looking for feedback on public domain monochrome sprites
Saturday, April 16, 2022 - 20:53
hello friends, first time poster long time lurker
would these fall under the trivial or unusable categary?
i made them during down time at work to try and learn pixel art. what do you think i could do to improve?
(the sprites i post in this thread are public domain)
I love monochrome art, it is really hard to do monochrome art properly but when you achieve that it stimulates imagination. I like those designs very much! I see expression and movement on the designs!
certainly usable. Especially submitted as the whole set.
--Medicine Storm
thanks glitchart :)
@MedicineStorm even if they don't have animation?
i would say there is some stuff in here, even unanimated, that i would find useful for making derivatives.
If the concern is about the "trivial submission" rule, I cannot imagine a reasonable person being able to produce these in just a few minutes, animated or not. There is no risk of that.
These strike me as sort of shadow-demon cryptid Pokemon creatures. Intriguing.
--Medicine Storm
Animations are nice, but you don't have to have them, someone from the community could create animations if they wanted and maybe share them. But theses are great as they are! :)
Text adventure:
As you attempt to leave the cave a mysterious creature appears from nowhere. His dragon like wings stretched across the entrance, blocking your exit. He howls and you feel his windswsept breath upon your face whilst gazing at his long teeth and drooling mouth. As you look down you notice the creature is holding something betwwen his talons.
Fight (F) of Run (R) ????
Chasersgaming | Support | Monstropolis |
thanks friends :)
made 3 more animals
and two more plants
this time around i tried to stick to 32 by 32 for the animals, im not sure about the results. critique is welcome :)
Nice! I like them!
@gaymoo: "what do you think i could do to improve?"
How about adding some gradients? Something like the characters 176 - 178 in the old Latin 1 ASCII table? It would be great to use those for shadows to add some "depth", maybe? Or to represent different materials like in this submission?
Cheers,
bzt
thanks BZT :)
i think i might try making tiles in that style, but for now i wnat to keep the little guys mostly textureless
made a few more
unortunely i think these ones turned out too unreadable
i like em!
thanks ;)
made a few more
are you gonna put them in a submission?
just submitted the animal sprites
edit made a few more and managed to shrink all of the random sized ones
made six more. do you notice bad habits forming, stuff to avoid?
not really. they all read pretty well and have the fun vibe. keep it up!
Wow, I love these!
thanks friends, here is a look at the process. the sketch is made with the krita pixel brush set to 5 pixels wide and with pressure sensitivity for width enabled. once a basic shape is made i use the standard pixel brush
i feel like my sprites lose a lot when moving from the sketch stage to the finished form
anyway here is the current second collection
does submitting the sprites as a single sheet make the submission less useful? also is it better to post them with a white background or a transparent one?
submitting the sprites as a single sheet makes them more useful in my opinion
what i meant is if i should cut them up and zip them up? and if so should they be with white background or transperent?
like this
or like this
yeah i knew what you meant, that was what i meant too! they are better as a sprite sheet than cut up and zipped.
@gaymoo: "should they be with white background or transperent?"
I'm afraid that latter is not possible for monochrome sprites. You see, monochrome uses 1 bit per pixel, already used to encode black and white, so there's no place to store transparency.
The best you can do is to provide a mask layer too. So you should have two sprite sheets:
Here's an example mask in attachment.
Cheers,
bzt
bw_transparent.png 4.8 Kb [0 download(s)]
@bzt, please don't say stuff like "not possible" when it is not only possible, but easy. Is it possible to have the file saved as monochrome palette? no, probably not, but that isn't what Gaymoo was asking, nor are the files currently stored as an actual monochrome palette anyway. The sprites themselves are still monochrome even if the file's palette wouldn't be. An indexed palette with 1-bit transparency works just fine. The attached is less than half the file size of the original. If gaymoo mentions an interest in the intricacies of marginal gains in storage space and load times of overly-complicated image handling in game engines, then we can discuss more, but otherwise that kind of stuff is off-topic on this thread.
@Gaymoo: eh, for almost any other color set, it may be more useful to have a transparent background, but for black and white assets like these? It is trivial to just select all white (or black?) pixels and convert to transparent, so I would say nah, no need to submit a transparent version. The developer who wants to use it can do that if they need it. It certainly doesn't make it less useful if you choose to do so, though. More variety of useful forms is always better than less. :)
--Medicine Storm
xtvegkp-1-bit-transparent.png 2.6 Kb [1 download(s)]
xtvegkp-1-bit-transparent-1.png 7.5 Kb [1 download(s)]
@MedicineStorm: "please don't say stuff like "not possible""
Well, technically speaking it isn't possible, simply because monochrome has only one bit per pixel (0=black, 1=white). But...
"nor are the files currently stored as an actual monochrome palette anyway"
...is true, these images aren't technically monochrome, you're right about that.
I think the question is, why are these sprites created monochrome in the first place? Was the intent to allow them to be displayed on a monochrome screen/gameconsole/etc.? If so, then monochrome format is necessary (and transparency needs a mask). However if the intent was just to mimic monochrome, then a palette format is acceptable (0=black, 1=white, 2=transparent), but then already more colors are available, so why the black and white restriction?
So @gaymoo, it's up to you: do you want these to be actually monochrome, or is it enough for you if they just look like monochrome? It's a decision only you can make.
Cheers,
bzt
P.S: it is hard to find any resources on monochrome these days, but I've found this about the Windows cursor (which is a truly monochrome icon):
i thought by limiting myself to just the sillohuete i would be able to come up with more readable designs. then somewhere along the way i chickened out and added faces
edit
just uploaded the second collection. pack now has 50 critters
also got started on the third collection
lookin at them now i fear my designs might start becoming redundant. hopefully carefully referencing real animals will lessen the problem