[the game is finished] Platformer Girl sprites
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: Pixel Art
Forum Name: WIP (Work In Progress)
Forum Discription: Get crits and comments on your pixel WIPs and other art too!
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=25023
Printed Date: 12 September 2025 at 6:15am
Topic: [the game is finished] Platformer Girl sprites
Posted By: Vilmore
Subject: [the game is finished] Platformer Girl sprites
Date Posted: 26 March 2016 at 4:49am
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Hi everyone!
Nice to meet you. It is 2016 and here I am doing pixel art, it looks like I found the right forum 
I'm working on spritesheets for a platformer game. It is supposed to be a bit of a template. The first two character I'm working on are the knight and the girl. I've not begun animating yet, because I am not sure if my base character are good. So I would like some feedback from you guys first before I go on. I will update this topic as I make progress, I promise 
with green background in different sizes. I think they will end up being used 2x scaled, or maybe 3x scaled on a full screen hd game? not sure 
transparent 
I'm not to sure about having an outline. On the armour the extra contrast does work I think but, I'm not sure about the girl. It looks heavy on a light background, and not sure if it is necessary on a darker background. I would like some input here :) I think the proportions are about right. There are some other variations I'm not sure about. Again all feedback is appreciated, I can take negative comments, so dont worry. I'm posting this to get better. Thank you for reading! |
Replies:
Posted By: jalonso
Date Posted: 26 March 2016 at 6:35am
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It all looks very good.
I would change the girl's hairbow color to a grey from the knight because it stands out too much, especially at 1X Work without outlines until you have BG tiles made to see if you need them ------------- |
Posted By: Vilmore
Date Posted: 26 March 2016 at 11:07am
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Thank you jalonso. I agree with the hair, I will try a two or three tones version. What do you think about the outline on the knight, it is more integrated, it looks a bit like the dark part on the metal, but it makes the knight sprite a bit thicker than the girl. |
Posted By: Xevil
Date Posted: 26 March 2016 at 11:34am
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Originally posted by Vilmore
Thank you jalonso.I agree with the hair, I will try a two or three tones version.What do you think about the outline on the knight, it is more integrated, it looks a bit like the dark part on the metal, but it makes the knight sprite a bit thicker than the girl. I don't think hats a problem as a knight in full armour would be a bit thicker than a woman in a dress anyway :p |
Posted By: Vilmore
Date Posted: 30 March 2016 at 7:11pm
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Hi pixelfriends!
Back with a small update. Played around with the hair a little, and I tried another helmet variation. 
Also started on some idle and running animations. As you see I went for a template, so I can just focus on the movement first, before I apply these animations to the girl or knight sprite. Maybe the movement needs further adjustment to fit the character of the sprite but I'll see then. I added the tail on the head to use as a reference for all kinds of bouncy things also on other parts of the body.  
Again I welcome all feedback. :) |
Posted By: eishiya
Date Posted: 31 March 2016 at 9:40am
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Something about the run animation looks off to be but I can't put my finger on what it is. It looks almost backwards to me, perhaps you're bending the legs at the wrong time in the animation? It also looks like the legs lack a frame where they're fully extended on their way forward, maybe that's why it looks off. When you animate run/walk cycles, I highly recommend not doing it "in place", but actually having the character run forward, and you can then realign the frames centered on the character's center of mass afterwards. That way you can make sure the leg movement makes sense. It'll also help you add head/torso motion relative to the center of mass to make the animations look more natural. The idle animation has that painful http://24.media.tumblr.com/aed56e5bc567697f79aad85553e62160/tumblr_miwiyoxvxh1rnmjleo1_500.gif - "legs breaking" thing going on. Don't arbitrarily shorten the legs! If you want the character to bounce, give them the motion to create that bounce! Have the knees bend, or have the hips sway so that the legs are at different angles, you could have a breathing animation with no leg movement, there are lots of possibilities that don't involve randomly dismembering your character, even at this small size. Also, vertical motion isn't your only option! If the others feel extreme, you could have the character sway from side to side, e.g. by shifting their weight from one leg to the other. Better yet, you could have different characters do different things - at this small size, it's not that time-consuming to animate multiple kinds of motion. |
Posted By: Vilmore
Date Posted: 31 March 2016 at 2:58pm
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Thank you eishiya.
Looking at it one day later I think the problem with the run cycle, is that the character is turned towards the camera a little bit. Right now I made the run animation also go towards the camera, so both legs sequences look quite different. Especially when the blue leg is up its just in front of the green leg and this is the weird part imo. I'm going to make a sidewards run cycle instead. I think these characters turning their body and face towards the camera works for many normal actions but not for a walk cycle for a sidescroller/platformer. I also agree with the idle, I'm not to hapy about it. To be honest I didn't know what to do with the legs. It is varying between 4 px and 3 px height atm, and moving something sideways to bend a knee looks weird as well. So if you have a good example of this at this small scale I would like to see this. Since the character is waiting to move in a sidescroller I wanted to avoid this look  http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/10799.htm - http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/10799.htm because that is the "I'm ready to hit" idle.
I wanted something more subtle, heavy breading like this  http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/17205.htm - http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/17205.htm
Even better would be an entirely different sequence, like the character looking around, or sitting down after a few seconds :) but that is more for finishing touches. I will try to update soon :) |
Posted By: Vilmore
Date Posted: 31 March 2016 at 5:24pm
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ok this is the sideways run.
I opted for 8 frames instead of 6 this time. I should've made it more clear which is the front limb and which is the back limb but as this is just a template just try to look closely 
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Posted By: Vilmore
Date Posted: 04 April 2016 at 3:42pm
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Hi everyone I've been busy today :)
I started doing an environment, should I create a new topic for that? probably? I reworked the run animation a few times. I then started playing around in Unreal Engine 4 to test the Paper 2D functionality and my graphics. I have made more animations, besides run, also jump, fall, crouch, throw while running and jumping. I made a quick gif for you guys, it is a screencap of the actual game. It is unfortunately not pixel perfect, unreal did some scaling that I dont want, and the conversion program did some more scaling. 
So again I could use your feedback :) |
Posted By: jalonso
Date Posted: 04 April 2016 at 5:28pm
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Looks good :)
A running thread for the whole project helps PJers understand and see things in context which means better feedback. The other benefit of a long running thread is that others learn from your mistakes and successes ;) We love long threads ------------- |
Posted By: Vilmore
Date Posted: 05 April 2016 at 3:54am
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Cool, I'll keep posting in this thread. The title won't really be representative anymore but ok. I love long threads too :)
So this is the tilemap I have right now. I realise as all the tiles are stuck together it is hard to see what the end result could be. I will build a level out of them later. 
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Posted By: eishiya
Date Posted: 05 April 2016 at 8:11am
| The environment tiles feel noisy compared to the slick look of the sprites. Too much single-pixel "detail". Try to work with larger clusters like you did on the sprites, so that they feel like they belong together. |
Posted By: Vilmore
Date Posted: 05 April 2016 at 5:52pm
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New gif!
I shouldn't have used the gradient in the background, makes the file a lot bigger. Hope you like it. The walk cycle of the knight needs some more finetuning for sure. 
longer version: http://i.imgur.com/eVqzo2U.gifv |
Posted By: rocifier
Date Posted: 06 April 2016 at 4:23am
Your run cycle doesn't have proper pass-through for the legs and arms. Make sure to track them smoothly between each frame and keep each limb the same length. Also I don't recommend moving the pelvis laterally within the frame at this scale. Here:
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Posted By: Vilmore
Date Posted: 06 April 2016 at 6:53am
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Hi rocifier,
That is super friendly that you adjusted the run cycle for me. thank you :) I totally agree with your comment btw. If you look closely at the in-game gifs you will see that I have already iterated a few times on that run cycle, and the one I am using now is actually quite close to the one you posted. So thank you again, I will look very closely at your run cycle and maybe do more iteration on the run cycle. As you see I've now started drawing over the template to create the knight, and that needs more work :) |
Posted By: Nppsf
Date Posted: 06 April 2016 at 10:30am
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Your latest gif looks great vilmore.
I think one weakness might be your knight characters feather in their helmet. Its resolution of detail seems off compared to everything else. Also, just eye balling it, it looks like just two colors in contrast. Its like, the feather is too fine in terms of resolution, and not fine enough in terms of color contrast. |
Posted By: Vilmore
Date Posted: 06 April 2016 at 3:32pm
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You mean the feather should be bigger? so I can add more highlight/shadow?
I was thinking about something like this 
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Posted By: Nppsf
Date Posted: 06 April 2016 at 10:56pm
| No like, its colors shouldnt be so different, or, that it should have simpler features. |
Posted By: Michno
Date Posted: 08 April 2016 at 2:46am
| Loving the look of this game. if you ever need a tester hit me up ^^ |
Posted By: Vilmore
Date Posted: 09 April 2016 at 3:58am
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actually I will hold you to that promise :)
might still take a little while before I get a testable game though. |
Posted By: Vilmore
Date Posted: 07 May 2016 at 2:07pm
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So after quite a while some more updates :)
I added throwing, attack and death animations for the knight. I'm working on some enemies: bats, and spiders... And recently I made a paralax background in unreal engine that I wanted to show off so I made some quick backgrounds for that as well. here are some screenshots. :) 
I wanted to give you moving gifs but the process I used the last time was quite time consuming... I tried screen to gif, but the frame dropping while recording was terrible and the compression messed up pretty much the whole thing. I didn't yet get gyazo to work... so I might go back to screen capping with open broadcast software and doing the whole conversion process. :( But since that takes a while I want to polish this a little more. if anyone got any feedback I'd be happy to hear it. |
Posted By: Vilmore
Date Posted: 06 January 2017 at 5:17pm
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- One Year Later... -
Or almost :) So I came back to this project and decided to bring some new life into this thread too. Since the post above I have actually worked a bit more on the project but mostly on the programming side of things. Only a few details in the art. I will now try to get out a playable level to expand upon, you know, the minimum viable product principle, sort of... Expect that hopefully in the coming weeks. But what I did do was an other little project, with very small soldier sprites. Unfortunately I though I had this backed up, but this week I found out I didn't... auch 
The only thing I have are crappy JPG uploads I made to facebook and one video I uploaded on youtube. 
I opted for the smallest version. Here is a battle field. 
Again this is -sorry was- a project in Unreal Tournament. You will have to click the video to see the simple sprites in action. there is one version of the sprite walking towards us and one from the back, these are also mirrors giving me 4 directions, this is actually almost enough. That was one of the tests I was doing with this project. The blood is not a spritesheet but a normal particle effect with little rectangles... who will win??? https://youtu.be/BYrIffhqvxY - https://youtu.be/BYrIffhqvxY |
Posted By: RebeaLeion
Date Posted: 08 January 2017 at 5:26am
| That terrain style is appealing. I really like it. |
Posted By: Vilmore
Date Posted: 27 November 2017 at 7:42am
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Alright!
Its been a long time since I posted here. But guess what I actually finished this project!
I will post all the sprites here later when I polished them a bit more, also I still welcome feedback of course. gif with messed up colors: 
normal screenshot: 
Download the actual game (windows) from google drive https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wkIbkt7momQbxUi2z-P9UaQs5b4ykeWH/view?usp=sharing - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wkIbkt7momQbxUi2z-P9UaQs5b4ykeWH/view?usp=sharing |
Posted By: Hapiel
Date Posted: 27 November 2017 at 12:54pm
| Sweet, congratulations! |
Posted By: pyrometal
Date Posted: 27 November 2017 at 2:46pm
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Unfortunately I am not on Windows; I really would like to try out your game though! Will you be trying to get this out on Steam or some other service? If so, you should consider writing up a quick news post for the PJ front page once you do  |
Posted By: Vilmore
Date Posted: 03 December 2017 at 10:42am
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Thanks guys!
You are not the first to suggest putting it on steam, and since everyone can pretty much get anything on steam these days I might actually do that some day. But not in the near future. I will of course report any news here. When I have some time for these kinds of projects I want to flesh out the sprites a bit more to make something of a set so programmers can use them for their games. Again I will post the sprites here to get tips from you guys. When I dont spend time on that I will move on with the strategy game in the style of my previous post. |