yes i agree !! artwork !!
Is that avatar from Namco X Capcom? Who’s the guy in the middle?
I want to clarify from my last post that by “non-essential” work, I mean the people volunteer for things other than coding and artwork. “I’m a real good playtester!” Yeah, sure. First of all, how is that even measured? And second of all, it’s not difficult to find people to play a game after you’ve made it. Making it is where the help is needed.
Basically, if you want to start a project, you have to make a beta with at least two playable characters. Then you might get some people to join the project, or at the very least you’ll get some support for it.
Jin. Guy in the middle is Jin.
My revival of this thread 
I guess for those who were interested, here’s about a week’s worth at school of spare time. I didn’t get as much done as I hoped I would, but being sick sucks.
I realized that this is an impossible goal, so I guess you can say most of you were right. But I’m going to continue to make frame animations for fun, and hopefully get better at it.
Here’s the animation http://randomanduseless.net/v2/izi/view.php?sub_dir=%2FCameron%2F&file=nejistartingpunch1.gif It’s my first time making a sprite and I did it all without references (i.e. sprite editing) I think I’m going to slow the animation down a bit too, cause I think it’s going too fast. Also, there’s really no animation on the legs cause I really didn’t know what to do with them. But comments or helpful advice would be appricated.
Well, you could make him shift his weight a little more naturally. He’s kind of rigid. Look at Eagle’s HCF+K in CvS2. His knees and feet move all back and forth and shit, but he’s not really moving much.
When doing motion blur for sprites, you have to do it manually. You can’t use a blur tool because 1) the background you are using isn’t a plain color 2) Blur tool pushes the amount of colors of a character over 16. Remember that in a sprite you only have 1 transparency color.
You’ll see that the attempt to use a blur over a white background looks absolutely messed up when the background is changed.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v505/mondu_the_fat/blur.gif
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v505/mondu_the_fat/blur2.bmp
If you notice the blur on hulk’s fist, no transparency was involved. The blur was drawn manually.
If you don’t to draw blurs like that, then don’t do blurs at the sprite level at all – the best you could hope for is to let the sotware do it, using semi-transparent after images. But then, you’d still need a lot of in-between frames.
I agree with booda and bowie…
I would also suggest giving more details to the legs; right now it’s a big blob of straight color with a tiny bit of shading…
Also don’t be afraid of making your sprite in a much higher resolution. It’s always easier to scale down than up.
Another way of working with sprites is making them multi-layered; instead of redrawing the whole sprite every time, make a standard torso, legs and arms, and reuse them constantly, modifying them as needed. The game I am working on right now (at my real job) uses a special animation system where we have a very minimal amount of sprites yet the character looks very animated because we use a common animation technique for low-memory devices: we create legs, a torso with arms and a head, then fix them with a spring so that we can just move the torso a little bit to give an impression of weight shifting without actually drawing each individual frame. It saves a TON of space, and it looks great.
No, no, you have it backward. Scaling down is next to impossible using sprites of that size (the height of an average capcom character is around 95 pixels). You absolutely do not want to draw a large sprite then scale it down. The borders become a mess that takes as much time to fix as it is to make the sprite itself. Scaling down may look good in pictures, but can’t be used on sprites that have to be placed on a background.
Learn how to make sprites at the resolution that you want them to be.
(i’ll post examples of scaling down a bit later)
I guess it depends on how the artists work… Here it’s what most of the 2D artists I work with do, since they can allow for much more detail, then scale it down, slowly removing stuff. If they upscale a low-rez sprite, they are stuck with blocky stuff and have to constantly retouch their sprite and fixing up problems. When they scale it down, they remove details but spend less time fixing up blocky stuff.
The people you are working with are correct… because its pointless to do a low res sprite then resizing it up. Nobody works that way. Either work at the given resolution or scale down. I guess my “backward” comment was a bit off.
Anyways, to continue with the problems of resizing down (since I already went to the trouble of making images)…
There are basically two resampling methods when scaling down an image: bilinear and pixel resize.
In bilinear resize, all the pixels in an area are computed to arrive at a final color. When you’re resizing picture, this is not bad. When you’re resizing a sprite, weird borders occur, much in the same way weird coloring occurs when you try to use a blur tool instead of manually drawing the blur. This is because the background color is also taken into account when computing for the final color, and “transparent color” is not an actual color. This method of resize also blurs edges, which may not be the effect you want.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v505/mondu_the_fat/1.jpg
In pixel resize, the borders problem is elminated and the edges are razor sharp… however the image looks like shit at those resolutions.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v505/mondu_the_fat/2.jpg
On the other hand, making a sprite the size you want lets doesn’t have as much headache as making a large one then resizing it.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v505/mondu_the_fat/4.jpg
One work around to the resizing problem I’ve used is to resize it twice, first as bilinear, then pixel resize, then take the alpha channel from the pixel resize then pasting in on the bilnear one. Still requires work, though, and the result is nowhere as good as a sprite made in its proper resolution.
You’re right. I should actually USE a product before I reccomend it. But my group and I plan on using the Torque 3D engine for an independent gae. I’ll only be doing sound and music, but I’m sure the rest of group will voice their opinions on it openly and we’ll see if any major problems are encountered.
Sorry if I’m butting into the conversation, but there was something that I was wondering about.
In the case of a designer, what is it that, say, corporations tend to look for? Would some knowledge of programming or some artistic talent be necessary, or would the ability to lay out the plans of the project be all that’s necessary?
Character design, move design, and background design are things I do in my spare time as a writer, but I have no programming or artistic talent, so I was curious.
i actually think it makes them easier to read.
DV8 productions, just make the game, you will just come across problems as they come and then you will answer your own question to how hard it is.
Interesting, I’ll have to keep that in mind. Thanks.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I’ve been looking something like that for ages since I joined Gamasutra. There was some on this in the Designer’s notebook, but It’s aim was completely different.
Well, I was going through my old favorites to kill off links that are not there any more, and I found this:
http://www.fkdigital.net/engwanted.htm
I’ve no clue what it is, but I think the folks in the thread would be interested, hence the link.
Well I was looking through mugenguild at some of the sprites, and so I’m going to start building the neji sprite again, with maybe less emphasis on the face and scale it off bigger.