Tileset and run animation advice

[someolddoor]

Hi everyone, I'm a somewhat long-time lurker on these forums.. to be honest the reason I've never really posted anything was that I feel that the advice on these forums is so good that I didn't want to waste anyone's time - I see a lot of people who seem to take the time people give here for granted. Anyway - I think now I have some items that would benefit greatly from some critique and advice.

Im working on a video game, and at the moment I'm trying to lay down some basic tilesets. I'm starting with an outdoor plains/grass/rocks/trees tileset because there are a lot of good examples both in art and videogames plus it is somewhat versatile and reusable - and also quite aesthetically pleasing. I want the game to have a fairly clean, simple tileset, but still have a modern look. There are not really any technological restrictions, although I like the elegance of using small colour palettes.

Enough talk, though... here is some examples of the work:


Basic grass tileset, characters for scale, mushroom enemy (looks terrible at the moment), little rock.
I'm going to make diagonals for the grass too.
One of the major issues I'm coming up against is trying to decide if I should texture the ground. I think the current ground colour is too bold and high saturation for plain usage, however my attempts to texture the ground haven't really met for success.
Furthermore, the grass itself I have not textured and mainly left plain. I'm thinking that maybe I'll keep that look - I like how clean it is, but I will make some tiles with clumps of thick grass and another entire sub-tileset for thick grass that can tile inside any grass area. Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?


Basic run animation for character.. but something about it looks wrong to me.. any advice on how I can make it look a little less mechanical and unreal? Also, I'd like to spend as few frames as possible. I haven't touched animating the head yet, but plan to. This one may simply be down to lack of animation experience, though!

Thanks very much in advance.

[robotacon]

Easy on the stretching of the neck on the run-cycle.
Also the feet are moving in a pendulum movement. Make her take actual steps instead.

Otherwise, very cute!

[Hyrule_SwordsMan]

hey there!
  welcome? 
I like a lot your grass tiles
you can add some "taller grass" tiles. Not toooo tall, but a little bit to nullify repetitiveness... ... or fludd? 

 if you check the stone carefully you'll find a color that can be recycled. In the right shade part of the stone, there are 2 colors, the lightest one can be replaced by the lightest outline  of the same And there's a weird light effect on the stone  it doesn't really fit the texture of a stone 

About the girl... Is there a happy face there? I can't really understand it. You can make her hair moving with the wind while walking . I don't really love that opaque shadow. Other than that and that you could add some clothing details to her... its pretty nice

I really like the style 

About the animation... if you force your eyes to do so, you can imagine she is running backwards. That's because the animation of her left leg going is the same as her same leg coming. When she moves her left leg towards her front, she should have some space between her feet and the ground

Well, think thats all ^^

cya!!

[someolddoor]

Update on the run animation:

Old >> New


Tried to make the leg movement less pendulum-esque. I think I'm getting somewhere and I'm planning to go on to animating the head next as I think it will make the whole thing look a lot more cohesive. I removed the head bob (for now).. can anyone say if it is general practice to include head bobs in run animations though? Some of the old SNES sprite examples I've seen don't have this and look okay. The only other thing to really animate is the hair and I'm a little confused as to how to approach it. I'll study up and post my results.

Thanks for the comments so far!

[Opacus]

I'd say you need some subpixels to make her head move better.
And I'd say a head bob is pretty much needed in every run

[ninjascience]

it doesn't look like she bends her legs while she's running.  Frames 1-3 are good, but after that it starts to break down.  One problem is that her feet look like they scrape the ground as they move from the back to the front.