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[Calabraccio]

Hey all,

I'm trying to make sprites in the vein of Paper Mario 64's dimensions (sizewise, at least, rather than graphical style). The animation in that game is mainly facilitated by the larger characters being segmented, separate frames for different expressions with very few inbetween frames.

I'm just finding it very hard to keep my pixel art clean and segmented, and am not sure if I need to tackle spritework in a different way. Here's an example of some characters I've made that I need to go through animating (for a battle system, so animations like idles, performing attacks)





Is there a pipeline people are comfortable with to tackle these larger sort of sprites? Or, on a tangential note, making recolouring a little less cumbersome?

[Tobers]

I'm not sure how'd I'd go about slicing up/segmenting those characters. There's not much opportunity since they're so seamless; other than their heads.

If it were me I'd lean into a design theme that segmented out the legs (for walks) and then laser focused 1 thing to animate really nicely (eyes, hair, tail, mouth, etc...). Whatever exemplified that characters purpose/mechanic.

Also to fill in the gaps I'd do a procedural squash and stretch bounce of the whole character to keep them alive. Like a poor mans breathing cycle.

I'm not sure what program you're using, but the only thing Flash has going for it is a very robust find/replace function (you can find and replace colors by their hexcode). Actually I think you can render them without anti-aliasing too and you can  certainly get  the animation done in Flash. I would try to work in Flash (now Adobe Animate). There's a free trial on Creative Cloud and after that it's like $20 /month.

Yea the more I think about it the more I think Flash/Animate might fit your pipeline.