Libbet the boulder girl

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nocash
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Re: Libbet the boulder girl

Post by nocash »

pubby wrote:Shadow should get smaller the higher she goes.
Whatever looks best. Technically it could get bigger, or smaller, or stay same size - depending on the light source.
I guess bigger shadow wouldn't look so well, same size looks good, and, yes, maybe smaller size could look even better.
tepples wrote:That's correct. A buffered move will execute without delay.
Okay, just wanted to be sure that you've kept it in mind.
tepples wrote:Yet the ZX81 tileset works without need for attributes.
Yes, but that's using dithering instead of colors. The NES version does actually have some source code option for 24x24pix cells with dithering, too. The dither in NES version is rather imperfectly implemented though.
On the other hand, dither+palette might help to get better contrast on NES. Or, using different colors (like replacing four green-shades by black, dark-green, yellow-green, yellow) might also help on better contrast (on color TV at least).
Anyways, 32x32pix cells aren't so bad for NES. With smaller sizes you'd get even bigger floors with more moves (making the game more difficult to solve).
tepples wrote:It's an animation cheat, I admit. Games are full of them. Look at how small the houses are in outdoor scenes in many RPGs.
No problem, I just meant that it might become a problem if the dimensions are totally wrong (and even then it might be fine if it doesn't look too obvious).
tepples
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Re: Libbet the boulder girl

Post by tepples »

I started with a Scale2x of the existing sprite (using this GIMP plug-in) and added a bit of depth to produce a double-size rolling animation. Anything I could improve?
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Libbet-roll.gif
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FrankenGraphics
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Re: Libbet the boulder girl

Post by FrankenGraphics »

I didn't read the whole thread so i might've missed something, but how about giving her a bit of directional shade? I think that could help balance the impression, what with all the intensive changes of rolling, and reinforce her sphere-iness.
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FrankenGraphics
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Re: Libbet the boulder girl

Post by FrankenGraphics »

tepples wrote:It's an animation cheat, I admit. Games are full of them.
Some cheats are easy to get away with. Others... are horrendous. See below for a gruesome mistake i made at one point:
disturbingknees.gif
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In roller derby, it is often beneficial to step-roll 360 degress around your own axis to escape a troublesome blocker of the opposing team. If you're doing it successfully, each leg shouldn't rotate around its own axis or swap hip joints :shock:
tepples
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Re: Libbet the boulder girl

Post by tepples »

Disney animators routinely make the same "gruesome mistake" with Mickey Mouse's ears that you made with your skater's legs. But perhaps it appears less gruesome because Mickey is less often seen rotating.
FrankenGraphics wrote:how about giving her a bit of directional shade?
I didn't try directional shade earlier because I feared loss of ability to reuse vertically flipped tiles. This doesn't hurt the jumping cels as much as the rolling cels. But now that I look at the CHR set that my sprite sheet tool produces, only six in-game tiles are reused vertically flipped: four in side view rolling and two in front/back view rolling. So that's a good idea.
Sprite sheet
Sprite sheet
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The horizontal line at far right is the shadow that shows during a jump. The squarish looking thing is used for setting up impossible triangle priority on the animation for falling into a hole. The priority trick works the same on Game Boy as on NES, with the caveat that when running monochrome software, the PPU reorders sprites with smaller X coordinates to the front.
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40 unique tiles, flipped ones highlighted in pink
40 unique tiles, flipped ones highlighted in pink
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tepples
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Re: Libbet the boulder girl

Post by tepples »

In [url=https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?p=235809#p235809]this post[/url], darryl.revok wrote:
tepples wrote:There are practical problems with asymmetric highlighting on a sprite that's going to be flipped.
I've [...] decided at the end of the day, nobody but me is ever going to care that the highlight might reverse sides. It's like when a character faces the other way, their handedness changes.
That's fine for a character who doesn't often turn upside down, such as Milca from my aborted attempt at a Cookie Clicker port. Libbet is a little bit different, as she sticks her head down and rolls. If you take art shaded to imply a light source in one direction and try to rotate it, she'll look like a cardboard cutout.
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rainwarrior
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Re: Libbet the boulder girl

Post by rainwarrior »

nocash wrote: Although, to be geometrically correct, the perimeter of the boulder should be roughly same as the width/height of the floor cells (so it takes one rotation per floor cell, unless you would want Libbet to end up with the nose on the ground after 1.25 rotations).
I remember people making jokes about π=2 for Stephen's Sausage Roll, and I felt like this impossible physics was an incredibly good feature for a game to have.
FrankenGraphics wrote:If you're doing it successfully, each leg shouldn't rotate around its own axis or swap hip joints :shock:
This too I think is great and probably better than a realistic turn. :)
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Re: Libbet the boulder girl

Post by tepples »

A year and a half later, I got requests on a couple Discord servers to add a light source to keep the cels from looking too simplistic like ColecoVision or early monochrome Game Boy graphics. I did so, eating the tile cost of not flipping cels vertically. Is there an easy improvement I could make?
Libbet.png
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I'll soon post an update about some of the floor tile designs as well.
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Re: Libbet the boulder girl

Post by tepples »

What I want to communicate are
  1. The player can (and is expected to) move onto all four tile types during each run. None of them is necessarily an obstruction. They are clearly distinct from anything that looks like a wall.
  2. There is a defined sequence to the four tile types.
  3. Each tile design should have a texture and color scheme as a redundant way of identifying its place in the sequence at a glance. This is why they have four shades: darkest, dark, light, lightest, and back to darkest.
I asked for critique of the version of the floor appearing in v0.06 in a couple Discord servers, and the gist was that parts looked like early 1980s graphics (Intellivision, ZX Spectrum, ColecoVision, and MSX), not the mid to late 1980s (NES, SMS, Game Gear) aesthetic that I was shooting for. I acted on suggestions for improvement from Daid, M-Tee, IRCWIP, and DragonDePlatino: darken the border around the floor, give walls and door frame a better defined shape, flatten the dark gray tile and push accents to the corners, and unround all tiles' corners. Are these enough to make the graphics look both readable and at least mid-8-bit?
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calima
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Re: Libbet the boulder girl

Post by calima »

Those alternating black-white-line tiles look horrible and poke my eyes out, so it's really good you replaced them. Other than that, no, the improvement is not that big to me.
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