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I think that if you were sort of hunched over with a really long tail protruding from you, you'd have to move the arm and leg of one side at the same time while twisting your body sideways to move that sort of bulk. This is my interpretation of that. I slowed it down a bit. It could probably use a few more tweens, too, but this gives you what I was aiming for. Next'll be to grid it up and pixel it out, I guess. I might try brush work, though, like I eluded to in a previous post.

Whattya think?

I've been toying around with sprites done at 128 tall in this style. It actually scales pretty well!



This is the type of drawing I'm most comfortable with. What do you think? A good style for making a game? (Aside from the obvious pains of animation...)

Well, I thought I'd post this here. I haven't been active for a long while (damnable real life getting in the way and all), but I thought I'd share a way of making sprites that has REALLY changed the way I work.

This method is a lot less reliant on hunting and pecking around and, for me, tends to create more fluid results.



I start by drawing a loose sketch of the subject in Painter. This could just as easily be done on traditional media. I then proceed to overlay a grid on the sketch with the same number of squares as the final piece of pixelart should have. In this case, I have guidelines creating 32 boxes across and 32 boxes down.

Next, I fill in black squares in the boxes which I think help convey the character the best. Sometimes, some major tweaks need to be made at this stage. I find it's really handy to be able to refer back to the original sketch by turning off my faux-pixel layer.

I like this way of working because it helps me to focus on the character first and the fact that it'll be rendered as pixels second. I get a lot more fluid results this way. If you don't feel like mucking around with all that, just buy some graph paper and do a loose pencil sketch there first, blocking in the squares later. That ought to work about the same.

Next, I tend to alt-tab from Painter to Graphics Gale. I zoom way in on a 32x32 image and transfer my black marks. Really, any graphics program with a good zoom and pixel by pixel grid feature ought to work fine.

After transfering my black marks, I lay down large, flat areas of color. From here on out, it's matter of adding shadows and highlights with as few colors as possible (because I'm a bit of a purist that way). Darker, cooler, desaturated hues tend to receed and brighter, warmer, saturated hues bring things forward. Anything you can do to bring form to the little bugger helps.



Often at 100% or 200% things look remarkably different than the 1600% view I work at. There's a lot of testing that goes into seeing what'll read well at such a small size. In the above example, I flip-flopped on the color of the band-aid, finally settling on the original choice with the addition of a highlight and some shadows.

That's about it!

First off, I'm a programming moron. I have no idea what the probability or capability of writing a plug-in for AGS would be that would allow for Vector based graphics.

Is it possible? Has it been done?

No sooner did I say I was bored with pixelart did I get asked to draw character portraits for a friend. This is more of a color test than anything.

Any thoughts?

Below is a rough for a walkcycle I worked on a long while ago. I recently came across it and remembered being unhappy with it and shelving it for some reason.

In retrospect, I think I rather like it. The head movement needs to be toned down. The breasts are a little off too, but overal it looks pretty smooth to me (for a brisk walking animation).

The problem is, that feminine walks tend to overlap foot in front of foot with each step; that's tricky in a south or north walkcycle.

Any comments?

Submitted below are two pictures done in a pen and marker style. One is a concept sketch for a game, the second is just practice in the style. I'd like to do the backgrounds for an upcoming game in a concept sketch style. See this site for examples.





Whattya think? It's a departure from traditional adventure game graphics, but I'm kinda getting tired of pixelart.

Webcomic link.

I posted regularly to the critics lounge there for awhile. Some of you may recognize me.

I got sidetracked from my AGS endevours by the webcomic I refer to in the subject of my post. I and three other people work on it. I'm responsible for the art but have written one or two of the comics as well.

I've always valued the opinions of this community and would like to know what you all thought of it.

Today's comic makes sense in the context of a few of the previous comics, so pardon me for it's apparent randomness when you see the front page.

You might want to start at the beginning and go from there.

I haven't had ANY free time lately, but decided last night (about 2:00 am) that I had to do something towards the game I've been working on.

Here is that something:


And here is that something slower and at 300% size:


Thanks in advance for any comments! (And to the people waiting on logos, I haven't forgotten!)

[CLEAN LINE ART OF THE YEAR]

I've been trying to make a mech walk for between an hour and a half & two hours. I'm adding one inbetween frame to transition between the down and passing frames, but other than that, it's pretty complete.

I'm not trying to win the CLEAN LINE ART OF THE YEAR award, but am mostly looking for comments about the movement itself.



Thanks in advance!

Edit: For some reason, my gif animator sped this up about a 1/4 second per frame. It's fixed now, so if you've looked and were turned off, just refresh or empty your cache and all should be well.

I've drawn a new mummy character. First things first, his lower jaw is supposed to be missing. Other than that, have at. Be harsh, be mean, be cruel, I like a challenge!

I've been using this logo for years. It's a single color vector image in it's native format.



For the uninitiated, it's supposed to be a Penguin standing in at the bottom of an X. Penguinx. Huzzah!

I've had this thing sitting on my PC for awhile now, and I thought I'd get some feedback on it as I don't have the time necessary for larger projects at the moment. (I've been the victim of a slew of bad hardware luck.) This was, more or less, a test to see how well I could animate a character that was stuck in, say, a 64x64 bounding box. Dack, here, is supposed to be an older fellow, and a bit of a monster killer.



See anything wrong with it?

(Oh, I almost forgot to add that this would be one of several idle animations and would not be constantly repeated as in the gif posted here.)

See last post.

Each style of the character shown below contains thirteen colors. This drawing is representative of the down-left direction of motion.

One style has no manually drawn dithering and the other has a bunch.

No dither:


Dither:


Which do you prefer and why?

Thanks!

The company that I work for has an annual halloween sale and I am responsible for all the Flash animations/navigation (namely the 'movie' at the top of the home page). Let me know what you think, please!

http://www.midnightmoose.com

It's not an AGS game, but I'd rather have your opinons over some web design forum's.

Attached below is a gif (only slightly animated) of a character concept for Death that I am working on.

I want to make a very short one or two room game to practice my coding before delving into my ISO alien game.

I've always admired the style of capcom's old-school 2D artists and wanted to kind of make the in-game characters reminiscent of a pocket fighter combatant.

The animation is really rough, as the robes Death is wearing will shuffle and move a bit more and his hands will clench and relax in time with his breaths.

This would be an idle animation:



I've always given characters a black or dark colored pixel border in the past; this is probably the first time I've dropped that out of the design. I'm please with the results thus far, but what do you think?

I already posted a few pics of the alien-based game I am working on in limited color. I've decided to give high color a go, and was wondering what you thought of that.

The image below shows the high color versions on the left and the limited color versions on the right.

What's the verdict? Stick to limited color, or jump to 16-bit?

Attached is a rather large picture which depicts a lot of concept art and animations I've put together for my first game idea. It started as a small one-room concept and has quickly balooned into a full sized game idea.

Before I got too far done with animating all the different characters, I thought I'd post here and get some impressions. A little off topic, but I just wanted to say I am extremely impressed with some of the very professional games that have come from AGS and am glad to be a part of the community!

Have at!

Ray





(Edited to format the pictures to fit on screen.)