Second MegaMan Legends Sprite [Feedback, please]

[thesydneylad]

Pretty happy with this sprite. The outlining around the left arm makes that section look dodgy, but I think I did a good job.
I just wanna know if the sprite has good body alignments and whether you can tell what's what with the sprite.
Would you deem this 'usable' in a top down shooter game?

[Helm]

Hi, thesydneylad. I think your blue guy is cool. I read him as if he's wearing kind of a dog-ear cap, perhaps of a medieval-esque variety. I know you're probably going for a robot man (given Mega Man Legends is your reference point) so we perhaps should consider how to make him look a little more like a robot.  I hope you don't mind I did a little edit of your sprite to illustrate a few points:



A few things I tried you could also try:

1. Made him darker on the whole so the highlights I did use read more like shiny metal. He's a robot! Contrast is helpful.
2. Clarified some segmentations in the body, so it looks like he's got a breast plate and a canon robot arm and black boots etc.
3. Gave him a dog-eared robot cap because I like that from the beginning, why not?
4. I recommend you play around with 4 color palettes (like the original game boy!) spanning the field from very dark to very bright with a couple of middle colours in there and play with that until you draw stuff that you show to people and they can immediately tell what you're going for with just that color range. It's a great exercise.

 
Personally I went with this sprite as a side-scrolling sprite, perhaps you'll like it even if it's not top-down.

Thanks for reading!

[thesydneylad]

Thanks for the advice, Helm. That one sprite you made looks amazing, BTW. I wish I thought of trying to make the metal look 'shiny' at the time.

[Rydin]

It will be 'usable'. But it can be better.
Is this the perspective you're going for, sydneylad?

I put him in Guerrilla War on NES to test if he's usable.
But it's not readable if Helm sees it as side view and I as over the shoulder.

[thesydneylad]

Yep, that's 100% what I was going for, Rydin.

Thanks for the game. I'll look up the sprites.

When I first made the sprite, I was pretty happy with the result, about an hour later I thought, "I think I messed up with that sprite. In hindsight, it's pretty bad."

Then by chance I watched some gameplay footage of Commando just to see how it plays and to see the sprites in action and I thought, "Man, would it have killed me to use black lines to separate the body parts on that sprite?"

[Atnas]

Sprites on old systems often used black outlines for clarity, so that their bright contents didn't bleed into bright backgrounds on crts.

Plus, when you only have 3+transparency, black is the universal separator. Megaman had a black outline and bright interior so he worked on either light or dark backgrounds. Imagine cyan and sea blue megaman disappearing into the sky 

However! You are working from a top down perspective. You do have the liberty to go outline free as long as your backgrounds aren't blue. But the cyan is going to be a pain on light grey etc. So you might as well use black for the purpose you stated to separate the body parts.

Here's something cool, thanks to: https://piratehearts.itch.io/supercrt


Anyway, there's a reason people used black pretty universally. If you're interested in making retro sprites, the process behind achieving the CRT effect is here. A big part of.... why my NES was so beloved as a kid and contained magic that it lost when I got a bit older and started emulating, is that the medium of viewing was actual magic by comparison. There's so much mystery hidden in the degradation! GBC is where NES-like graphics were developed for LCDs, so if you're developing for modern computers without the goal to distort, GBC may be better to learn from. I suspect the majority of people getting into making retro style graphics are also predicated against screen effects, which is confusing when you think about it. But this means even if you don't create for the intent to view on CRT, you have a lot of company.

...I'm gonna buy a CRT.

When I first made the sprite, I was pretty happy with the result, about an hour later I thought, "I think I messed up with that sprite. In hindsight, it's pretty bad."

That's excellent. Your brain went through enough change in such a short period to see the same thing completely differently. It means you're learning a lot