Critique > Pixel Art

A first go at a character: animated spaceman.

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daramon:
So I'm very new to pixel art. I've looked at a course or two on Udemy and I've been fiddling around with background tiles for a while (the usual: grass, rocks, that kind of thing).

I felt like I was making some headway, so thought I'd have a go at some character animation.

This is my first attempt at a spaceman. He's small as I want the pixels to look chunky in the final game. This cycle contains run, jump and idle. The animation frames were inspired by the walk and jump cycles in a Preston Blair book on cartoon animation (you can find the cycle images all over Google as well.)



This is an earlier iteration without shading, and just the run cycle.



So questions:

 - It all looks very simplistic, and the shading seems uneven between the head and the body. How can I better shade the character to be more space-suit-like? (I'd like to keep a slight orange tint to the player, as the majority of the environment will have an orange hue.)

 - The game concept involves the suit sometimes being empty, controlled remotely by an AI (in game of course. In reality the player is always in control.) In this case, a "breathing" style idle animation doesn't really make sense. What else could I use for an idle animation to add interest? Breathing seems to be so ubiquitous.

 - I'm not overly happy with the "Jet Set Willy" style side-on idle. What kind of poses are there that aren't the "overly dramatic 45 degree to the camera posed" look?

eishiya:
Your images aren't working. You may want to use a service designed for hotlinking images, such as Imgur, instead of Dropbox.

daramon:
That's disappointing, Dropbox used to be great for that and the preview seemed to be working fine for me.  I even made sure I wasn't logged in.

OK, I've updated using Imgur. Are they visible now? :)

eishiya:
Yep, the images are working now!


What's the environment for this character? That should determine how you colour them.
In space, there's very little scattering of the light, so shadows tend to be very stark, even on rounded objects. On a planet or inside of a space station, the lighting will of course be different, with more bounce-light and diffusion.
In addition to the shadow quality, the environment would affect the colours. The colours you're using now suggest something like a dusty Martian surface.

For the AI idle, you could have the helmet look left to right and back (or up and down) very smoothly, as the AI scans its environment. Having different idles for AI vs human would be pretty neat, and help remind the player what's going on even if the gameplay doesn't change much.

Turning the body 45 degrees to the camera (or at least some angle that isn't a profile) is very effective for communicating the pose clearly, which is why it's so common. Showing both legs and both arms allows you to have all of those for communicating the character's personality, and allows for interesting silhouettes even with very relaxed, simple poses. Achieving the same with the character in profile would require a more dramatic pose xP

daramon:
> What's the environment for this character? That should determine how you colour them.

There will be inside and outside environments. (Futuristic exoplanet moon base, surface, caves). I may need to create different sprites for the different locations, by the sounds of it.

> In space, there's very little scattering of the light, so shadows tend to be very stark, even on rounded objects.

Great point, I'll have a play with some harder shadows. The surface will have to have some kind of atmosphere though, as there will be life, so even if it's not nitrogen/oxygen there would probably be some kind of scattering I guess.

> For the AI idle, you could have the helmet look left to right and back (or up and down) very smoothly, as the AI scans its environment. Having different idles for AI vs human would be pretty neat, and help remind the player what's going on even if the gameplay doesn't change much.

Excellent idea! Thanks.

I'll get to work on those, and a decent idle pose.

Thanks for your time!

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