Pixel Joint, I need your help. I've hit a wall in terms of improving my skills, so I'm going to set myself different challenges based on oldschool games in front of all of you and see if I can figure out some new tricks.

My first stop is the EGA challenge, in the form of Strontium Girl.

Bitten by a radioactive isotope, Serena Robinson transforms into the nuclear powered superhero Strontium Girl!  A platformer in the vein of Sonic, MegaMan, and Commander Keen, my challenge here is to have a clear, decent-looking level despite the dubious EGA palette. Here's my first shot:

 

Besides the obvious 'what do you think?', the two things I need a second opinion on are:

• Is the forground clear enough vs. the background?
• Which background objects do you think you could interact with (if you can't tell, I'm doing a poor job calling them out )?

I'll try to get an animated gif of the tiles tomorrow, does anyone know a good Windows program to do it?

Alright, tried orange sidelighting for Kane (left). Definitely more striking, but is it too eyeburney?


Also on the note of small but fun sprites: ballcats!


Lastly, this is a partial rework of an older piece, a Zelda-roguelike. Still trying to balance colors. I'm thinking darken the darks for the background, maybe desaturate a bit, and then brighten the sprites, especially the dungeon meat. What do you think?

Hi zodiac,

Good luck with your learning oldschool pixels!
I have some comments on the first mockup:

As for your questions: Yes the characters read fine on the background. You've set yourself a bit of a challenge though, because the background is partially bright gray and partially dark gray, so any sprite in the mid-brightness range will not stand out in at least one of either background parts. But you have the colors/saturation to make up for that :)
Which background objects can you interact with? I would guess none. It looks like we have a bit of a three quarter view on the floor, which is strange because the characters are standing on the edge of it.. And far away from the wall, thus the wall objects seem not to interact with the sprites.

The animation on the background can work, but I would do it at a quarter of that speed, or it remains very distracting..

Other critique:
The face of the girl doesn't read very well.. The connection of the nose and mouth does not work I think. In general at this scale it is not really necessary to define a nose. Her eyes look a bit sad..
Also, in order for her to read as a girl, you might want to give her a more feminine body. I can think of many reasons to not give her larger hips and a girly pose, but if you want to be readible at this scale you might have to push a bit more into extremes.

I'm not a big fan of broken outlines. They work okay-ish on the girl sprite, but the neck of the keen-inspired alien seems definitely broken...

Good luck, I hope this helps a bit :)

Hapiel, TYB3N, thank you both! Really appreciate it :)

Hapiel: yeah, the alien neck and Strontium Girl's nose/mouth were areas I was concerned about. I filled the back pixel to the alien's neck and that does a lot for continuity without hurting the proportions. For SG I want to keep her nose, and I tried pretty much every else to fix it, so it stays for now. What do you think about the potion bottle white outline in the dungeon crawler?

Ultimately, I'll probably use a palette with real shadows for Strontium Girl once I finish the challenge portion - EGA kind of sucks for shadow-midtone-highlight drawings.

Also: do you have a preferred way to layer different animations? I can export a single one in GraphicsGale, but if I wanted to alter the rats of some animations and not others I end up drawing 30+ frames, tedious even with copy-paste.

TYB3N, great rendition . I was going more for sad instead of bored though, but in hindsight it doesn't read well so that's just the feedback I needed. Here's a quick edit (plus frame 2) :



So her ears are exactly like you drew in the base pose, but they move with her emotions. I still need to edit the 'look up and smile' frame to show the motion's effect on her body and hair, but that's the expression.

Both: the background objects on the ship are tilted and, well, back so that they don't look interactable, so you're seeing right. The one I hoped would stand out was the power box at the top, but I rushed it so I could finish and post before calling it quits. No joy in shortcuts I guess .

I'll get around to finishing that and other reworks when I have time, but not sure when that'll be - busy week coming up.

Her ears are cool! I just thought that maybe they could've been some sort of alien headphones so I wanted to make sure. I think that, with the animation, it'll be clear that they're part of her body.

Is that Coven's sleeve? It's really long.

Alright, did it! Here's a rough of the cloak animation, what do you think?


I couldn't find a good tutorial on animating a big mass of cloth, so this was part science project, part youtube dive, and I'd welcome another set of eyes or some thoughts from someone with more experience.

Individual frames for anyone who wants them:


Also, if anyone wants to see the process just say so, I can do a tutorial once the animation is done.