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I'd actually recommend drawing regularly, but limiting your sessions so you have plenty of time for other activities. (The same goes for learning any new skill). If you begin and end in a good mood, it will help you enjoy drawing. If you get frustrated or hungry just save and quit. It should be fun, not feel like work. Granted this will slow you down a lot, but I feel it's better in the long run.

Hurrah for Pavlov .

If I may ask, you said you are using Deluxe Paint, right? What are your thoughts on the program? I'm a long-time Photoshop and Gimp user, but both applications have shortcomings when dealing with pixel art, particularly animation and palette work.

In terms of feedback, I really like what a bit of retouching has done to your low resolution version. It looks much more detailed now, while still retaining many of the qualities of the original. I think The woodsy area in the background, the broken pillar in the foreground, and the pile of rubble in particular look much better now. And that dirt-spattered column on the left looks top notch. One smapp gripe is that a few areas still look too soft and show the effects of the scaling.

I'm a fan of the new, more random dithering style. Did you say it started as a pattern dither, then was randomly scattered? Or is it a purely random pattern?

Wow, that's quite an improvement. Keep up that rate of progress, and the rest of us will be asking you for advice pretty soon.

As for suggestions, The colors are pretty good. I like the way you are using a variety of related colors for outlines, instead of just using black everywhere. The overall pose is good as well. Most people (myself included) automatically draw characters with completely vertical spines. I like the way this guy is leaning forward- it makes it look like his backpack is really heavy.

I think the biggest issues are inconsistent resolution and areas that could use a bit of reshaping.
His waist seems to be a bit high, and his right elbow could use more definition. As for the outlines- it's fine to use double-width outlines as a stylistic choice. But it will always look awkward if you scale up a smaller sprite. If you want to paint over a smaller sprite at a higher resolution, you really need to completely repaint all the edges or you'll end up with jagged chunky effects everywhere. For instance look at the line running from his right shoulder to his elbow, and compare it to the outline of the hat. Do you see how much chunkier the first line is?

I'd also recommend not getting into details like the belt or the highlight on the hat until the sprite is much further along. If you get into details too fast you can easily lose sight of the big picture.

Overall this is a really huge improvement, and I for one would be happy to have made so much progress in such a short length of time.

What I meant was that up close a low resolution sprite just looks like a mess of random colours and I have trouble understanding what I'm looking at unless I zoom out!

I have that problem too. What program are you drawing in? If you use Photoshop or the GIMP, you can actually open multiple windows for the same document and have them at different levels of zoom.

Sorry for the delayed post.


Aside from general adjustments here and there, the mouth and lips got rearranged a bit, he has new eyebrows (which need some thickening up), and the outer corner of his eyes has been pulled outward a bit. His eyes still don't look quite right to me. In the render on the right the skin has been toyed with a lot. hopefully he doesn't look quite as much like he's wearing makeup now.


old ear (left) and remodeled ear (right)
His ear got a makeover. It seemed like his ear didn't fit the photos very closely. The main changes were the way the earlobe transitions into the head and the shape of the ridge on the top.

my only nark are those patches of roughness on the skin, (forehead & around the bottom lip/chin). They look too intense, and it also looks like he's wearing some form of foundation make-up.

Also, not sure if you'd finished the hair yet, but it could do with some thinning/fading at the very edges of the  his hairline. Especially where he has his partin.

Judging by the photos he's got some pretty deep scarring from smallpox or something. Does it look odd if you look at it from that angle? If it doesn't look like scarring, perhaps something could be done to communicate that better.

Are you planning to do graphics for a game with Lovecraft in it? Or is this merely for your portfolio?

There aren't any plans to use him in a specific project, but making a low poly version with a full body would be good practice, now that I think about it.

She looks good as is. If you want to improve the shading a little it might be nice to light her from above, and perhaps add a bit more contrast to her skin.

The lighting here is a little more uniformly from above. Her shoulders have been rounded out a tad, she's been given a slightly heavier build and her breasts have been made more natural in shape. Her face has been re-shaded a bit- the main change is that her nose is lit a light spot instead of a dark spot. These are all really fiddly edits; as I said before the sprite already looks fine, and doesn't really need any work at all.

Nice work, this sprite has really come a long way!

What about fading his right pocket a bit so its outline doesn't interfere with his arm?

The second one screams traditional videogame art. It's fun and over-the-top. Not knowing anything about your game I'm not sure if that's a feel you want or not.

Personally I'd prefer something in the vein of background 1. I don't really know enough about graphic design to help you with specifics, though.

What program are you working in? If it's something layer-friendly like the GIMP or Photoshop, you might want to use an independent layer for lighting. Then again it would impact your ability to do the smears and smudgy distortions that are part of this style.

Overall I like the feel of it.

Overall I'm quite happy with the atmosphere of the forums. I feel the quality of opinion expressed is higher than average, and there's a refreshing lack of egotism here.

One thing I've noticed is that while there are many experienced and talented people in the community, the majority of posters are from the less experienced end of the spectrum. It seems that confident, talented people tend to be fairly quiet because they are almost always working on a project. On the other hand we have lots of enthusiastic posters who are still learning the ropes of their field(s) of choice. I think it would be nice to find ways of encouraging our more experienced forum members to participate regularly.

More community resources aimed at 'serious' developers would help. Interviews with community members and non-AGS developers would be a draw for me. I would also welcome more chances to talk with other people who are deep in production, and rarely see the light of day. Perhaps we could facilitate "open house" events, where a community member interviews a development team, and they describe what they are working on, the status of the project, descriptions of their workflow, and release a batch of media.

Another suggestion I'd like to make to Chris and other administrators is that the Games in Progress forum, while functional, could stand to be supplemented with a nice graphical links page somewhere on the main site. Many teams have their own website. Let's capitalize on that. What I'm imagining is a nifty looking grid of banners and logos for the various games in progress, each linking to the developer's site. Next to each logo there could be a small amount of information- perhaps a title, estimated progress, and the date of the last update. The first set of links would be to the sites of healthy, thriving projects. The second page would be an archive of links to sites that haven't been recently updated. This would allow people to quickly check the status of high profile games without wading through multiple pages of forum threads.

Anyway, I hope that was helpful. I already love these forums, and if anything can be done to further improve them I'd be all for it.

Thanks again, boojiboy! I'll make good use of those comments.

Hopefully you're still considering the modeling stage because I picked up on a few more things.

I'm definitely still playing with modeling. If anyone else has related suggestions, fire away.

edit:
I have some rather unnerving news to report. Lovecraft's eyes have spontaneously decided to start glowing. It was weird- I never touched his eyes at all, I just hit the render key and all of a sudden they were glowing and the light was off. Given the author's leanings I'm sure he'd be amused .

I think the interior of the laundromat works very well now.

About the reflections- I think they fit the style well. If you're worried about realism take them out, but I think they look nice and cartoony.

I'm so not encouraging someone who has the patience to make 50+ frame animation sequences to obsess over details

I love it when there's nice fluid animation for minor characters. It really adds to my enjoyment of a game.

On another note I'm really enjoying seeing assets from this game filter through the critics' lounge. It's fun to see everything come together piece by piece.

OK, here's another edit. I tried to address all the points made earlier, but due to a number of crashes I may have lost a few of my changes. So, err, I'll blame any remaining issues on Modo's stability .

The color isn't quite ready, but the displacement (pores, etc.) more or less is.


Four renders of the model with only displacement on, and one "I'm an angsty horror writer" shot.

Among other minor changes, his nose is a tad larger now. The eye sockets have been reshaped- good observation there, I don't know if I would have picked up on that. Unfortunately these eyebrows were made before the edit, so they conceal the change a bit. I imagine he'll get a new pair of eyebrows anyway, these ones look a bit too much like carpet. Does he still look like he's smirking? At certain angles his mouth still looks a little off.

I'm thinking Boojiboy is right, and the chin is too wide. And he still doesn't have any hair, just a shiny brown swim cap for now. But before he gets hair the color needs some work.

Good detail, good posture overall. I think the super saturated blues are a bit unnatural looking. There's lots of nice detail in the torso, but the blue is close enough to your outline color that it obscures them a bit. Perhaps a lighter, greyer blue would work better.

Another small point is that her arms may be a bit short- if you ask any self-assured art major they will insist the fingers should hang down exactly to mid thigh when the arms are relaxed. If said art major were in a bad mood he or she might also berate you for making the shoulders wider than the hips. 

It looks great, mate.

The problem I've struggled with is that I'd like the perspective to be similarly Cavalier perspective as the other room, but of course that poses odd problems when looking "into" places. I'm not totally sure how best to handle that at the moment.

I appreciate that you're trying to stick with cavalier projection throughout your backgrounds. I think that will add a lot to the quality of the game. Could you elaborate on the issues you're having with that?

I must confess I've never read much Asimov (I've always been more of a Edgar Rice Burroughs and Frank Herbert fan when it comes to science fiction).

Given what people here have said about the character, I think the second edit has a good feel to him. I like his face and right hand the way they are, but the rest of him could use a little more definition. The pose is good- I can tell where his weight is and where all the important masses of his body are. But the cloth has a sort of noisy look to it, almost more like camoflage than silky fabric. The creases and seams are a little flat looking- you've got enough colors in there, maybe you could vary their intensity or antialias a bit. He's really fine the way he is, I'm just making suggestions in case you want to push him a little further. Nice work!

I tend to like main characters with indistinct facial features, like Rose in The Winter Rose for example. I also like characters with simple, easy to "read" clothing. I feel this is almost a must in low resolution sprites. What resolution are you drawing the final characters at? I'd be a little worried that the clothing of the cloaked version of Ivory wouldn't work at 320x240- the details might be a little unclear and noisy.

About the centaur: I'm all for creatively rearranging body parts. What about front legs that are mid-way between horse and human? Maybe they could have several unfused toes, like prehistoric horses or something. It always seemed silly to me that there are fantasy animal conventions- stock animals like unicorns, orcs, elves, etc., all with a "right" way to draw them.

P.S.- there's a thread on the Polycount board about a centaur here, but the creator took it in the opposite direction- more horse, less human. This thread is neat in contrast.

boojiboy- Thanks for the observations, they were all helpful.

I know it's nitpicking...

I always appreciate the picky, obsessive comments, actually . I tend to think that way myself, but I can understand why you'd be cautious about imposing when you aren't sure how someone else likes to work.

This exudes style- I would love to play a game with this much atmosphere. Maybe an outline-free, slightly noisy 3d character style would work well. Sort of like 1996-era polygonal characters such as those in Quake, but rendered as sprites? I have faith that you'll come up with something appropriate .

In terms of feedback, the doors and windows are perhaps a bit too wide in relation to furniture such as the bed. Also a bit of framing around the doors and windows, some window sills, and a few beams on the ceiling would be neat.

Another potential issue is the perspective. It really looks great as a picture, but as a room in a game it will require a lot of character scaling. A shot from a more distant camera with a narrower field of view would give you less scaling. I hope that makes sense, I don't think I said that very well. Also in terms of angle, a camera closer to eye level might be neat; it would make the floor take up less vertical space and enlarge the ceiling a tad.

The colors and textures are really professional. Could you tell us a little about your workflow? How did you make your textures?

Edit in response to Mr Colossal's post: those are all valid points, and depending on character and GUI color you could probably get away with more color depth. But personally I like the washed out, desaturated look and low color fidelity. I think both add to the piece, if that makes sense.

Thanks Haddas- I was insisting on working freehand, but a little work on top of a reference really helped with this last edit. I suppose it doesn't pay to think too rigidly.



I think his cheekbones might need more rounding out- in the first view they look a little too sharp still. I think I'll start detailing him now, but I'd still be interested in any advice people have on how to make him look more convincing.