#230
Posted 31 May 2013 - 03:07 PM
That depends of the sprite. Most times those enemies are done by merging other enemies and changing details and colors. It´s a tedious work but once you get the hand of it it becomes a little less tedious.
I, for example, make a big image and paste all the tiles there, in rows. Then I use new layers for the changes. There are many quirks and tricks. If you want, say, a duke with black pants, you´ll have to paste all tiles you´re going to use in this sheet, then make a big selection that covers all pants bits of all tiles. Then you apply color/shading morphs. If you want a duke with a pig face, you´ll have to manually crop all possible head postions in the pigcop tiles and create a 2nd sheet from which you´ll copy paste the templates trying to find the most suitable for each new frame. Blending and other things are done manually with soft brushes. Then you can match colors from original tiles so it´s not a waste when you finally convert those tiles to 8bits. I think the most challenging part is making a convincing sprite with such small amount of pixels, a human face is generally as big as 10x15 so there´s no room for things like mouth or eyes, they´d look stupid if you used blue eyes or a red mouth, so it´s all about contrast. Finally, the most annoying part is doing hard borders in order to avoid artifacts when your tiles are finally exported.
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