Some updated animations, two one-handed ones:





It's mainly small changes at the moment.

I'm unsure of how to show the rotation of the waist without making it too exagerated.

That blue road looks like water, while the water itself looks like blue plastic. The is grass is too pronounced, which is plainly annoying, unless grass has some functional use. The tower looks too fragile and thin. Castle is even worse. The black outline around forest has aesthetics of a condom.

Edited by snv - 09 May 2015 at 4:00pm

Thanks for both of your comments!

Tried making some of the buildings bigger (also significantly expanded the towers), also applied the outline consistently:



The outline for the forest was indeed quite excessive so i reduced it.

Also changed the colour of the road tiles up north.

Damian; the differing shades for the grass tiles north and south are supposed to resemble biomes (not sure how else to express this sorry). I'm going to work on a grass tile soon as well.


Edited by AshCrimson - 10 May 2015 at 9:25am

Thanks for the edits SNV, inspired me to make some changes some minor, others big. I'll list them below:

Added Anti-aliasing to Outside outlines for Roads, Mountains, Rivers, Marshes/Swamps, Lakes/Ponds and Towers.

Changed Towers, made them slightly thinner in the middle.

Changed Castles appearance, tried to make the bricks in the wall visible. I would have liked to have added the towers like SNV did, but it went over the 32X32 tile limit.

Changed Marshes/Swamps; hopefully they look more like either of them, i also changed their colours as well to green, still unsure if they read well though.

Changed Mountains: Made they more rounded, unsure if they look better compared to previous version. Tried to split them up with a black outline in the inside.

Roads/Paths: Removed banding from inside and replaced with Anti-aliasing. Hopefully it looks cleaner now.

Forests: Basically did what SNV did in his edit, i think it looks better now.



Edited by AshCrimson - 11 May 2015 at 11:35am

Thanks for the edit SNV i will see what i can fit in such a small dimension.

I've been playing around updating the 3 bases i have:



I've been playing around with shading and the direction of the chest. I realise the blue arm should be occluded by the chest so i added that.

0 Is the original
1 Has AA used on the legs sparingly.
2 Tried actual shading on the legs, worried it creates banding though.
3 Has bigger AA on legs.

My main concern is that without the shading the legs look flat and look like they're being seen straight on (such as the original chest), but also that my changes detract and bring banding which i am trying to avoid at all costs.

I really like the shoulder rotation on the last one

These last sprites are all very nice.
You just keep getting better :)

Finally some non-character stuff... sort of:



Made and updated some battle-backgrounds for various types of terrains, nowhere near finished but any critique on them would be more than welcome.

Created two sizes, since A (the original size) seemed too big, so B is slightly smaller, although the forest tree's and mountain's are still larger than the characters.

These mock-ups look very fire emblem-ish to me. Keep up the good work!
Especially that sword animation with the shoulder rotation is really great.

I'm not good with animations myself, but as a viewer it came to my mind that in those last animations you posted it looks weird that none of the combatants have a left arm. The weapon of the second person seems a little bit too short (it seems that it could be at max a long knife, but then you wouldn't attack with it in that way?).

The knees seem positioned fine, maybe just a tad too big (the lower edge of the knees is where it should be).

Perhaps the reason they look off is because you separated them in the first place? Human knees aren't like the ball joints on a doll. Functionally, they're basically part of the upper (blue) part of the leg, and the lower leg (red) sort of swivels in them. With sprites this small, trying to make the knee stand out as it does IRL is just going to look odd, it's too minor a detail to warrant being visible bumps at this size.

The other thing that might be throwing your proportions off is the size of the foot. Those are quite thick feet, presumably because they include the shoe as well. Taking them into account, I think the proportions are just fine.

That would be because your older animations had the legs bending like they're one continuous bendy noodle, instead of two stiff sections connected by a joint. For the purposes of low-res sprite animation, you can think of the knee joint as just a point where the leg bends. In high-res art, you'd have the room to worry about the knee cap and such, but at this size, just the one pixel where you have the front of the leg transition from one angle to another (when the leg is bent) is enough to read like a knee.

They don't look like noodles, no :]

(Disclaimer: I'm a not that familiar with animating, feel free to disregard all of the below.)
The issue that stands out to me with those animations is there's no power to them, they look half-hearted. I think four things contribute to that:
1. The forward motion is the same speed as the backward motion, instead of being faster. In the case of the legs and torso, it looks like it's the exact same motion, just reversed? Having a quick forward motion, a short pause as the attack is finished, and a slower recovery/reset motion should look more like an attack. Ideally, this should be done by choosing your frames appropriately rather than with frame rate tweaks.
2. The torso does not move/tilt at all. It rotates, and you did the rotation well, but that's not enough. Even on a weak attack, there should be some movement, but you can perhaps ignore that at this size. On a strong attack, there should be quite a bit of tilting forward. The power of an attack comes mostly from the thighs and torso, the motion of the arms mostly just directs the force.
3. There's no follow-through motion. However, I wouldn't worry too much about this one at this stage, as follow through is something that's much easier to convey when you have clothing, hair, etc to work with. Just think about what you would do in the finished animation as you work on these. For example, that pause I mentioned in #1 might be a pause in the motion, but it wouldn't be repeated frames - during that pause, there would still be secondary motion going on.
4. You've not drawn the other arm in the one-handed attacks, which is likely to be used to keep balance. So, in a forward attack, it's likely to be held out backwards.

Edit: I think your initial stance looks "stronger" than the mid-attack/impact stance, because the knees are more bent. At impact, the pivot leg (blue) would be straight so you've got that right, but the other leg would likely bend to bring the torso further forward, and the pivot leg would be at a lower angle as a result. However, I would save working on that until you've gotten the hang of the torso motion, since that will determine the position the legs need to have.


Edited by eishiya - 17 July 2015 at 6:39am

I think you should spend some time studying HEMA, etc videos to see how the fighters move. Freeze-frame them if you can, to see just how much the body stretches and moves, how the limbs move in relation to each other, things that are very hard to keep track of otherwise. You're being very timid with the motions. Don't guess this stuff, there are too many ways to make it look wrong, and only a few ways that it'll read well. Do the research, it'll save you a lot of time by helping avoid so much trial and error.

The limbs are too gangly, those noodle limbs don't work with the rest of the style imo.
Give them at least a bit more width.

Also pretty impressive that you still keep this up!

You are the hardest working PJer.

Its not the size of the art its all about 'on the pixel level'.

Some non-character stuff for once. A really basic attempt at walls and buildings:



Sorry for the sparseness and basic nature of it. Will try to add more stuff to populate it.

Edit:

Quick update:



Hopefully less barren


Edited by AshCrimson - 06 August 2015 at 2:22pm

Finally submitted something to the gallery! Working on other cultures/factions misc items.

Updated idle animations, also added in the two stages i now do whenever i animate (blocking in the basics and then adding in details).

 Unsure of what to do with weapons and the arms, wanted to make them look less uniform and less boring:



Not sure if the weapons should even move so dramatically, if i should leave the arm holding said weapon downwards etc.

I think the "final versions" move their weapons too much for an "idle" pose. A very slight motion would make sense, but that much looks more like a lead-in to something else than an idle animation.

I think they move down a bit much too? It's great that you actually have them bending their knees instead of just breaking their legs to make them a pixel shorter every few frames, but think about what actual humans would do. Your characters appear to be dancing, rather than waiting. An idle stance tends to be more about shifting one's weight from one leg to the other (which does involve some knee motion).

I think the only one being hassled and annoyed is you, since you have to do all this work xP

I think that looks better and less dancy, but the motion looks bad because it looks unbalanced and purposeless. What are you trying to show with this motion? So far it looks like you're just drawing motion without thinking about why the character is moving in the first place.

It's fine to have an idle stance. I'm not asking why you want idle stances, I'm asking why the character chooses to move the way they do. I realize they're generic units without motivations, but it helps a lot to think about that when animating.
Fighting game idle stances - and yours, I assume - are all about keeping the momentum going, so the character can move at any moment. Think about how they would do that, and how your current motion would help or not help with that. Normally I'd suggest you look at real fighters, but in reality, people rarely just stand around like that (and when they do, they're often quite still), so idle poses are largely fiction to look interesting. So, make these stances yourself. What makes you feel energized and ready to go lunge forward into an attack? Animate that.


Edited by eishiya - 12 August 2015 at 12:17pm

I think that looks better. It looks dancy because the motion is too intense - you're overdoing it. It's an idle stance, but you have so much motion that at a glance it could look like an attack xP Keep the motion more subtle, just a little bit of movement. It's okay if the body only shifts a pixel or two!

Hopefully this is somewhat serviceable.

Slimmed down the Ui, also finally some sort of font/alphabet thing:

Thanks for your advice, implemented the dithering on the UI, I'll probably play around with it more.



Idle stance talk, I like your edit im going to play around with less frames, hopefully it'll still be sort of fluid though.

Here's what i got so far though





I'll probably simplify it further.

Edit:

A really quick 6-frame idle animation thats hopefully less dancy but still active:



Another edit:

Since im experimenting with reducing frames here's some new attacks:









I'm stepping back from the sort of animated attacks i did before, im sort of going with the way shining force dealt with things, it's probably a bit easier to explain the first bit with a gif it:



Essentially it wouldn't be a looped animation, it'd be triggered after some text, stop midway during the actual attack frame(frame 4), text would appear confirming a hit, the damage or if it misses etc, then the recovery animation (last 2 frames and returning to frame 1).

So basically:

 text announcing attack -> Frames 2-4 -> text confirming hit and damage or miss -> Frames 5-6 -> return to Frame 1 -> Text confirming exp gain, etc.

Sorry if thats uh, a bit convoluted.


Edited by AshCrimson - 24 August 2015 at 4:31am