Well look at that, its the final blog post. This week I attempted animations using aesprite (keyword "attempted") and learned a lot of stuff along the way. I also finally posted my interview with Aleks, developer of the upcoming Unworthy game, which you can find in my last blog post. He had a lot of interesting things to say about pixel art and it was very interesting for me. Animation brought up a very interesting challenge for me, as you have to draw the same sprite over and over and over again, and make sure that each tiny change looks fluid. This can be 5 to 10 times the work of creating a single sprite, and these things took forever to do compared to the stills. That's why I used a simple sword in the video, because it didn't require a ton of animating and I was pressed on time! This blog post is going to be a lot shorter than normal due to the video, so I'd like to take this time to share with you a little bit of what I learned about pixel art during this process, elaborating on what I said in the brief video below. The main things that I learned during this time were choosing colors and making shapes. Sam Keddy has a very useful tutorial about this
on his website and this is one of the first resources that I used. Essentially, small differences in pixels can result in things looking off for inexplicable reasons, as I mentioned in my video and this website goes into great depth about that. For this week's full update and a neat time-lapse of me making one of the animations, check out the video below:
The video requires Flash to run but it's kind of glitchy, you can find it on Google Drive here
And of course I couldn't go without showing off some of the stuff that I made this week. I spent some time revisiting one of my landscapes by popular request after getting fed up with animation and I think that if I spent even more time adding detail it could look really good.
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| Not my proudest character sprite... |
Yes these are tiny, no I'm not sure how to resize an animated .gif with aseprite.
Great progress.
ReplyDeleteWow Matt, nice job so far. Its interesting to see the progress that you have made over these 7 weeks in pixel art. I have to say that the backgrounds that you chose to make look very good and the colors look excellent among each other. I have one question. Did you consider the animations to be extremely difficult but could be mastered and become very easy or do you think it will only get more difficult?
ReplyDeleteThe animations are the most challenging for me right now for one main reason: you have to redraw the same thing with small changes but make it look natural. This is something that can be mastered over time but it is much more time consuming then normal and can look unnatural if not done correctly (I ran into that issue with a few of my old animations). Since the animations rely so heavily on the foundation of drawing single-frame sprites I've been focusing on that.
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