Artwork - WIP - Space shooter

edited in General
Hi all,

With the huge amount of fun I had doing the pixel art, I have decided to make a small space scroll shooter, entirelly with pixel art sprites I have made.

EDIT: Whats the best resolution sprites to use, if you plan on playing this on a tablet? is 64x64 high enough resolution too look good?

Ship 1:

References:

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image

My current sprite 64x64:

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Comments always welcome, thanks.

Comments

  • edited
    Cool concepts! :) I feel that what makes them strong designs is that they have a strong, overarching (and simple) shape that defines them.

    So in the one concept, the ship overall appears to be a circle, with a rectangle cut out. In the other, it appears to be defined by two (roughly) triangular wings. This is great for making things easily recognisable. While many other shapes are in there too, it's really clear that these dominate. This is especially important for something like your sprite here, where it's likely going to be quite small compared to the screen.

    In your sprite, it's not really clear what shapes are the defining ones. Is it the grey piece? Is it the maroon piece? What is the overall shape? Is there an overall theme to the ship? :) You may want to go over that before you do shading and detail work and other fun stuff. :D
  • I get what your saying. I think it I will be dropping the maroon on the sides all together. I'm going for a bit of a mix between the two ships.

    Keep in mind these are not my concepts. I am stealing some shapes and ideas from existing games, and making them my own. So the end result is not supposed to be recognisable as either of those concepts.
  • I've heard it said that it helps to design the object in silhouette first, and get that appealing, and then move on to indicating different parts with shadowing and colour.

    Though I'd defer to @Elyaradine.

    The size of the sprites that you need depends on your goals. If this is for a tablet then it's got to look good on a resolution of 1024 X 768 or bigger. You can always play the whole game at 2X pixel size or even bigger. I'd suggest mocking it up at that resolution and see how it feels, and you can always bring it here to get feedback.

    If you goal is to do the art yourself and make a fun game you could go even lower than 64X64. If it were me I probably would, but I may have different goals to you.
  • Actually... @BlackShipsFilltheSky, you reminded me of this article on Gamasutra: http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/178656/sponsored_feature_drawing_basics_.php

    Slightly different context, but the page 4 information on silhouettes is amazing!
  • Oh, I forgot to answer the second part of the question. :P

    Tablet resolution can be up to 2048x1536, or something ridiculous like that. The thing is, you seem to have decided on pixel art. Pixel art generally scales up really well (as long as you're scaling up in powers of two). It's not like other styles of art where bad artifacts can cause it to look low-res. Pixel art already is low-res, and doesn't try to hide it. As long as you're using power of two scales (so that each "pixel" stays the same size), the pixel art *should* look fine.

    And yeah, silhouettes ftw.
  • Silhouettes first for the win :) Then, after you decide that, you think about the colour layers - lighter in front or darker in front? If you have shadows then it's typically darker further back. Think about outlines, are they black, darker, or lighter outlines? Think of one single system and have your whole thing constructed with that system in mind.

    I think your shapes were sound, but the colouring and layers didn't make sense - light over dark, but there were dark shadows, different types of outlines, it resulted in a difficult to read overall composition.

    Those articles are good starting points! :)
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