Medieval RPG knight WIP
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=26279
Printed Date: 11 September 2025 at 5:33pm
Topic: Medieval RPG knight WIP
Posted By: Pookaball
Subject: Medieval RPG knight WIP
Date Posted: 23 May 2018 at 10:51am
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Hi. My coder friend and I are working on a personal project which is supposed to be this top-down 2D dungeon crawler. Here's what I have made so far. I'm looking for any advice regarding how to animate this huge sprite (it's 136 px tall, I'm seriously considering going down to 96 px) and how to paint in the details so the armor looks like it.
Walk cycles (there's no walk animation to the left because we took the easy route to flip the guy for the time being.) 
The attack animation I rotoscoped with another friend who was willing to help. I know it is too slow for the gameplay to be enjoyable. I'll have to make another one that's faster in the following weeks. After that I'll work on combos. 
Here's a quick room I came up with (here the guy is downscaled to 96px tall). The most frustrating parts about this entire thing is readability and colour count. This floor tile may be too repetitive for the amount of screen it covers. Staring at it makes me feel funny. I guess I'll have to break up the pattern and work on that contrast. 
This is the result of a month's work. I seriously think I'm about to go insane if I keep working on this. please how can I make pixel art faster |
Replies:
Posted By: Hapiel
Date Posted: 23 May 2018 at 11:03am
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Nice work! Some of the animations need some attention to timing of things, such as hitting with the axe and the sideview walk, but overal this is going in the right direction.
Also there are a lot of animations where the feet move, make the body move instead! Planted feet stay where they are.... What do you want to show by making such large sprites? Most animated characters are simplified a lot to make them drawable, but even the rough versions of your knight already have a lot of details! For the sideview stuff, have you looked in the option of using a skeleton/puppet tool like Spriter? There is a learning curve to get the animations right, and you might have to do some cleanup after rotating stuff, but it could potentially speed up your workflow. As for the texture, especially the floor one, try and see if you can get the same pattern with just 3 colors? It might be a lot easier to hide the pattern that way, and you can always add more colors later. But now there is one stone of each color in the texture, which makes them stand out a lot and show the grid. Also the wood work seems as if lit outdoors, where the stones are relatively dull. |
Posted By: Pookaball
Date Posted: 23 May 2018 at 11:13am
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Yeah, I see what you mean by making the body move instead of the legs. I guess that comes from literally not knowing how real people actually move around. I'll fix it later.
I guess I kind of just dove in with this huge sprite without much consideration and right now it's being more of a pain than I expected. I'm still at a stage where I can go back and redo everything, though. I'll have to have a long talk with my friends to convince them smaller sprites are faster to make, and are easier to make prettier. I can't see myself animating the entire enemy roster at this scale. As for the Spriter tool, I'll look into it, but I've edited the post to clarify that I actually made the attack animations by filming my other friend swinging his sword around and rotoscoping the animation. |
Posted By: Hapiel
Date Posted: 23 May 2018 at 11:21am
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Small sprites, few frames, few colors, few details... Focus on the right motions and you can still get gorgeous pixels! Here is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJosaT1sCfs - a nice video on why fewer frames helped some early games to get good results. |
Posted By: Pookaball
Date Posted: 10 June 2018 at 2:22pm
So we decided to totally redo the sprites
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Posted By: dyluck
Date Posted: 14 June 2018 at 1:55pm
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I think the knight looks still more viewed from the side rather than like the rest of the game perspective. It's just me? |
Posted By: PixelMart
Date Posted: 03 August 2018 at 1:27am
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I have to say the first attack animation looked more realistic
+ he really is using that shield + more autentic - less dramatic power in the swing the new sprite has not much more dramatic power I practice Iaido which is about japanese sword forms. the sensei of my sensei (teacher of my teacher) said the movement should be like a wave. now how to use that idea? the knight lifts his sword to be ready to strike = as the wave grows up and become bigger. + this shouldn't be too fast. + and the knight could get his shield in position to guard incoming attacks. + the knight swings his sword down = the wave breaks down with a loud and mighty splash! + this is the fastest movement + the sword needs to shop trough the enemy. not just flesh but also his bones + the shield could move behind his body for this to make it look more dramatic set a longer time the last frame of the slash part. try to think of a wood chopper with his axe "chop... chop... chop.." instead of "chopchopchop" or a smith with his big hammer and anvil "Bam! Bam! Bam!" and not "bambambam" the enemy is cut down = the wave moves back slowly to raise again. the enemy is down. and if not, the knight can raise his sword again or poke him with his sword as an additional attack. now that was my point of view |