frrrosty pixels -- c&c welcome!

Hey RPG makers!

As a more design/programming type with no real artistic background, I decided to try my hand at learning pixel art and spriting.  It's tough!  Anyway, I figured I'd put my work here and keep at it.  I've been doing it every day for the past week and it's been really rewarding.

I decided I wanted to start with sprite bases for my game.  I really like to focus on characters and let them tell the story, so I wanted to make sure I had something I felt good about.  I'm making male and female adults as well as a unisex child sprite.

Here's a quick look so far at male back, female side, and child front.



And here's a WIP running animation for the male adult.  Still have to do the torso and arms, but hopefully the legs look okay.



If anybody has any suggestions or recommendations on how to improve, please let me know!

Love the little family! Very cute!

It's looking pretty good, I love the animation and the style you used. Your pretty good for someone who is beginning. I would love to see more!

Did more work on my run animation... I think I might be done with the side running!  Does anything look weird?  I stuck to the 3 frame limit (1, 2, 3, 2) limit that RPG Maker VX Ace imposes.

Hey frrrosty, nice to meet you. These are pretty good! If you want some advice on how to improve I'm happy to help. It's hard to give a really good critique on the different bases because you've got three different views arranged artistically on top of each other so I can't see everything but I'll do my best.


The perspective is off for an RPG view which is extremely common for people who aren't used to it. It's pretty common to make a side scroller view by mistake. RPGs are in 3/4ths view which means you see 4/4ths of the side and 3/4ths of the top of something. We're not seeing enough of the top of the characters.


You've got some problems with shading too, but those are common too. Your lighting is inconsistent. You've got a specular highlight at the top of the head, but the rest of the shading indicates that the light source isn't from above but from the side. The sprite will look much better if it's got a clearer light source and that light source should match whatever the tileset's light source is.


I'm seeing a lot of banding causing some fat pixels. That's where you have a color exactly the same shape as the outline only moved over one pixel. There's a whole section on it here on this tutorial if you need more of an explanation. You almost never want to do this, it actually makes the squareness of the pixels stand out more and in general doesn't look good.


I don't know if this is how it is on all the sprite types, but your side view character's head is shaped very oddly. There are some humans who look like that bald, but as far as I know that's a racial trait for people of African decent and not something you'd see in a person of that coloring.


That's a lot of stuff but I hope it's all helpful.

@Sharm

Wow, thanks for the helpful critique!  I really appreciate it.

Here are my three bases in front view, in case it helps:



I have a general idea of what you mean by the view but I thought I was doing something pretty similar to other RPG Maker bases... Maybe just a lot of them are too much of a side view :)  That said I feel like it doesn't look too weird in-engine, but that could just be my untrained eye.

I hear you on the shading.  I wanted to use the highlights to give some depth to the characters, but it's true that the light sources are kind of all over the place.  In the running one the leg highlight doesn't really make any sense, for instance.  I was just worried that they were looking too flat otherwise, and I didn't want to use too many colors.

Thanks for the tutorial link.  It's interesting because I usually like the "chunkier" look of older games but I see where I was going wrong here.  I'll have to see if I can take another pass and improve the look!

I assume you're talking about the "bump" at the top-back of the skull?  I know what you mean, and I actually tried it a bit "rounder" originally but it ended up looking sort of "too round" if that makes any sense.  I'll take another look and see if I want to change it or not, but I actually kind of like what it does.

Thanks again, and any further c&c is always welcome, I feel like I'm learning a lot as I go.  Also I would Like your post but I guess I ran out of Likes for today.  I didn't even know that was possible!  :guffaw:

Okay, tried my hand at the female running sprite, tried to keep in mind some of the stuff Sharm mentioned.  I've been focusing on making the male and female adults "different" both in their proportions (as in the last post) and also in their animation styles.

Working on the side view for the child, and I accidentally made a cute pudgy child.  I'm still gonna use it as an alt!

 and 

Nice to meet you, frosty. I wanted to say that your pixel art is good already who's a beginner, good luck!

PS: I am also A beginner in pixel art. Just in need for helpful tutorials.

The child can run now :)  I may do an alternate for this run as well, not to mention the pudgy kid run :p

Everybody run!!!

Okay, first try for the male forward run.  I like that you can copy+paste+flip the body for the alternate cycle.  Makes things a lot faster, though you lose some of the nice perspective you get from the side run.



Thank you :)  I'm doing my best!  If you want some tutorials I've been using, try the ones here: http://finalbossblues.com/pixel-tutorials/

You really shouldn't be leaving the lower section of the torso unmoving like that, it makes it look like it's growing and shrinking with each step. It's not as weird at this size, but at the normal pixel resolution it's going to look really strange.

@frrrosty: If you are finished with them, may I suggest you to make small sprites template? That will help me a lot and lot, thank you.

Thanks for the comment! :)

Do you mean the stomach or the pelvis/crotch area?  What kind of change could improve it?  Should it be "rotating" left and right or doing more of a shrink/stretch?  I tried to give it some left/right motion by moving the navel and the pec shadows but I'm not sure where I shoul dbe doing more.

I will probably try my hand at a standard VX Ace sprites size at some point but after I finish all these ones, and I still have a lot left:

- Walking (so far only done running)

- Hiding (idle pose)

- Sneaking (walk + hide)

- KO/Dead pose

I also want to try and double their usage maybe as battlers, so I have to look into that.

The crotch area. Its staying in exactly the same spot while everything else moves. It should probably move up and down with the rest of the body. Men don't move their hips much so I wouldn't swing them though.

No artistic background!? Dude they're awesome. Well done.

Ah, I see.  Yeah, good point, I'll give a look at that.  Thank you for the advice once again!

Edit: Just tried it... wow, such a small change but it makes a big difference already:

 --> 

Thanks  :blush:

I think it helps that I'm looking at so many drawings and trying to focus on form as much as possible.  Sharm has helped me pay attention to some stuff I messed up on as well.

Much better. :)

Running away!

I had a lot of trouble with this one.  I need to learn to do these faster because I really need to get on with making my actual game :p