Groo the Wanderer :)

[Cherno]

Cheese Dip!

I tried converting everybody's favourite (?) bumbling barbarian Groo as he appears as a paper figurine to a 32x32 pixel version. I'm quite happy with the way it turned out. The colors are of low contrast at this scale but what irks me the most is his face; most graphics that small deform the character so the head takes up up to half of the total body height to get more detail into the face, but in this case it would alter Sergio Aragones' own style which would mean that it isn't Groo anymore. Anyway, with so little pixels to work with in the face area it's probably useless to draw features like eyes mouth but I'm not versed in the ways of using single pixels and colors to make the human eye believe that's a human face. Groo is also known for his big nose but again that's something that is hard to represent here.

Critique, comments and especially tips are very welcome. Thank you!

[Cherno]

Some face variations:

[MysteryMeat]

VERY slight edits to the face area, belt, and swords. Changed the grip outlines to the orange to better contrast with his skin, and cheated a TEENSYTINY bit by making the sword and eyes white.

[Cherno]

Thanks for your suggestions! Interesting. I like the white sword (it makes more sense as well I assume the pinkish color from the original is due to some printing requirements).

White single-pixels eyes always look weird to me, like the character is wearing glasses or staring whide-eyed and expressionless.

Not sure about the orange sword grip outlines, do you think it could be neccessary? There is already a black outline seperating it from the skin.

I made the head one pixel higher because after looking at the original again, the head was too short so now the image is 33 pixels high but what the hell, it's not the 80s anymore right?

[MysteryMeat]

Yeah, I was trying to go for sort of a shadows-cast-over-eyes look to emphasize both the barbarian thing and the big nose, but I couldn't get it to look right. Big noses can be hard at this scale.

[Cherno]

After a long time, I was bored so I made some animation frames for Groo

What I don't like is the way the sword crosses the face in the running frames, and how the upper outline of the character doesn't change much even with the up-and-down motion due to the sword taking the place of the lower head's outline.

[Cherno]

Here are some of the other recurring characters.
The Sage:

Mulch, the Sage's dog:


Chakaal:

[Vinik]

I think Groo has a noticeably vertical head in the source, if you were to stretch his head by a few pixels that could give you more space for a rounded big nose. I think a large nose would add a lot to him, including making the level of detail of his face match that of the sage.

[pistachio]

re face:



Good job on this though. NES palette?

Considered putting these guys in a NES mockup?

[Cherno]

The nose is a defining feature of Groo, I guess I will have to continue experimenting with his face to somehow include or hint at it.

I think the original choice to make his head squashed compared to the original was becauase I wanted to fit the sprite into a certain box, like 32 or such IIRC. It's nonsense but I somehow went with it.

I like the changes to his lower body, with the frayed shirt (?) and shadow line under it.

The colors are just random ones I picked from the source images.

I'd really like to put these characters in a very simple 2d sidescrolling hack & slash game where Groo is given quests by The Sage and collects jars of cheese dip to regain health while "doing what Groo does best" - fighting huge numbers of enemies!