felt like mucking around with games again so i thought id try my hand at some pixel art/animation. i've got a rough idea of what i'm after - a generic platformer where you shoot baddies, but with emphasis on art and visual design - wacky characters and over-the-top worlds - involving, of course, fun and interesting level-based gameplay mechanics. basically; i'm making it up as i go along.
so here's a silly character design i drafted up as a sort of concept idea
i don't think it turned out too bad. there's some weird stuff going on with the legs since they're the only part mostly redrawn per frame, and i completely forgot to fix up the black bolt things on his torso, but it's just a rushed proof-of-concept so what can ya do.
if anyone's interested in the process, I just basically drew a very rough concept image, changed levels to increase the value range, set the mode to indexed colour (I think it was 16 colours), and then scaled it down with nearest-neighbor sampling. from there it was a matter of going over the entire thing by hand to get that true pixel-art look, and animating.
pretty effective if you have a decent drawing done as a base. i'm not sure how much more efficient a method this is than simply doing it all at the pixel level from scratch or simply starting off from a drawing as opposed to a rendered piece. you can also do the same thing from renders of 3D models if you adjust some render settings in your program to fit - the cleanup afterwards is much less work from what I've seen.
still, pixel art starts to get really really time consuming the larger you go. This probably took me like 3 hours of work or something, for what's practically one still full-character frame - and a pretty rough one at that. i'll get better at it as i practice, but still. doing the same thing 14 more times to get a run cycle...
... is probably gonna take like two weeks if i'm just doing this in my spare time, maybe less since you can basically do half a run cycle and just make simple edits for the other half. bottom line is, it takes loooong.
can't really rig up a 3d model instead either, the animation just wouldn't be the same. so that's why i'd really like to get a super solid character design down before i start making assets. something that i feel happy with and will also be a relative breeze to animate and draw. right now this robot guy just looks like a cross of bender, larry from time squad, and some general doug tenNapel-inspired design elements. which i suppose isn't a bad range of sources to derive from, but still feels a bit bland. plus, you got those rigid, geometrical robot forms. organic stuff is just easier to draw, and especially animate, for me atleast. oh and he needs a gun.
anyway, i guess i'll get to that. i'll see if i can post any updates if i ever get to a point where i have some nice stuff actually in game. this is really a post about art / asset creation then. if anyone's got stuff to say about character design or just pixel art stuff in general, do share!
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