AuthorTopic: Lurdiak's pixel stuff - Beat-em-up  (Read 2800 times)

Offline Lurdiak

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Lurdiak's pixel stuff - Beat-em-up

on: July 24, 2008, 05:15:52 am
Hi to all from an amateurish Pixel Hopeful. I was referred here by a dear friend of mine who's mastery of pixel art was so good that it inspired me to try to drastically improve from "guy who sometimes changed megaman's hair color in his spare time(hyperbole but still)" to "guy who could conceivably do the entire pixel work of a fun, professional-looking freeware game". I'm not really at my goal yet... or even halfway there, really. I have improved dramatically since I started really trying to learn instead of dicking around with other blind people on terrible forums like Bobandgeorge, but I still have a lot to learn and a lot of problems to fix.

Right now I'm working on a simple-ish video game called "Mr. Boxing from Outer Space". The outlandish name was inspired by a contest on another forum where people would use the Video Game Name Generator until a name struck their fancy, then build a game around it. I knew I could never hope to win the contest or even finish the game within the deadline, but I decided to do this anyway as a personal project. Mr. Boxing From Outer Space struck me as a great concept so I ran with it. I decided I wanted to make it a final Fight-esque Beat-em-up, but a little cartoonier. I also decided I wanted Mr. Boxing to be, well, a boxer, so I knew I needed some boxing stance references, which I found here.

To create Mr. Boxing's standing frame, I reduced the "upright stance" to two colors, blacked out the silhouette entirely, and messed around with its shape until it looked more like something I could work with. I then filled in muscles, details and colors as I went, thinking about the design and modifying the look and shape accordingly. I am not really sure if you'd call it tracing since I only used a bare "skeleton" as a guiding point to my final result, but if it is considered such, I'm sorry. I eventually settled on a so-wholesome-it's-sickening guideline for the character design. He looks somewhere between heroic and smug, or at least he's meant to. I put in a little bit of Super Punch Out!'s Super Macho Man, and a little bit of Appolo Creed. I also mostly used Final Fight and Super Punch Out! as anatomy references. After finishing the basic design, including his special star belt (the source of his super boxing power), I set upon creating a breathing animation following this tutorial: http://www.gas13.ru/v3/tutorials/sywtbapa_breathing_life_into_sprites.php. The first 4 frames went relatively well. I used Street Fighter Alpha Balrog's breathing animation as a loose guideline to what I wanted to do (though I wanted my character to come across as more relaxed) and also used his arms and gloves as references at times.



Not perfect, but I thought it was satisfactory. Next, I wanted the character to lower his arms rather fast, a drop if you will, then bring them back up to loop into that first 4-frame circle, creating a kind of circular feel where his arms go out then come back in. I planned on adjusting things like the hair bounce and the shorts as I went along. I also wanted the knees to actually bend. However, things went dramatically wrong and I am now at an impasse:



I'm a few frames shy  of looping but I had to stop. Obviously, the movement doesn't look natural at all. It doesn't gel with the previous 4 frames and looks totally stiff. Furthermore, it doesn't look at all like a boxing stance movement. I've worked and worked at it but it still comes across as weird looking.

I welcome any and all advice on these faulty frames, pixel animation in general, the design, the colors, or basically any criticism you can lob my way. Even though this is my best work yet, I don't mind someone tearing it apart so I can improve it and make something better next time. Thanks in advance!  :y:
« Last Edit: August 07, 2008, 11:21:35 pm by Lurdiak »
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Offline Lurdiak

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Well, while I'm waiting for a reply, I'll just bump this with some older but decent work... no animation on these. They're my "learning curve", and part of an older project. Basically they're the most generic Beat-em-up crew I could come up with, all reeking heavily of the corniness of the early 90s and late 80s. I was heavily influenced by games like Final Fight and the Rushing Beat series for these. I made all of them by "shadowing" another sprite, rebuilding the silhouette until I was satisfied with the look, and then filling in the blanks, taking some cues from the musculature and clothes of the original sprite where applicable. Not to mention lots of fiddling with details as I stumbled blindly, with the help of FrankieSmileShow a good friend. Let's have a look.

Dirk Blazer:

Reference: Slash from Brawl Brothers


Arguably the best of the bunch, this one is 30% me and 70% FrankieSmileShow, who kept helping me along the way as I learned the ropes, doing tricks like shading better, creating light sources, reshaping the legs, helping out with the chain and zipper effects, etc. He's the hero, and of course his girlfriend gets kidnapped. I planned an introduction where he'd see his girlfriend was held hostage on the news, which would cause him to punch a hole in the TV screen, kick his own door down, and bust onto the streets of Stage 1. He embodies all the "cool" attributes of this particular era, and he's sort of got a neo-Fonz look going on, if we're lenient enough to call early 90s fashion "neo".

Bigger Thugs:

Reference: Al from Peace Keepers


A couple of middling sized thugs. The "kinda big" but not "the big" thug of the game. The one on the left is the first one I made mostly by myself, and it kind of shows. His left arm is totally awkwardly placed, and this is a symptom of the overall bigger problem of following the silhouette too much. Al's position is radically different from what I wanted to do, but I still was too afraid to truly change the thug shadow's shape, thus resulting in this mediocre mess and weird body shape. Another problem is the tattoo on his left arm, which looks very little like a tattoo.

The other two are recolored headswaps with a few details added to give them a little more personality. All good beat-em-ups knew to create variants of every enemy type! The one in the middle is more military, obviously, and the look of the one on the right is inspired by a famous pro wrestler(guess which). I didn't really name these guys, but I'm tempted to call the middle one "Sarge".


Harrier, Spider and Buzz

Reference: Mic from Final Fight 2


This is probably the one I'm proudest of. Looking at it now, I see some issues with the color palettes and his right arm, amongst others, but overall it ended up looking like I wanted it to, and isn't a slave to his reference as much as the bigger guys. These guys are the game's punching bags, cannon fodder: the lowest thugs of the games, the ones you'll see first. I wanted to give them a run-down, small guy feel.

Debbie

Reference: Wendy from Brawl Brothers


Her leg is wrong, amongst other things that leap out at me... The color palette needs work too. The Tough Grrl of the game, Debbie has rollerskates to move around faster and to fit her corny aerobics theme. The perm is very 80s.

Krowley

References: The clawed Thug from Peace Keepers and J from Final Fight


Okay I used a pretty awful basis for this guy, which is a big part what led me to reconsider my "shadowing other sprites" technique, especially since I was taking so few risks with it. I also used J as an actual reference for the ruffles in his coat. This guy was meant to be the lanky dude who's prone to throwing knives or slide-kicking you, and these dudes are usually freak-os, so I decided to give him a Crow look. His right arm and hand are messed up and the angle of his left one is awkward, a result of my poor choice of "template".

So yeah, that's my previous work. Even though I can see some of the flaws now that I've improved my pixel-fu, I'd like to hear what other problems you guys can spot, and advice for improving them.
« Last Edit: July 26, 2008, 12:28:12 am by Lurdiak »
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