Hello all!
I have been a Nintendo lover, well, the majority of my life, and creating NES games was the second idea that I had for what I would like to do for a job, right after fighter pilot.
Anyway, I started experimenting with programming at a young age, primarily with BASIC, as that was what was available to me. My interests in designing games waned as game technology shifted away from 2D graphics, and I found myself involved with other interests. Sadly, as a child in the early 90s, I didn't have access to wonderful resources such as this site on 6502 assembly or even knowledge of what was actually entailed to program an NES game. Had I known, I would never have started with BASIC and would have jumped straight into 6502.
Now, as an adult, I find myself very fond of the games from my childhood and assembled a pretty nice NES and SNES collection. But playing these games once again stirred the desire to make my own contribution to the gaming library of my favorite consoles. Luckily, this time, I'm armed with the internet and thirty years of information dissemination on programming for them.
So, I've started on the trek of learning the code, and I've began reading and rereading tutorials and familiarizing myself with the syntax. It's a lot, yes, but the simple fact alone that the information necessary to create functioning programs for an NES console is available, is thrilling to me, and would have blown the mind of my childhood self. One can actually commit themselves to learning to create an NES game, as many have. That concept is very exciting and that excitement has brought me here. I've been reading through the wiki and forums for a while now and I would like to be a part of the community.
So, what has brought me here for my first post are some sprite graphics that I did yesterday. This is about the better part of a day's work here, but it was my first one and there was a lot of redoing. By the time I got familiar with the constrictions of designing in 16 x 32 with 3 colors, I did the last ones much faster.
So, the first ones that I designed were the attack animations 1 - 4. I was having troubling visualizing how to portray my character with so few pixels, so I actually started with 64 x 64, then reduced the size by half. That honestly, looked like crap, BUT, it helped me figure out where the few pixels I have to work with should go, then I reworked those, and from then on started designing in 16 x 32.
For the walk cycle, I adapted frames from Moon Crystal. This is a beautifully animated game with a not too dissimilar character style from mine, so after some adjustments I feel like it looks pretty decent. I found the Moon Crystal sprites on Spriter's Resource, and it appears that they were ripped by a fellow named Domobot, so thank you for that.
Now, I realize that having so many animations is going to eat up my CHR space pretty quickly, so I started considering how to design things most efficiently. I went through my frames and tried to identify any that were very similar, and if possible without hurting the animation, I modifying some of these to be the same. So, I believe there are 15 duplicate 8x8 tiles in the 8 frame walk cycle. Am I correct in assuming that I could reuse the other tiles to save space?
When I placed the images in a 32 x 16 space, I aligned the feet to the bottom, and basically, the head moves one pixel counter-clockwise each frame. So it goes up, then left, then down, then right. The tiles that I reused are the ones where her head is in the same position. Her arms and legs are in different spots, but sometimes I could reuse the bottom of her feet too. I'm wondering though, since her head mostly stays the same and just moves a pixel, if this is more efficiently done by drawing a new tile, as I did, or by shifting some existing tile. I'm not even sure if this would work, as it seems there would be a gap, but basically I'm just trying to consider if I am doing things as most efficiently as possible.
I'm hoping that after I draw a couple more animations, I'll have tiles for most of the body positions, so hopefully I can give her a lot of varied moves without using too many tiles. I don't know how many moves I'm going to give her, but essentially as many as is practical. Any thoughts on a common amount of tiles to use for the main character in a 1-player NES game? I'll probably exceed common, but I don't want to go so far that all of my enemies and locations feel generic.
Now, I know that the colors are not NES colors. I just kind of picked what looked decent to help me design. I can always change them easily later when I find out exactly what colors I have. But then again, the color information won't really be stored the same as in a graphics file so I'm not sure if that really matters for this step, other than for art direction.
This is my first draft but I hope to get any feedback that I can early so that I can start on good habits. The idea for the animations is that when she walks, her sword is sheathed, but after she attacks and her sword is out, I'd like to give her different combo attacks where she could move from one attack to another. So the uppercut attack animation is meant to follow the normal attack. If there are any suggestions that anyone has for making these work more efficiently, look better, or just anything at all, I'd love to hear it. Thank you very much for looking!
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File comment: Animated GIF. - First Draft

SwordGirl.gif [ 3.91 KiB | Viewed 3955 times ]
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File comment: Walk, Attack, Uppercut Attack animations. - First Draft

SwordGirl.png [ 42.96 KiB | Viewed 3955 times ]
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