Pixel-Art Megathread: It's not programmer art it's *retro*

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > Pixel-Art Megathread: It's not programmer art it's *retro*

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Kazerad: Aug 1, 2011; Unshamed by Koos

Disproportionation posted:

Not at the moment, though I'm looking to have one up by the end of the month. It's not much of a big deal though, I'm just happy to help.

Noted! When you get something up I'd be happy to go back and retroactively link it; working with the small palette was a lot of fun and I think it gave the finished product a pretty neat feel.

^ Here's the aforementioned finished product, if anyone's curious. It's a little 1-2 minute sequence in my webcomic-like thing. The graphics are all mine, with the exception of the far BG layer and a couple normal buildings and trees I commissioned from friends once the fatigue of "I don't need a tileset, I can just make this one big image!" started to wear on me. Art crit and all appreciated, since this is the first time I've used a limited palette this extensively or drawn my own parallaxing background layers.

They're all out now, but it was originally also set up to give little prizes to people who could finish in 70 seconds or less. The prize page was built to look like some early internet relic, and was complete with its own little graphics (all also using the game's palette).

Kazerad fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Jul 10, 2013

# ? Jul 9, 2013 22:10

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# ? May 9, 2024 23:32

Shoehead: Sep 28, 2005; Wassup, Choom?
Ya need sumthin'?

I've noticed that there's something...off about this guy's eyes. They are both at the same height and the same distance apart, but they look lopsided.

Am I just going crazy?

# ? Jul 10, 2013 21:36

Yodzilla: Apr 29, 2005; Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch

They're not lopsided but goddamn those irises are huge. Reminds me of a Zwinky.

# ? Jul 10, 2013 21:38

Shoehead: Sep 28, 2005; Wassup, Choom?
Ya need sumthin'?

Yodzilla posted:

They're not lopsided but goddamn those irises are huge. Reminds me of a Zwinky.

He does look a bit manic.. So I AM going crazy then.

# ? Jul 10, 2013 22:01

RedRupee: Feb 25, 2012

I tried doing something like that Pixosprout person's work on the other page. This was my first attempt and there were some good lessons in the end. I'm currently working on a higher-res thing and hoping that it turns out better.

RedRupee fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Jul 11, 2013

# ? Jul 11, 2013 03:54

blowingupcasinos: Feb 21, 2006

Shoehead posted:

I've noticed that there's something...off about this guy's eyes. They are both at the same height and the same distance apart, but they look lopsided.

Am I just going crazy?

The ears are off by one pixel, so it tilts the face.

# ? Jul 11, 2013 04:40

Sanguinary Novel: Jan 27, 2009

He looks manic because the upper eye lid is open all the way to the top of the iris. If you look at your own eye, you can see that the upper and lower lid cut off the iris a bit. Don't do too much, otherwise he'll just look stoned.

# ? Jul 11, 2013 06:03

Seashell Salesman: Aug 4, 2005; Holy wow! That "Literally A Person" sure is a cool and good poster. He's smart and witty and he smells like a pure mountain stream. I posted in his thread and I got a FANCY NEW AVATAR!!!!

Does Aseprite support exporting an animated gif to multiple static image files? I just assumed that it did, but now that I've played around with it a bit and I actually want to do it, I can't figure out how.

e: the export to sprite sheet feature is sort of interesting, but it's very simplistic and doesn't produce any layout config file that you could parse afterwards (begs the question why you'd want to automatically generate a sprite sheet in the first place IMO).

Seashell Salesman fucked around with this message at 07:52 on Jul 11, 2013

# ? Jul 11, 2013 07:48

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

RedRupee posted:

I tried doing something like that Pixosprout person's work on the other page. This was my first attempt and there were some good lessons in the end. I'm currently working on a higher-res thing and hoping that it turns out better.

This looks great! One thing that I do notice is that all animated elements seem to loop at exactly the same time. Maybe you can stagger the starting frame of the different animated elements?

# ? Jul 11, 2013 09:39

Shoehead: Sep 28, 2005; Wassup, Choom?
Ya need sumthin'?

blowingupcasinos posted:

The ears are off by one pixel, so it tilts the face.

You are an angel sent from heaven.

# ? Jul 11, 2013 12:35

Seashell Salesman: Aug 4, 2005; Holy wow! That "Literally A Person" sure is a cool and good poster. He's smart and witty and he smells like a pure mountain stream. I posted in his thread and I got a FANCY NEW AVATAR!!!!

Okay, I found a free library provided by the GraphicsGale folks which will read gal files into bitmap handles (they only provide a windows binary naturally), with that I can covert gal files to other animations or explode them into multiple static images of whatever format I like. Why on Earth they would provide this for free when their entire upgrade pitch is "Convert to GIF!" is beyond me. If anyone is interested in doing conversions like this (especially if you want to do it programmatically) then I can point out the framework code I used, which is extremely simple. But I suspect I might be the only person in the universe who cares about this.

# ? Jul 12, 2013 22:21

WorldIndustries: Dec 21, 2004

Seashell Salesman posted:

Okay, I found a free library provided by the GraphicsGale folks which will read gal files into bitmap handles (they only provide a windows binary naturally), with that I can covert gal files to other animations or explode them into multiple static images of whatever format I like. Why on Earth they would provide this for free when their entire upgrade pitch is "Convert to GIF!" is beyond me. If anyone is interested in doing conversions like this (especially if you want to do it programmatically) then I can point out the framework code I used, which is extremely simple. But I suspect I might be the only person in the universe who cares about this.

I would love to see that code, it sounds useful for me too.

# ? Jul 14, 2013 20:13

Seashell Salesman: Aug 4, 2005; Holy wow! That "Literally A Person" sure is a cool and good poster. He's smart and witty and he smells like a pure mountain stream. I posted in his thread and I got a FANCY NEW AVATAR!!!!

Caddrel posted:

I would love to see that code, it sounds useful for me too.

I created a little console app to feed into the command line back end of Sprite Sheet Packer (http://spritesheetpacker.codeplex.com/), so I only bothered to implement exploding to png but it would be trivial to adapt this to saving to animated gif instead of exploding. The only work that's not being done by the .Net framework (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.drawing.bitmap.aspx)is flattening each frame's layers and setting the transparent color for the bitmap. If people have a use for the tool itself (and save to animation/other output formats) I can create a public repo for it, but I can't provide the GraphicsGale binary dependency (illegal) so users would have to download that themselves.

The two interesting bits of code:

code:

        private static void ExplodeToPng(string inputFile, string outputDirectory)
        {
            IntPtr ggFile = galefile.ggOpen(inputFile);

            IList<Bitmap> frames = GetAllFrames(ggFile);
            for (int i = 0; i < frames.Count(); i++)
            {
                frames[i].Save(
                    string.Format("{0}{1:D4}.png", Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(inputFile), i), ImageFormat.Png);
            }
        }

        // This makes many assumptions about the input file:
        //   1. All layers have same dimensions (I think this is a requirement of the gal format?).
        //   2. All frames have at least one layer (Again, I think this is a requirement of the gal format?).
        //   3. We want transparency on for the background layer in the resulting images (This is how GG always
        //      seems to export my animations even when background layer transparency is switched off.)
        //   4. All frames have a transparent color (I don't think this is a safe assumption, but the interface
        //      for reading these files doesn't seem to handle the case where there isn't?).
        //   5. There will be at least one frame (I think this is a requirement of the gal format?).
        private static IList<Bitmap> GetAllFrames(IntPtr ggFile)
        {
            int frameCount = galefile.ggGetFrameCount(ggFile);
            if (frameCount < 1)
                throw new Exception("There are no frames. This is unsupported.");

            Bitmap[] retval = new Bitmap[frameCount];

            for (int i = 0; i < frameCount; i++)
            {
                int layerCount = galefile.ggGetLayerCount(ggFile, i);
                if (layerCount < 1)
                    throw new Exception(string.Format("Frame {0} contains no layers. This is unsupported.", i));

                int transparentColor = galefile.ggGetFrameInfo(ggFile, i, FrameInfo.TransparentColor);

                IntPtr backgroundHBitmap = galefile.ggGetBitmap(ggFile, i, 0);
                Bitmap backgroundImage = Bitmap.FromHbitmap(backgroundHBitmap);
                backgroundImage.MakeTransparent(backgroundImage.Palette.Entries[transparentColor]);

                using (Graphics backgroundGraphics = Graphics.FromImage(backgroundImage))
                {
                    for (int j = 1; j < layerCount; j++)
                    {
                        IntPtr foregroundHBitmap = galefile.ggGetBitmap(ggFile, i, j);
                        Bitmap foregroundImage = Bitmap.FromHbitmap(foregroundHBitmap);
                        foregroundImage.MakeTransparent(foregroundImage.Palette.Entries[transparentColor]);

                        backgroundGraphics.DrawImage(foregroundImage, new Point(0, 0));
                    }
                }

                retval[i] = backgroundImage;
            }

            return retval;
        }

e: In the above, galefile is just a class with static methods importing the interface methods from the GraphicsGale gal file reading binary (I used PInvoke).

Seashell Salesman fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Jul 14, 2013

# ? Jul 14, 2013 21:14

Scut: Aug 26, 2008; Please remind me to draw more often.; Soiled Meat

Scrap raiders eager for some semi-conductor loot!

# ? Jul 16, 2013 17:57

Shoehead: Sep 28, 2005; Wassup, Choom?
Ya need sumthin'?

More work. God drat I need to spot making them X5.

# ? Jul 18, 2013 22:13

Scut: Aug 26, 2008; Please remind me to draw more often.; Soiled Meat

Try adding more shadow, anything that blocks the light source should cast a shadow (hair for example). Those eyes are also feel too strong. Unless that character is supposed to be shocked or thrilled etc, there are few expressions where both the top and bottom of the iris will be visible.

# ? Jul 19, 2013 13:06

blowingupcasinos: Feb 21, 2006

Scut posted:

Try adding more shadow, anything that blocks the light source should cast a shadow (hair for example). Those eyes are also feel too strong. Unless that character is supposed to be shocked or thrilled etc, there are few expressions where both the top and bottom of the iris will be visible.

It's not just more shadows, but more of the shadow that you have. The hair right on the head has a decent sense of depth, but the rest of the parts are pretty flat. Shadows in/around the eyes, under the nose, etc. will create more interest all over. The jawline is especially suspect.

# ? Jul 19, 2013 13:11

RedRupee: Feb 25, 2012

A little over a week ago (actually around the time I posted my last thing) I did another one of those loops but I didn't want to clutter the thread with my own stuff so here it is.

I also did a thing for a kirby zine.

(there's a scaled up version with CMYK colours for the zine but I still think it looks nice scaled down).

Shoehead: your dude looks a bit flat and I can't tell entirely where the light is meant to come from considering the shading where the hair parts. I also agree with the others that the eyes look like they're a bit too open.

# ? Jul 19, 2013 13:47

Gaspy Conana: Aug 1, 2004; this clown loves you

Scut posted:

Scrap raiders eager for some semi-conductor loot!

Just wanted to show dis some love. Looks rad.

# ? Jul 19, 2013 14:36

Scut: Aug 26, 2008; Please remind me to draw more often.; Soiled Meat

Thanks, coming from you that means a lot!

# ? Jul 19, 2013 21:27

kloa: Feb 14, 2007

Scut posted:

Scrap raiders eager for some semi-conductor loot!

So when can I buy/play this??

# ? Jul 19, 2013 21:43

Scut: Aug 26, 2008; Please remind me to draw more often.; Soiled Meat

When I can team up with a programmer I guess.

Actually I've been mulling over how to make the game into a board game seeing as it's really hard to find reliable programmers for zero budget indie projects (assuming you want to see it finish), and I've also started to get really interested in the new wave of boardgames coming out.

# ? Jul 19, 2013 23:20

Seashell Salesman: Aug 4, 2005; Holy wow! That "Literally A Person" sure is a cool and good poster. He's smart and witty and he smells like a pure mountain stream. I posted in his thread and I got a FANCY NEW AVATAR!!!!

What platform/s are you targeting and what sort of work do you want done?

# ? Jul 20, 2013 00:35

A LOVELY LAD: Feb 8, 2006; Hey man, wanna hear a secret?; College Slice

Scut posted:

When I can team up with a programmer I guess.

Actually I've been mulling over how to make the game into a board game seeing as it's really hard to find reliable programmers for zero budget indie projects (assuming you want to see it finish), and I've also started to get really interested in the new wave of boardgames coming out.

Is Delver still ongoing?

# ? Jul 20, 2013 10:51

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Shoehead posted:

More work. God drat I need to spot making them X5.

You've got some "banding" problems, i.e. pixels of different colours lining up unintentionally. Makes things look overly jaggy. I find it best to make the outline of the shadow at a different arc to the outline of the face, to give it a better sense of volume.

# ? Jul 20, 2013 12:41

Scut: Aug 26, 2008; Please remind me to draw more often.; Soiled Meat

Exclamation Marx posted:

Nice palette, would you mind sharing it?

A LOVELY LAD posted:

Is Delver still ongoing?

Umm, maybe you're thinking of The Salvage? There are a couple indie games going under the name Delver with some nice pixel art but they are not projects I'm involved with.

Seashell Salesman posted:

What platform/s are you targeting and what sort of work do you want done?

Well other than making a physical boardgame, I was thinking a digital version would be well suited to ios and android because I wanted to keep the controls and rules very simple and tight. PC goes without saying as well.

The concept mostly exists as a bunch of notes, sketches and a couple mockups I've been working on in my spare time. The general idea came out of my dislike for JPRG battle systems but my enjoyment of some of their aesthetics. What I liked was the notion of abstracting a battlefield into a condensed space that allows for party management. What I want to throw out is the menu/numbers grind and replace it with an elegant tactical game that uses cards to dole out actions to units. The player has a hand of cards and must choose from that somewhat random draw the actions they will place onto the units at their disposal. Failed quality checks or other negative events can inject penalty cards into the player's hand which reduce the number of good options available and forces the player to improvise with undesirable options. I definitely want the spatial notion of a battlefield to take a part in the game mechanics so that play consists of more than just two lines of opponents hurling attacks at each other, so there will be some manner of grid or field sections that allow for advancement, retreat, cover and possibly flanking.

Below are mockup pages I've been tooling around with. Mostly to figure out layout proportions and brainstorm ideas on how cards look.

# ? Jul 22, 2013 15:10

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Scut posted:

Nice palette, would you mind sharing it?

Sure!

# ? Jul 22, 2013 16:07

A LOVELY LAD: Feb 8, 2006; Hey man, wanna hear a secret?; College Slice

Scut posted:

Nice palette, would you mind sharing it?

Umm, maybe you're thinking of The Salvage? There are a couple indie games going under the name Delver with some nice pixel art but they are not projects I'm involved with.

Yeah thats the one, sad to see its not currently in progress!

# ? Jul 22, 2013 16:52

Scut: Aug 26, 2008; Please remind me to draw more often.; Soiled Meat

Same here. A friend was programming it when he had a job that allowed enough free time for a side project. He changed jobs and couldn't continue. Can't blame him at all, but I've still got all those assets itching to get used.

# ? Jul 22, 2013 16:59

Seashell Salesman: Aug 4, 2005; Holy wow! That "Literally A Person" sure is a cool and good poster. He's smart and witty and he smells like a pure mountain stream. I posted in his thread and I got a FANCY NEW AVATAR!!!!

Scut posted:

Same here. A friend was programming it when he had a job that allowed enough free time for a side project. He changed jobs and couldn't continue. Can't blame him at all, but I've still got all those assets itching to get used.

I work full time but if you want someone to continue where your mate left off send me a PM. I wouldn't commit to finishing what you want quickly since I'd be working in my spare time but I can keep kicking the can down the road to get you closer/finished or until you get more help. I can't legally make money except from my current employer because of my visa, so I don't really care if it's for free and someone else's closed source.

# ? Jul 22, 2013 19:37

Scut: Aug 26, 2008; Please remind me to draw more often.; Soiled Meat

Exclamation Marx, I made a variation of your palette and subbed out the values in one of the scrap raiders. Looks nice!

Seashell Salesman, I sent you a PM.

# ? Jul 23, 2013 00:00

Shoehead: Sep 28, 2005; Wassup, Choom?
Ya need sumthin'?

I've had a good week.

# ? Jul 26, 2013 12:48

Scut: Aug 26, 2008; Please remind me to draw more often.; Soiled Meat

You are making big improvements! Good usage of shifting your shading colours slightly into blue, too.

On the walking sprites, forgive me if I'm misinterpreting but it appears as if there is a highlight on both knees mid-stride. If one leg is angling away from the viewer that should not happen. Or it's the fact that the highlight flashes on for one frame on both knees then disappears in the others.

# ? Jul 27, 2013 13:35

Shoehead: Sep 28, 2005; Wassup, Choom?
Ya need sumthin'?

Scut posted:

You are making big improvements! Good usage of shifting your shading colours slightly into blue, too.

On the walking sprites, forgive me if I'm misinterpreting but it appears as if there is a highlight on both knees mid-stride. If one leg is angling away from the viewer that should not happen. Or it's the fact that the highlight flashes on for one frame on both knees then disappears in the others.

Actually yeah you're right. I was thinking of the back leg being bent kinda forward, but its not, the foot is supposed to be down on the floor.

Should look like this,

Thanks for catching that.

# ? Jul 27, 2013 20:58

Triangle: Jul 30, 2011; Heh. If I was actually unchill, I would be using all caps and/or exclamation marks in my posts, but I am chill. Clowns like you make me laugh, that's what clowns do. Added to my ignore list.

Nice pixel dong

# ? Jul 27, 2013 21:37

angel opportunity: Sep 7, 2004; Total Eclipse of the Heart

The shading here looks way better, but it looks like the guy is shivering rather than speaking. I'm not sure what the best way of fixing that would be.

# ? Jul 27, 2013 23:38

Seashell Salesman: Aug 4, 2005; Holy wow! That "Literally A Person" sure is a cool and good poster. He's smart and witty and he smells like a pure mountain stream. I posted in his thread and I got a FANCY NEW AVATAR!!!!

systran posted:

The shading here looks way better, but it looks like the guy is shivering rather than speaking. I'm not sure what the best way of fixing that would be.

Doesn't the shape of the mouth usually change in animations when someone is talking, more than just opening/closing?

# ? Jul 27, 2013 23:56

crabrock: Aug 2, 2002; I

AM

MAGNIFICENT

Seashell Salesman posted:

Doesn't the shape of the mouth usually change in animations when someone is talking, more than just opening/closing?

not on starfox64

# ? Jul 28, 2013 00:27

Shoehead: Sep 28, 2005; Wassup, Choom?
Ya need sumthin'?

crabrock posted:

not on starfox64

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzEbGiuKgbg

It's both lazy AND stylish!

# ? Jul 28, 2013 13:04

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# ? May 9, 2024 23:32

Scut: Aug 26, 2008; Please remind me to draw more often.; Soiled Meat

An in-progress tileset for an arena game commission. Making something look like molten metal or magma is a challenge but also really fun when you get it working.

# ? Aug 4, 2013 20:07

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > Pixel-Art Megathread: It's not programmer art it's *retro*

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