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*

Shinmera: Mar 25, 2013; I make games!

I'm not sure if I've introduced myself here:

Hey, I'm primarily a programmer and am currently working on a pixel art game called Kandria. Today I finally managed to convince myself to start working on enemy animations. Here's the first of that:

Gonna do attack and damage animations tomorrow.

# ¿ May 14, 2020 14:57

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# ¿ May 1, 2024 06:45

Shinmera: Mar 25, 2013; I make games!

anothergod posted:

Welcome Shinmera! I don't know what you're looking for in response to your art, but it's looking great so far. The tail is really well rendered w/ a lot of frames like in the walk/run animations. The end's got a "snap" to it that seems to imply the end is kind of like a hook or pointy part which is cool, but maybe unintentional. If it's the latter I think you might need to widen your sprite dimensions to get that flow going for the whole thing.

Thanks! Yes, the snap is intentional!

Did some more work today:

Not happy with the stagger animation (3rd one), but couldn't really think of a better way to do that either.

anothergod posted:

I'm trying to make some new swappable overhead fantasy sprites to match the Zelda-y tileset I've been working on forever. I've gotten to the point where it's easy to make new weapons/shields/hair/clothing so there's a ton of versatility. I needed to make some generic attack animations, so some of the keys were a low frame count and the ability to rotate to Up/Down/Side fairly easily. I ended up looking at Zelda 1's one frame attack animations, and I realized they did something cool by staggering the player sprite with displaying the sword.

And here I thought I was working with small sprites! These look super expressive despite the tiny size, very nice.

# ¿ May 15, 2020 16:26

Shinmera: Mar 25, 2013; I make games!

Scut posted:

I started this piece when I was losing sleep as the pandemic set in. Finally decided to set it aside and work on something else. I like it though!

Holy smokes, very nice.

Today I quickly turned the :woomy:

emote into one suitable for Twitch since I became an affiliate.

Took the really lazy route on the upscale and just fixed up RotSprite's output a bit.

E: I also made the original emote in case that wasn't clear

Shinmera fucked around with this message at 12:52 on Jun 21, 2020

# ¿ Jun 21, 2020 11:40

Shinmera: Mar 25, 2013; I make games!

I need to get back to making some small profile animations for the dialogue sections in Kandria.

Did the above as a sample for the thread I made on the game! I'd like to make a couple for each character so that the text can be matched up with an appropriate reaction or expression.

Ash Crimson posted:

Here's another sporadic attempt at roguelike graphics, which i got inspired to try after playing Caves of Qud and trying to put my own take on it (X2 size, 24x24 tiles):

Started changing my palette again, though i think there might not be enough contrast and that it might be too desaturated/muddy

Yeah, it's a bit hard to make out the foreground enemies from the background elements. Maybe take some inspiration from the Necrodancer games, those do a pretty good job keeping the enemies visible, though they do use a much bigger palette.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2020 21:59

Shinmera: Mar 25, 2013; I make games!

Adding a slight blue tint makes things appear more "glass-y". Also try to make the specular highlights sharp shapes per glass pane, rather than a smooth gradient. If you look at some photos of glass, you'll see that the contours are pretty strong.

E: Also made two more animations for my game today.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2020 17:04

Shinmera: Mar 25, 2013; I make games!

For pixel art I just draw directly in Aseprite.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2020 18:00

Shinmera: Mar 25, 2013; I make games!

Scarodactyl posted:

The animations on this are nice and convey character well, but there are technical details I think you'd want to address before spending more time on animations.
As is it kind of looks like you're laying down the outlines and then moving immediately to shading inside them. The first thing I'd suggest is spending a little more time cleaning up the linework--you have a few spots where the lines have odd jogs rather than making smoother curves, which will tend to make the pixel grid more obvious. These can also be fixed pretty quickly:

There is also the issue of integrating the outline with the shading. That's not something you need to worry about with traditional art but in pixel art anywhere you have a sharp contrast in brightness the pixel grid will be more evident. That's something you can play with and it can work in a particularly stark, minimalist aesthetic, but when you're doing smoother shading with high color counts it tends to make the outline stand out and give things a crunchy look. That's where antialiasing becomes important--you can smooth those curves out by putting intermediate shades in strategic positions to downplay crunchiness. It also gives you more control over the perceived thickness of lines and lets you pack more detail into the same amount of space.
I did a quick edit on the face, mostly just adding antialiasing, all using the existing color palette:

That might not capture the expression quite right but it's just a quick pass.
As a general thing the contrast on your palette is a bit low, particularly on the hair. You might want to darken the darks a bit, which should help with conveying volume. You also have four completely separate palettes for four different brown ramps (skin, hair and jacket)--if you reuse some of the colors between them it can help with making it feel a bit more like a cohesive whole.

Thanks a lot for the advice! I knew that I had to go back to fix the line art, I was pretty sloppy with it today. I'll also definitely have to re-evaluate the palette. Colour in general is something I'm not very comfortable with, even outside of pixel art. I'm not sure if I'm sold on the anti-aliasing, I honestly don't mind the crunchy look, but maybe I'll change my mind on that still.

Hopefully I'll have a better day tomorrow to fix what I can.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2020 22:10

Shinmera: Mar 25, 2013; I make games!

Turns out you were right, Scarodactyl! The anti-aliased version looks much better in the game:

Not sure yet how well I'm doing at actually making things anti-aliased though. I also don't quite know how to implement your advice about sharing the three brown bands -- the things I tried ended up looking super wonky.

On a side note: I'm currently looking to hire a pixel artist for the game, since I don't think I have the ability and time to do everything for the game myself. If anyone's interested, there's more information about it here: https://kandria.com/team-search.html

# ¿ Sep 14, 2020 13:30