Game character stuff.

Something something cast fist?

A lot of what becomes a game is art assets. On a recent interview, a modern game can have 10 Gb of art and maybe 200M of code.

This is a kernel, or a seed of sorts. Also, my camera is not a scanner. Clearly.

I ended up doodling in Piskel a bit. Fun, and usable, but not exactly what I intend to go for.
Just the keyframes, but at this resolution I'm not sure if any more is needed.

Still, I seem to be entering a pixel art kick .

Pixels 'n links and stuff

I've become unsatisfied with Graphicsgale. I mean, it's not a bad program by any means, but outside it's animation capability, I feel that Paint.net or Paint Shop Pro 9 ( the one, the only, the best ) does the job better. Since I now have Ubuntu as a boot option, I've been giving GIMP another look, too... it can be quite good with a bit of customization. And then, of course, there's my own paint app... But that sucks, so nevermind. 

The problems in KZ sprites are too deep to be fixable with tweaking, so I'll need to re-draw. I think I'll go through the hand-drawn -> scanning process this time, it'll give me a better pose, and animation is easier, too...

Speaking of which, Pencil is relatively impressive. I'm not sure which I prefer, Plastic Animation Paper or it. I guess pencil is better, but I like sketching with PAP4 a bit more. Well, maybe.
On the digital painting side, I still think OpenCanvas is probably the best.

I'm also itching to do something with Adventure Game Studio.... when I'm not swamped by studies.
Oh, yeah. I did complete the Chzo Mythos series, too. Although in wrong order. Once again, 5-7-notes-6. I played 6 as the second game, and whoa huge spoilers. T_T

pixel-fu

Gotta do this too, from time to time. I wonder what happened to Chesu?

*edit*

So, yeah.
*edit2* click it. I dare ya.

No, that would take too long. let me sum up.

I was on an isometric kick, and my brother appeared. I started explaining stuff to him, how the whole projection thing works.

• square half as high as wide, from mid point of each edge, a line.
• You must draw the top square or you lose track of stuff, and end up like bottom-left.
• when in doubt, draw a line in same angle as the diagonal lines. things must line up.
• if you can draw a square, you can draw anything. Maybe not well, but...

So, I did the above in Graphics Gale. very useful as a guide. Go an' make some of your own.

If you work in PS or something, make the initial image something like 800x400, and once you have the grid, start putting big color circles on a separate layer. Works amazingly well.

Next, the topic of art styles came up.

• You can draw a head-shape from almost anything, but I don't enjoy it.
• Neck style in One Piece, simple but looks good, nya!
• After you know the rules, you can break 'em.
• If you draw lots, your arm will learn certain shapes and you can "cheat" when drawing them.
• Draw robot/mannekin shapes, to learn the shapes and pieces of everything.
  

Then, we touched on animation, shortly.

• Using balls-and-lines skeletons to figure out the limits of movement. The line can become shorter ( you can calculate or graphically derivate it by flattening a circle ), but they generally cannot become longer.
• On paper, you can just draw each position on top of each other, then trace 'em ( with paper/on computer ) later.
• Once you have a skeletal model, you can flesh it out. in the graphic sense. Heh.

In other, unrelated news:

• GDM in my mind
• School starts soon
• Dentist's appointment tomorrow
• Coding, drawing --- such joy.
• I wonder how long it'll last...

On GDM:

• Paperdoll sucks, but Photoshop's file format is good.
• Need a tool for tweaking .ben
• ...ben-edit? bend-it?
• Isometric... Disgaea... Game programming... Tactical Combat... Maneuvers... XPH...

Stuff like that.

Terra in Pixel Land

64x64 pixel, 20 color Terra portrait done with free version of Graphics Gale. A quite nice piece of software.

I was mainly inspired by this tutorial here.

I'm really not very good with pixel graphics. I mean, I'm better than I was back when I did these two for GDM, in 2003:
Blown up to double size, I think.

There are some things I like of them, but they're definitely not as clean and neat as sprites are supposed to be. They're also terribly asymmetrical. Still, they probably fulfilled their purpose of testing the adventure mode. Maybe.

Chesu does a much better job, all in all. I mean, sure, he uses some pre-existing sprites as a starting point, but I'm not going to hold that against him - I mean, it keeps a consistent look to the whole thing. Not to mention how incredibly tiny they are... I think they're 32x16 pixel sprites, originally - maybe due to the hardware limitations of SNES. These days there's no limit to what size one can make them sprites.

Ah well, I like the flow and energy in my asymmetric, sloppy terra sprites. I'm sure they're actually salvageable with a bit of work, if it ever becomes necessary.