Can Anyone Help With Pixel Graphics? Options

[DeadCal]

Does anyone know anyone who is any good at pixel graphics? I'm currently in the planning stages of doing an RPG game using RPG Maker XP. But I'm finding doing characters etc bloody annoying. Especially faces. If anyone could provide any tips or help it would be fabulous.

Alternatively, if anyone is extremely bored and willing to do the whole thing or me, I have 2 grumpy Badgers I can use as payment. Unfortunately I am out of temperate Badgers at the moment, so it's the best I can do. (IMG:http://www.allspark.com/forums/style_emoticons/default/icon-fire.gif)

Seriously, if any can help in any way I would be most grateful.

[Weremole]

http://spriteart.com/

Go here. St0ven is an awesomely talented pixel artist that have done his share of professional work. He also happens to be a really nice and cool guy and he has a few really nice tutorials up.

Also any real advice I can give is: Don't get in over your head and stay a step ahead in the planning process.

First figure out a base character. An NPC or anything. Then make one for every sex or type or whatever you can think of. If you are working from scratch thats the best way to go about it.

On faces its good to boil it down to the bare essentials of what you need.

[▲ndrusi]

Do you have any kind of sample you could show? It's hard to give generic spriting advice. Weremole's is good though: construct a basic "person" and then edit him in different ways.

There's only so much you can do in a given area, such as the face, so don't sweat it if you can't manage to come up with a unique face for every person on the planet in your game. (The eyes are typically your best bet in terms of what you can do to the face--glasses, different eye colors, eyebrows, the occasional eyepatch.) You might be best off leaving people with really similar faces and differentiating them by other means. Try messing with hair or hats (it's really easy to forget you can give people hats!), giving people different physiques (you'd be surprised by the difference a couple of pixels can make in this area), and of course clothing. (If your sprites have black outlines, try adding and removing "corner" pixels to make things look different.)

[DeadCal]

Cool, thankies. My main problem is that I somehow seem to be able to do really good spites at a certain size, but its simplifying them and getting them down in size that's the problem. A few pixels less and I can't get the detail I want in, which is where I know is where the talent of being able to do pixel art comes in. I will be able to post examples of what I mean when I get home.

Right now I'm at work and have to hide from the IT Ninjas.

[DeadCal]

Here is my example pic. As you can see, when I do slightly larger art I can get decent results, but the smaller I get, the harder it gets. Image is at 300%. The last one is not mine.



This post has been edited by DeadCal: Apr 11 2006, 02:54 PM

[DeadCal]

Oh well, I'll give Sprite Art a go.

[Weremole]

Well. Speaking from experience RmXP can NEED some larger sprites.

The resolution is so wonky that all the graphics could easily be twice the size. I don't really know WHAT exactly causes this because there really shouldn't be any problem jumping from 16 to 32 bit graphics resolution....

So i see no problem with your sprite. Just remember that the larger it is the harder it will be to animate.

I hope you'll be creating your own tilesets as well?

This post has been edited by Weremole: Apr 14 2006, 09:21 AM

[DeadCal]

My friend who wants to do all the programming is getting ahead of himself, he has all these big plans for these characters I came up with. I'm not sure about creating all my own tilesets, as that's so much work. But if I do the larger sprites, I'll have to.

This is the problem I have with my web comics, all these plans and no one to share the work load with.

[Weremole]

Tell me about it...

I've been working on an rm2k game for nearly five years now and its not even close to finished.

(IMG:http://img131.imageshack.us/img131/1731/cbscreenneo030sp.jpg)

A word of advice would be: don't go overkill.

[DeadCal]

Ouch. If it took that long, I wouldn't bother.

I think I'll stick to a small demo game.

[Weremole]

As I said. It depends on what you aim for. =)

If you set all too grandiose plans you will most likely fail. Instead adapt so it gets just right. That way you have all the chance in the world to complete it.

I'm still working on it though. Shaving off a peice at a time. Then again my game is about 90% custom.