Barbarian sprite with NES specs [WIP][C+C]

[fskn]

Thinking about how I'm going to approach jumps and falls.

[cels]

You mean this is going to run on a NES emulator? Or will you find a way to make actual cartridges? Sorry, I'm not familiar with the NES scene. 

- The new animation looks heaps better.
- The belt armor protection thingy (BAPT) does read as his belly for me, I'm sorry to say. If I stare at it, I might conclude that it's probably not his belly. But I might also conclude that since the dark line above the belt is the shadow of his arm, the bright spot is probably his belly. So it looks like he's wearing a weird wrestling suit, like André the Giant, exposing his belly. It'd be a different matter if you had more colors to work with.
- Jumps and falls look great, really nice sketches! 

[fskn]

I would love it if I could put it on a cartridge, and I haven't yet looked at how that could actually be done, although I have seen some people release cartridge games (Brad Smith's Lizard and toggleSwitch's Project Blue come to mind)... But it has to at least run on an emulator, and on an NES via an Everdrive (basically a cartridge with an SD card in it, in which you can load NES ROMs).

That's what I'm aiming for, anyway. But it's going to take a while until we get to that point...

I may be shooting myself in the foot by making so many animation frames that may need to be discarded judging by how few frames characters in NES games usually have, but at least that's good for practice. It's been a loooong while since I've done anything similar to that, and when it works it's really satisfying.

For the BAPT ( abdominal armor? I don't know) I'm thinking I *could* alternatively do like a Mega Man thing and overlap the main sprite with another 8x8px one (well, actually more than just a single one if we account for animations) with 3 more colors, but that has its drawbacks. I'll have to use those 3 extra colors somewhere else at all times (which isn't necessarily a bad thing...), and that would count towards the 8 8x8 sprite per scanline limit, which like I said before I'm trying to avoid... But it's really tempting!

I'm having a bit of trouble drawing the jumping frames straight into pixel art, thus why I'm resorting to sketching them on the side...

Thanks for the feedback, cels!

[fskn]

Initial jump test.



Not satisfied yet, and I think I'm using too many sprites.
(ignore the poof.)

Oh yeah: I changed his belt.

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EDIT: And just because this is so damn fun...

[cels]

That looks surprisingly good to me, given the genre. It actually looks like a muscular jump rather than the usual ping pong bounce. I didn't think the sketches would translate so well. I'm guessing it depends on how much stuff you want in your game, but it seems like a good idea to invest some extra frames in the most important feature of the game.

If you get a kickstarter going for a cartridge release, I'll definitely be investing. 

New belt is better! 

[fskn]

Thanks.
I think I'll have to cut a lot of that to make it fit on an NES cartridge, though... Which is going to be painful.
But the process is being fun so far.

If someone who knows this stuff has been reading, they're probably thinking "Eeeehhhh.... That ain't gonna work."
As soon as I have something more substantial I'll go to nesdev to get my ass kicked.

[SeinRuhe]

Long time without reading this thread!

The jump looks stunning Fskn! I think the only improvement for it would be to have a landing frame but again we hit the sprite number wall (Aaaand I see you already did lol). So far the only viable way to make your project fit the restrictions of a NES is to cut down the fun of those extra little frames 

I do agree with cels, if you do a cartridge kickstarter, I'll invest too!

I'm trying to find some spare time to edit the walk animation, up to this point is the only one that could use some extra tweaking

[fskn]

Thank you, Sein.
I know I could (sort of) make the upper body of that walk-with-sword-in-hand animation move up and down a little bit, which I think would improve it, but I'm holding back on adding more frames. Doing that with the jump is paradoxical, especially because so little could be reused from one frame to the next... But I'm playing around, and learning more about animation as I do it. That *may* (I guess......) help me when doing the next animations.

Reusing stuff will be key, by the way. Which I'll analyze in the future when I'm optimizing everything and pulling my hair off.
So far I've been analyzing some well animated NES games, and boy, would they reuse their tiles...

By the way, I may have to cut that smear from the first attack animation because of that. I don't think it could be reused anywhere else.
But I'll do more tries, see what works.

[fskn]

Do you guys think this is readable?



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Maybe he's a tad too small...

[cels]

Sure. Crouching / picking up the sword to save the princess.