Run Cycle

[Mitchard]

Hi, 8 frame run cycle. I started feeling a little iffy about it when I got to the arms and it seems off to me.

I started from this image

I made the legs longer while animating and I'm not too sure if it's better that way.
Palette looks a little different but I think that's just Pixen doing its thing.

Scarf will probably be a separate image hence absence.

[robotacon]

Great animation Mitchard, I like the Dr Who style design.

Here's an edit of what I would have done:

mine:    yours:  

It looks better if you have contact frames when the foot leaves and touches the ground. You've got those feet hanging in the air so I simply moved them down a bit.
You have to add the ground to the animation to really appreciate this.

Also I don't like head turns because no one does that exept for silly cartoons.

I raised the legs a bit on the passing frames and made sure the feet travelled at a constant speed on the ground.

Lastly I fixed his midsection that was jumping around randomly.

I hope you've got an Idea for a game because I want to see more of this character and play the game.

[Arachne]

Very nice! I would love to see a mockup with this little guy.

Shorter legs or not, I think he looks like he's leaning forwards a bit too much and that a more balanced pose might work better.

[Ben2theEdge]

I really like this guy! Reminds me of Steamboy for some reason.

One word of warning is that the way you've colored him is not really very condusive to animation. His arms, torso, legs, hands and feet are all very similar colors and consequently in his running animation you really only see the silhouette unless you study it carefully. There's a lot of nice motion in there that gets lost because the shapes all merge together in that dark gray blackness. The solution may be as simple as giving him brown gloves instead of black ones.

Of course this raises an important issue with character design especially when doing animation and pixel art. I'm not advocating a major change to your design but I want to point this out so you'll be mindful of it.



This character has been designed with excruciating care. These design choices were all guided by the needs of the sprite; Mario looks the way he does because of the technical limitations of the system. He has a mustache because the resolution was too low to give him both a nose and a mouth. He has overalls to separate his arms from his torso. Every decision made here was made for maximum readability at a low resolution.

Again... not advocating a major change to your design, which I like quite a bit. But details such as his hands, or the buttons on his coat, can be much easier to spot if you learn from the examples set by the pioneers. Character design can never be pure whimsy, it has to be functional for its purpose as well. Just keep this in the back of your mind as you continue to work on this!

[Lackey]

I would be cautious about mythologizing Miyamoto's work too much.  A lot of these concepts seem obvious now, but only because they've become entrenched over years of reiteration and gradual refinement.  These designs more than likely were the result of pure whimsy, despite the stand-out quotes from interviews on them.  You can see how they changed the designs as early as the second game, and with good reason as the original Mario sprite has an awkward palette (red, brown, peach?) and poor contrast.  I'm quite certain the reason Mario's design (Italian plumber caricature) is so recognizable is because it was a good game at the right time and it was followed by a successful series and rigorous marketing. Sorry, I just have to get that off my chest because I see the story cited all the time, and I'm really wary of this kind of retrospective legend-making.  Besides Miyamoto is still alive, it's too early to canonize him

THAT said, your advice is sound!  Really, the thing I think your sprite needs now is a little colour separation.  It will depend on the setting in game, of course, but at the moment it looks less "muted" and more "washed out."


Arachne's edit is also quite helpful, I think.  At the moment he appears to be leaning forward.  You can see that it changes his character quite a bit though, you could even pull a little less of a casual look if you make his legs pretty straight.

The character is really strong though.  Very human proportions for this kind of art and it comes across great as an actual, well, person.  I know that's not the critique you're asking for with this post, but robotacon and others can give much sounder animation advice than I

[Helm]

Strongly seconded. Here's various mario heads that work with both a mouth and a nose and eyes and personality. It's not the personality we've grown to attribute to mario, but that was an evolutionary thing for nintendo also. There's many, many ways to give an 8x8 pixel head both a nose and a mouth and still have it read. Let's very very critical of common design wisdom as it has been passed to us because many times it's not that simple. Why is mario a god design? The original NES color palette is pretty atrocious actually. That right shoulder is jutting out like hell. The sprite was probably drawn in an hour and they went with it. Later on they refined, but there's no amazing brilliance to the initial NES mario. It's solid, and that's great, but so is Mitchard's.

[Ben2theEdge]

Yeah I agree that it's a poor example, I realized later that I was actually thinking of the sprite from the original Donkey Kong which better illustrates my point.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I think muted and washed out is okay if it's for stylistic purposes, but it means the design choices have to be that much more carefully thought out to compensate for the crippled readability.