cure says, none of those names are official, and there are more cases of banding than he lists; but the principle is always the same: some sort of alignment or repetition that betrays the grid. It's a great exercise to find & correct as much as you can find in your sprite.



Just remember you're going to get a lot more mileage out of pencil and paper studies. I encourage you to participate in the daily sketch. If you aren't comfortable with drawing, pixels are not going to compensate for lack of fundamentals.

[madmenyo]

I am in dire need of a "good" tile set for my "roguelike" game. So I did some color studies the past week and had some attempts at myself.

I used actual pixel art as reference for these two, and "stole" the palette. I have worked many hours on these couple of tiles and unfortunately I need like 30 tiles, with those wall tiles being the majority since I need them for every angle.

The reference for below I got from Dungeonmans, my game is going to be somewhat similar to Dungeonmans and I love how there art looks.
It are 64x64 tiles and took way too long to create.


I got my reference for below from Vierbit at pixeljoint. That stuff looks absolutely amazing.... http://pixeljoint.com/files/icons/full/dead_end_detail.png
It are 32x32 tiles, I did these last and took me a couple of hours, so at least speed is improving.


I guess I need a bit more simplistic look, at least for now so I can push out all the tiles I need and worry about the looks later on in development. I really want 64x64 tiles but these take ages to produce. I will have another go, perhaps without pixel art reference and put everything I learned past week into it.

[madmenyo]

Another attempt, I guess I go with this style for the time being. Still need a lot more tiles for the top of the walls and other corners but it looks ok I guess. Picked my own palette, I hope the colors are not too boring.