[C+C] [WIP] Forest Visual Novel Character Sprites

[Suleiman212]

Hey guys, I'm new to this forum, and I just wanted some feedback on some characters. I'm making a game, and I have here the character art. You can ignore the top left corner, that's very early concept art, before I chose my palette. That's another thing: I have a 31 color palette, and I'm kinda satisfied with it, but if anyone has any advice I'll gladly take it. I'm willing to change it, and for story reasons I actually would like to have 33 colors, so if anyone sees anywhere in the ramp that more color can be added, or thinks a completely new color would add something to the art, let me know. The game takes place in a forest, with fire being the light source, so I went for blueish greenish shadows with orange highlights for all the colors, with blue even going to grey in the light.

Anyways, TL:DR, I just want some opinions and criticisms! I've shown this work to friends, but that was mostly to get critiques on readability (I'd ask them what they thought each character was, and what they were holding/doing et cetera, without giving them any information or context and if they were completely lost I would rework the character to try and make them more readable.) But I'd like some artistic critique too, on the lighting, color palette choice, shading, detail, et cetera. I'm trying to go for a combination of dark but also a tiny bit light-hearted (Essentially the setting and events are dark and dreary, but the main character is naive and light-hearted, so he still sees a bit of joy in it. The game is dark and is about distrust and paranoia but also has a bit of hope as a theme.)




As a note, the game will be, on a 1080p screen, viewed at 4x and 5x depending on the scene. On other sized screens, it scales itself accordingly to be around the same size on screen, about 270p and 216p.


Sorry if these images are too large, but here's some gifs of early animation work. Of course it's a WIP, and some characters are straight up not animated yet. Pay special attention to the seacaptain looking guy, in the blue coat and hat, with the pipe. He's demonstrating my idle animation system.



And here's the start screen with some dialogue.

[Suleiman212]

A quick update, I ended up deciding that the blue ramp was a bit too sudden, so I added an intermediate blue shade, and I think it fits okay into the palette. Looking for C + C on it and the color choice in general.

[Rydin]

Good work.

I am only going to comment on the red tree in the bottom screen as it sums up the overall theme to my reaction to all of the pieces you are showing.

The shape is too general. There is not enough nuance and character. Everything reads symbolically like it should. But can you push your pixels the extra mile to reach distinction?

[Suleiman212]

Thanks for the consideration!

Hm, I'm not sure exactly what you mean. The red tree at the bottom, though, is actually just a dream, and is revealed to actually be a dead, twisted tree, so it's a little intentional that the shape of the tree is so stereotypical in shape, complete with a nice little branch off to the side.

But you might be right about the rest of the work. I guess I might be sacrificing a bit of distinction for readability. But I feel a bit scared of just pumping detail and uniqueness into the sprites and just end up with an unreadable mess. Do you have any more specific critique on any specific characters? (Also the background in the first gif is just a WIP placeholder type thing. I'm currently working on the actual tileset for the forest background, redoing it from the ground up. Ignore what you see there.)

[BadMoodTaylor]

This is great stuff—love the style.

I did notice a few walking animations look more choppy than graceful.  But I think it is the duration of the frames not the actual animations...or the way you captured the gif.

Looking forward to seeing more!