Games Revisited

[zeid]

I haven't posted for aaaagggeeesss so hi everyone new and everyone old.

I lately have been having the erge to revisit my games that I begun/finished when I first got into game making. The idea of this piece was for a game which I attempted to make some time ago. It was meant to be a multiplayer game in which players would have to kill one another with a variety of different guns, the twist was you played as blobs!!! (yeah not that amazing) The game play was meant to be like realtime worms.

Ok, I know this piece isn't much but wanted to get as much critique as I could on it. I am somewhat satisfied with it but as it is a character sprite it needs to be as cool as possible. Yes I know it looks gritty and dead, this was deliberate as I am tired of the cute slime stereotype and wanted to make something that looked like it was going to absorb you in a grotesque evil manner.



I might later add guns, animation, etc. which will get 'glued' onto it.
***
The next revisited character
Copper Head

Still very WIP, hopefully will turn out more to my liking in a later update.

[sharprm]

Do the blobs have legs?

Are you trying to put a skull in there? Maybe a 'no nose, big mouth' blob type creature would read better. Currently the dark blue pixels
look like noise.



Did an edit, did change much about form, just reduced noise and added another blue. Even if it looks less slimey, wouldn't sliminess be conveyed better by a oozing kinda animation (ie. u should focus on readability rather than static frame sliminess).

edit: maybe outlines better for extreme black/white backgrounds. In fact, why do you draw it on black and white backgrounds?



edit2: tried to make it more slimey:

[zeid]

Thanks Sharpm, you raise some good points. Particularly about the readability it might have served me better to have made the sprites larger to allow for more detail rather then cramming it in. I was trying to make it look as if its skull was suspended inside its ooze and its body was transparant, but the many highlights from its slimey nature reduce the readability significantly. I think if I really exagerate the animations it will infer the detail better, for instance even the idle animation could show the skull rocking from side to side suspended in the blob. The blobs dont have legs, the movement animations will show it dragging itself along.

I draw it on a black and white background to test how it will look in game, I usually also throw in a range of greys. Its to see if the highlights, shadows and midtones significantly cause the image to break apart and get damaged on different extremes. I think the ranges I have are ok so I don't think I will outline it.

Im going to attempt to animate it later then depending on the result I might scrap the current look opting for one closer to what you have.

[sharprm]

Something to help convey that it is a solid skull in a transparent blob would be to have the skull part darker. A more spherical blob might be better.

[zeid]

An update... with 2 possible palette choices to chose from. 'Arm is finished'. Any suggestions for improvement, also which colours do people prefer.

Galathore!!! A new bad guy for Copperhead. I think he might need some further character design more than anything else.