Hi there!

I'm Kopaka, and I've been spriting... for not that long haha. I started out in 7th Grade back in High School and went on and off until 9th Grade where I stopped. Come 2012 where I've finished High School and a course at a 3D Games college and I'm starting up a company with a few friend of mine here in Sydney, Australia.

We're working on our first title and we wanted to do a platformer in pixel art because it was the kind of game we all grew up with back in the 80's and 90's. I posted my character art at The Spriter's Resource and have gotten some feedback.  Here's the character I started off with not too long ago:



After taking their feedback into consideration, I went about a redesign and am currently still working on it. At the moment I have the overall design and shape of it done and will be heading into colour palette and shading soon. Here it is:



I am trying to break away from the Megaman X style as much as possible and making this character my own. I believe this rendition achieves that, however if you feel this copies something else, please let me know!

With that, I want to ask these questions about the above sprite:

What do you guys think of the design/silhouette versus the old design?

Anything you can't read well?

Any problems you guys can already see in terms of animating this?

What colour palette suggestions you guys might have?

Looking forward to hear your constructive criticism!

EDIT: I cleaned up some of the pixels, gave him proper sideburns/ear and face, did some general shifting to keep proportions, and shifted the angle the axe sits at.




Edited by Kopaka - 11 August 2012 at 7:54am

Hello Yuran, the colours on this character are not final, they just serve the purpose of blocking out the shapes. When I'm finished with it, it's definitely not going to have 20 different colours, or really strange colour choice haha.

What do you think of the general design/silhouette versus the old one though?

@Kopaka,Gray colors will not interfere with the design of it form, that's realy true.
Obscure strip character in the groin ... Why do they draw it, it does not seem to part of the armor.
Make a plate of protection on that place, and on the thighs too,
you can try to do the same protection plates.

Thank you very much! I'm glad you like it :D

I made a few tweaks based on some other feedback, I'll be working on his animations very shortly.

Hey guys, got an update! I completed his Idle Animation, and also lightened the hair at the front, take a look:





Comments and criticisms welcome!

Looks good. Maybe increase the frame rate a little.

Thanks for the feedback, and I'm happy you guys are liking them! Oh and it's alright with me if it reminds you of MMX Buddy90. It's more so long as when you see it you're not "Man, this is clearly an edit," which is what I got a lot of flak for with the old design.

Anyway, I'm currently tweaking the Idle Animation since looking at it after working on the Run for so long it made it look really stiff. During the process I decided to change up the design of the Axe weapon:



The current backbone story is that the Hero is up against an evil Alchemist that is combining animals together, creating monsters. The Axe will be the "Anti-Alchemist Weapon" so I figured it needed a little more "oomph" to it versus what I currently had.

What are you thoughts on it's design?

hmmm.. I think what might be 'a little off' is try making him move up and down a bit more instead of side to side if that makes sense.

You know, I just wanted to say, this sprite keeps evolving and it looks better and better every time.

The motion blur looks good, but I think you exaggerated the effect. It doesn't read as an axe being swung, but more like a cloth or something. Try playing with it some more, although I would recommend to remove some pixels from it.


Edited by Buddy90 - 09 September 2012 at 9:42pm

Thank you so much Buddy90, I really appreciate the vote of confidence :)

Yeah, I think I'll have to just have the one frame of major motion blur, I was playing around with it in game and it doesn't look quite as snappy as I'd like it, as well as play around with the blur shape. Currently working towards a deadline, so I'm crunching out a lot of rough animations for the Hero. In the meantime I was able to complete some more enemies:

Acidibis


Currently only this one frame, the attack animation will have opening his beak and revealing an organic cannon that barrages the Hero with globs of acid from afar

Dragonbird


Mid-tier enemy that relentlessly dives bombs the Hero any chance it gets

What do you guys think?

Edited by Kopaka - 17 September 2012 at 1:14am

Hey guys! It's been a long time :) I've taken a bit of a break and I'm getting back into spriting again. The game I'm working required some portraits, something I haven't done before.

So this is what I have so far in terms of preliminary shading and line art, what do you guys think?

Hi guys, I worked on some animations for Stroud, namely the idle and how he appears to the Hero in the game:



Here's a separate link (http://imgur.com/RPAGXKT) if the details are hard to see



Tell me what you guys think!

Edited by Kopaka - 18 March 2013 at 5:30pm

I think they all look really really awesome... Looking forward to the progress of your project!