Cyberpunk Cartoon Character Sprites + Stuff

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

The top versions look much better.  I can make out the individual shapes without trouble and it has a cleaner presentation.  My only recommendation is to work a bit on the hair in the back view since the shading is a bit strange.  Well done!

[Scavenger]

Something a little different now - the inventory gui. The buttons disconnected are the up/down scrolling buttons for the invemtory window, with the smaller LCD screen being the text for the items you mouseover. Goes in the bottom right.

For 320x240. Wondering if it's a little big, as I'm going to have a gui in the bottom left, too.

[SpacePaw]

it will be too big (in my opinion). The panel reaches almost to the half of the height of the screen and 1/3 of the width. As it is shown whole the time AND there will be another gui on the right it seems unacceptable to me

Also the arrows on the buttons aren't clear to me.. Didnt know they were arrows until I read about them.

[Scavenger]

While I figure out how to put an inventory gui onto the screen in a stylish but practical way (and I still have to include Jakob's portrait and a text parser somewhere, argh), here's some characters, and Jakob's 3/4 view. I did them all from scratch (apart from the left view of Jakob, which progZmax did. x3), and I'm pretty happy with how they came out.



Bottom Left: Femme Fatale, wearing a PVC suit and a red fur coat draped around her shoulders.

Bottom Middle: The Courier Girl, wearing a protective and brightly coloured suit, many identitags on her chest, and holding a motorised skateboard. Also of note, a gas mask for all the fumes on the lower levels, and really gaudy hair.

Bottom Right: Surly bartender. Cyborgised.

Portraits/Rough Reference for later sprites: http://i483.photobucket.com/albums/rr191/Khatoblepas/cyberpunkcharacters-1.jpg

[SpacePaw]

Nice 3/4 view :3 good work on that!. And I must say I adore the gas mask girl! I would be happy to see some pixel art or portrait of her. Damn...I might even do it myself lol :3

[Scavenger]

Okay, here's some more animations up for review.




For portraiture, I've been working on some quick mockups. Dunno whether to go for flat shading or deep shading, and I don't know if I should add the nine phonemes and make lip synched portraits. (had palette difficulties reducing the below painting down, so I may have to redo it in Pro-Motion) Gonna have Lucasarts-style speech animations as well, though.


from this sheet:
HERE.



Finally, what colours am I missing from this palette? I might just go with 16 bit colour what with the lack of support for 8bit transparency effects I adore so much, but I want a unified sprite palette to give that same sense of consistency and retroness I love from 8bit games. (Aesthetically speaking, I adore the off-colours, the strange effects translucency has on 8bit. It's so awesome <3)

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Speech animations make portraits redundant and vice-versa, so you will save yourself a lot of development hassle by choosing one and doing it well.  The left animation of the girl seems awkward because her body stretches as she turns, parts shifting at different points in the frame.  The darkest shade has also been made black compared to a more purple shade in the smoking animation.  The smoking animation and the shirt adjusting animations both look quite good, though!  One thing I would work on, again, is the readability of your sprites.  The character with the gas mask is impossible for me to make out the features of, and I didn't know it was a female until you said so.  Her legs also seem very short and the torso very flat, so I would bring up her legs and alter the details on the torso enough that they don't interfere with her shape.  I think the portrait looks good and you should only worry about the color count if you want the portraits to look hand-pixelled.

[Scavenger]

It has come to my realisation that highly detailed clothing pieces and tiny sprites do not go together when I do them. And I don't want to waste time redoing whole animations, so I thought it would be prudent to improve the base sprites first.



So I redid the gasmask girl from scratch and dropped everything I didn't like about her appearance. I also changed around the shading on Femme Fatale, and also tried to make her look more shapely.

[SpacePaw]

No gas mask anymore T.T? I loved her with that gas mask...She was so hot...T.T

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I think it's a step in the right direction, but if you want shapely figures the best way to approach it with such small sprites is exaggeration while sticking to the generic principles of anatomy.  I've made an edit of both sprites with your versions below to show you what I mean.

1.  Altered the colors to provide more contrast and some lighter shades.

2.  Altered pose of left sprite to force her hips to one side since she's resting her hand on her leg.  This also gives her a more 'sexy' appreance.

3.  Widened hips of both sprites to approach the 'hips as wide as shoulders' rule for women.  This also makes them appear more shapely.

4.  Reduced size of feet for both sprites.  This allows you to taper the legs and adds to the shapely figure.

5.  Did some shading with the highlights above and shadows in areas that do not stick out or are beneath areas that stick out.







I think the biggest difference here is that the left sprite now looks built above and below and the right sprite looks less chunky.  Hopefully this will help!

[Scavenger]

Once again, ProgZmax, you've shown me the light. This time, however, I don't want to just crib your work, since that won't help me learn. The Femme Fatale is brilliant, though, I must admit.

Here is my own edit of my sprite.



I thought she looked quite good chunkier, as it fit the personality I was writing her as [tomboy] - I don't think waif wound really suit her. Too fragile-looking.