What to do with this alien concept?

[leveler50]

Hey,

What should I do with this alien spirit concept?



Should we use it in our game? (Possibly with bigger size).

[kilenc]

First thing you should do is improve it!

here's my process & things i noticed, others w/ more experience may disagree

• fixed line art: general rule of thumb, don't make right angles w/ no AA to fix em
• fixed shading: don't just make the color darker, make the color bluer, too! (real life light does this) i also added some shading to the head to give it some depth
• consistency: some of the forms (the body in the left) are blocked off with the outline, while some (hand on the right) aren't; i made them all outlined
• single pixels: some pixels were very hard to read (on the chest, the pink on the arms) so I cleaned them up
• space: in games, things are usually a factor of 2 because computers work in 1 or 0 (bit data), i guess (i've never actually thought why but this would make sense). anyways the point is that, while your sprite is a solid 32*32, the portrait is 42*42 total, so I just bumped it up to 48*48 to get a nice factor kinda number
• clean pixels: i made the center glowy thing (i interpreted it as glowing at least) more clean, a lot of the pixels seemed random, and that's just a big no-no for an art form where each pixel matters.
• clean colors: the border used a whole new glowy green, but you already have a glowy green right there on your dude! minimizing your use of color gives the piece tons more consistency

here's my final piece:

[leveler50]

Thanks! You got good points there. I utilized them:



 

Even though we are going to change this guy so that he would look more like a spirit than an alien. Because our game has a Spirit battle that's why. Here's a first version of a "spirit" version of this:

[kilenc]

its better, but you missed a few really crucial things I did: shading on the head to give it depth (very important, head looks flat), and cleaning up his chest and giving it visual clarity (it doesn't read well right now, hard to tell if it's a glowy thing or a design)

as for your beast :

• line work on the top of the head still had right angles, look wierd / unintentional; i also rounded out the back of the head to give it a more organic feel
• the shading had a lot of banding (pixels "lining up" to create blocks, which makes the sprite look not organic) so I added depth to the shading on the head to fix it and tweaked the pixel placement on the legs to fix those
  
• desaturated the brightest blue (it was at full saturation, which was too bright for the rest of the piece, imo)
• brightened the legs to bring them in line with the rest of the piece--they seemed like a separate element since they were completely darker, and shared very little color with the head. i dont know if that was your intention but in my eyes at least it make it seem strange, especially since the bright highlights made it look slimy like a squid, not a spirit
• fixed the line work on the tentacles following the brightening up, a lot of the lines were sharp (diagonal single pixels or straight lines). try using "transitional lines" insted of sharper ones (so, instead of a border that goes "5-1-1" have one that goes "5-3-2-1", it'll look smoother)
• maded the rightmost tentacle less thick to match the other two
• i wanted to change the middle tentacle, but im not sure what your intention was -- where is it attached? to his body, and pointing up? (that's how i interpreted it, at least, and changed it accordingly) or to his head, and rounded at the bottom? it's hard to read because the shading doesn't tell us

all of this in mind, here's my edit:

yours on the left, wierd tentacle in the middle, my idea of the tentacle on the left

feel free to use in your game to whatever degree you want to. hopefully, my thought process will give you a bit of insight to take your art up a notch. good luck