Boy and his Blob dumping ground.

[ptoing]

KratosX has a point tho. They are nicely done on a pixellevel but the boy ones are quite overanimated. Tons of frames is not always the best thing to do, and indeed the whisteling looks a lot like sneezing. Making stuff cartoony is one thing, but it's easy to go over the top.

In the run it looks like more attention was spent on the secondary motion than actually giving the run weight.

[Helm]

Most of the kid animations have too much anticipation and recoil and not enough stress. It's like looking at reels of all the secondary frames with the stress ones taken out. They can easily be tweaked though, but aren't these 3 years old you said? Are you going to make the game after all or are you showcasing old art? I'm not partial to the selout but that's a played out conversation I think.

[Indigo]

if I remember correctly helm, the selout works in this case since the backgrounds are dark enough to supplement it (from what I remember of the demo he showed me some time ago) - thus, its just AA

[Helm]

Didn't they not make any background art for this? Was the whole game ment to be on a pretty dark background? KITTY WANTS TO KNOW (my own avatar amuses me)

[Ben2theEdge]

The boy's idle animation makes me feel a bit nauseous. I don't know much about sub-pixeling, but you don't necessarily have to have an animation, let alone a ton of frames, for everything.

Actually I would say as a rule of thumb it's best to avoid static frames in character sprites, unless you're deliberately going for a minimalist or retro 8-bit feel. There are multiple reasons for this, the most obvious one is that real people don't stand perfectly still, and to have characters snap from motion to mime-like frozen positions is discomforting aesthetically. The other, more important reason is that the eye is attracted to motion so having a character that is constantly animated, no matter how subtle, helps to separate it from the background layer.

[Indigo]

Didn't they not make any background art for this? Was the whole game ment to be on a pretty dark background? KITTY WANTS TO KNOW (my own avatar amuses me)

if you notice on the sprites, the darker values are very rarely used as sel-out - only the mid-tones are.  All of the darker values form solid lines (good example of this is the blob).  Meaning the backgrounds don't need to be very dark for this sel-out to work properly.

In either case, this is best answered by darkfalzx

[big brother]

As far as I can remember, the game backgrounds were going to be pretty dark. I am guilty of the selout on the blob, but I didn't go overboard with it (usually just one shade step). I generally try not to use it, so you'll have to forgive me the transgression.

(Helm's avatar amuses me greatly.)

[Dusty]

KratosX has a point tho. They are nicely done on a pixellevel but the boy ones are quite overanimated. Tons of frames is not always the best thing to do, and indeed the whisteling looks a lot like sneezing. Making stuff cartoony is one thing, but it's easy to go over the top.

In the run it looks like more attention was spent on the secondary motion than actually giving the run weight.

I agree most of them are overanimated(stated before that the feeding one was way too dramatic), but I can't say the idle animation is overanimated at all. It is one of the more subtle idle animations I have seen on Pixelation, aside from static sprites, in a while honestly.

Aside from the feeding animation though, I think the 'overanimation' is quite nice. I'm not a great animator though, so perhaps they could lose some frames in favor of key frames... but I still think they have a wonderful cartoony exaggeration to them.

[Keizgon]

I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

The sub-pixeling in the idle here plays with my eyes, maybe it's just me.

I think the idle animation is great, and I don't think he used too many frames... I think it's 8 frames, but really only 4(1-2-3-4-3-2-1). Either way, depending on how skilled he is(and I can only assume from his others that he is very skilled in animation), that may not be a lot of work.

I wasn't referring to his idle animation, so I should clarify. What I have noticed about his animations is that they are all extremely animated, which is fun to show off such a skill, but sometimes it's not always necessary.

Whatever exactly sub-pixeling is, I haven't seen it before (at least I haven't noticed it). If I did, it probably was used sparingly deliberately so I would not notice it. Of course though, I have played little to no games around when the GameCube and GameBoy Advance first appeared, if it is a new style. I also never played Metroid, so maybe I'll give it a try sometime and tell you if I agree about the subtle sub-pixel animation. Everybody has their own taste in style (part of mine is try not to screw with your eyes), as they do in everything.

Regardless, workload shouldn't be a negative, and you shouldn't deter people from putting time into their work. Games like Metroid always have great animation and even the idle position has animation(much like his, has subpixel animation). I don't think workload or time consumption is ever really up for critique because it's completely up to the person how much time they want to put into their work.

You misunderstand, I am not critiquing his workload, or any other artists' who want to take their time for perfection sake. However, speaking from experience making games in my spare time, sometimes you have to speed up your workload, especially if you are both the programmer and the artist. That is, if you want to release it or bump it to a full version in a reasonable, yet still long, date.

If he and his friend can create good art pretty quickly, then good. It's totally up to the artist to manager their free time. Nobody has to take my advice if he/she doesn't wish to. It's just my preference when creating games for the sake of allowing me to program more.

[Helm]

The work efficiency point is off topic as from what I understand this is a dead project.