Let the age of the randomly drawn pixel girls BEGIN!

Not really a random girl, but it sort of counts I guess:


Ramona Flowers, of Scott Pilgrim fame, as portrayed on the cover of Volume 5.

I've done a bit of Scott Pilgrim stuff too! (don't remember if I posted these here)

I'm working on indoor areas lately, and still need a few tiles.
Any critique on what's there?

I messed around with your colors a bit - tried to separate the foreground from the background and give a little more depth. I like to use triplets when coming up with color schemes - using 3 distinct colors as a sort of starting point helps keep everything distinct, so I divided everything more or less into a foreground color (blue), a background color (cyan), or an accent color (rust/red). Maybe not the best combination but I only spent but 5 minutes on it.
 

Developing a character for a short little thing:



I'm leaning towards 8b or 9b, but don't quite know Some advice please!

2 3 and 4 all have nice silhouettes and posture that give it a lot of personality and make a statement about the character. All the ones after that have very standard Mega Man stances and very generic silhouettes.

Dinosaurs were 10x more badass before they started giving them feathers. Don't even try to argue science with me. Scientists are even worse than George Lucas when it comes to their fanbase.

If she gave the kitten a gun it would at least have been a more sporting fight.

STEP 1: Meet a girl

STEP 2: Show Cave Story to the girl

STEP 3: Ask girl if she would like to try Cave Story*

Congratulations. If you followed the instructions properly you now have an indie game-loving girl.

*If she declines, take her to see 500 Days of Summer and buy her ice cream afterwards. Then repeat steps 2 and 3.

The art of a game doesn't really have any rules except what is imposed on it by the design and programming. If you aren't going to be making art yourself and just want to be able to communicate well with artists on your team, I would recommend picking up a book on graphic design and studying the basics, or even taking an introductory course in graphic design if you're a student. You won't really need to understand illustration techniques for your purposes (lighting, shading, volumes, etc) but you will want a good understanding of composition, positioning, color theory, visual priority, and things like that. If you understand these concepts it will go a long way in communicating effectively with your art team.

Saying that animation is better or worse because of how many shades it has is kind of like saying a machine is better or worse because of how many moving parts it has. I'll take fluid motion over 50 levels of shading and busy details any day of the week, but I'm more into Western animation.

Kitteh.

Here you are, my good man!

I want a Tokyo-destroying monstrosity!

Same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice man, practice!

But more importantly, are you using proper construction techniques? There's some very good advice on that here:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/search/label/construction

Without good construction things will always look liquidy/floaty no matter how well you tween it.

I was wondering if you guys had any tips to accelerate the rendering process. I really prefer pixel art to photoshop stuff, but it takes me so long to clean up the picture, once I animated it. I love Snake and Tsugumo's stuff, I only wish I knew how they create so much so quickly.

Usually I don't clean up my roughs, I just make a new layer (I use Graphics Gale) and trace a cleaner drawing on top, then hide the rough layer. Of course everyone's experience may be a little different but I find that often it's faster to trace/re-draw than to try to clean up existing art, *especially* with pixel art.

Horseshoe crabs! We have TONS of those around here. As horrible as they look they're quite docile.

It has a lot to do with how characters in a game are portrayed as well. Most games portray enemy humans as either mindless hostile drones (like, say, Half Life) or as socially decadent sheep (Grand Theft Auto). I never realized how very intentional this was until, after beating Fallout 3 as a "good" character I tried to play again as a "bad" character. I started a killing spree but quickly grew very depressed because these characters were all unique, portrayed as having their own little lives that were getting snuffed out permanently with every pull of the trigger and were now gone forever. It made me feel so weird that I stopped playing and I haven't touched that save file since.

Killzone 2 also made me feel a little dirty inside but that was more because the game is downright racist (a people group, the Helghast, are portrayed as pure evil with no exceptions and therefore every last one of them on their entire homeworld must be snuffed out with no remorse). I don't know if this kind of thinking was intentional on the developers' part to force guilt on the player, but if it wasn't, it was a HUGE oversight.

I don't really know where all that was headed... fuel for the fire?

i think making a game to basically convert people to (aka "educate" people about) christianity is a lot more militant than talking about said game -- it's not like any of us atheists are making games trying to convert people to atheism

No, putting a gun to someone's head or threatening their family is militant. Making a game that can be played voluntarily and the moral/theological implications of which can be freely contemplated by the user is the opposite of militant. Good lord. Using language like this serves no purpose except to ignite tempers.

Alligator Snapping Turtle!
I've seen one of these live once. Now I do not swim in murky water.

Here's some good references:
http://www.lucidmovement.com/?p=171

http://www.lucidmovement.com/?p=104

http://www.lucidmovement.com/?p=70

http://www.lucidmovement.com/?p=168

http://www.lucidmovement.com/?p=128

P.s. he will have a steam powered backpack that the copter blades come out of. and at the moment he is missing arms. I am really having trouble with them.

Tiny arms! Tiny arms akimbo!

Another good resource for animation students is John K's blog (http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/) He is the creator of Ren and Stimpy and has a lot of good practical advice about animating that you probably won't find in animation books.

I've been in the process of "crossing over" into full-scale animation for a while and I believe anyone who can animate pixel art should be able to make the jump pretty easily. You must have a steady hand since you do not have a grid of pixels to "snap" to, and you must exercise proper technique, constructing your characters from 3D shapes, using key-frames, starting rough and making subsequent, cleaner passes, etc. But it's really not that intimidating once you know what you're doing.

Astro your experiment there looks pretty darned good! The construction seems a bit off to me (by that I mean you probably should have used more shapes and guidelines in your initial roughs as some areas like his eyes, his collar, and the tufts of fur on his chest jump around a lot), but for a first attempt that's quite impressive! Keep at it!

As far as how much tweening to do I think you probably did more than what's necessary. Especially for a project with only 1 artist you really don't need to go higher than 12-15 fps or so; (the actual game's frame rate can be higher of course)If it's animated properly the human eye will miraculously fill in the rest.

Alfred Molina is the obvious choice