E-Man's Sprite R & D

[E-Man]

Hello! I never got much of a chance to try out my spriting skills for various reasons that would take a long time to explain. One of the primary reasons is that although I was a fine spriter (or at least in my opinion) awhile back, the reality was that my sprites where "meh" compared to everything else on this site.

After polishing up my art skills at Full Sail and picking up a few things from you guys (including hue shifting), the thought of applying those skills with sprites popped into my head. Since I didn't have much to lose, I decided to whip these sprites up for this occasion. I know it's only a Mushroom from the Mario games, but we gotta start somewhere, right?



While I could just create a simple Mushroom sprite with the style I developed and leave it at there, I wanted to explore all my options, which is why I created nine variations of the shading. Tell me what you think and decide which one I am better off sticking to. (Note: The Mushroom is in a 2-D side-scrolling view that is common for Mario games.)

Note one

This is the first Mushroom sprite I created for this sheet. Since there is no shading whatsoever, any Tom, Dick, and Harry would be able to create this in a matter of seconds. Still, I needed something to apply shading to, so this had to do. Anyway, do you see anything positive about it, so I could (possibly) repurpose this style of shading (or lack of thereof) for any sort of project?

Note two

This is my first bit of shading for the Mushroom. I only used the the mid-light/mid-dark values to shade it. It's better than the Mushroom that I started with, but does it still seem a little bland to you?

Note three

This Mushroom is the same as the previous one, but I actually replaced the shading with darker/lighters values instead. This makes the shading more apparent, but does it make it look better?

Note four

I took the previous Mushroom and applied a little more shading by using the mid-llight/mid-dark values. Compared to the previous Mushrooms, this one looks more professional and has a better chance of being accepted by this site's standards.

Note five

In a sense, this one is a bit of a downgrade of the previous Mushroom. This time, the mid-light/mid-dark values are only used in a form of anti-aliasing. I would say it's a nice touch, but it hardly looks any different from the third variation of this Mushroom. By the way, I was planning on doing a bit of an anti-aliasing effect on the edges of some parts of the Mushroom, such as the spots. Since that would make the sprite appear cluttered, though, I thought better of it and just stuck with hard edges. As for why I did not use any transparent pixels on the outside edges of the Mushroom, it was all a matter of making my sprites easier to use. Besides, since most people use MS Paint to fiddle around with sprites, it wouldn't make sense to include elements that would be useless to them.

Note six

Basically, this is an upgrade of the fourth variation of the Mushroom. I managed to increase the coverage of the shading created with the mid-light/mid-dark values to make the Mushroom seem just a hair bit rounder. In my opinion, the result looks a lot more professional than the fourth variation.

Note seven

Up until now, the direction of the lighting is coming from above, which appears to be common for most video game sprites. Since I normally don't use light in that direction, I decided to change the direction just a smidgen to replicate how I usually shade. Compared to the previous six variations, this one looks good enough to be featured on the main site in my opinion. The only downside is that if I were to create other sprites using this light direction in mind, then that would mean that I have to almost double the amount of sprites I need to create if I am going to create poses for the opposite direction. Sure, a sprite like this one is no big deal since it is symmetrical (mirroring it would only change the direction the light is facing from), but more complicated sprites would demand more work to avoid the oddities associated with flipping (i.e. Link switching his sword hand if you mirror his sprite). Since this would would also apply to the shading I placed onto the sprite, then that would mean that I have to create a new set of sprites with the correct shading that are in that direction. Either way I look at this, this would either lead to two separate sprite sheets for the same character or one big sheet that would take a while to sort out. Which would be the better choice?

Note eight

This one is the same as previous Mushroom, but I added a shadow underneath the cap. Did I manage to do this right, or should I not bother with shadows like these at all? (Note: I'm not sure why it did not cross my mind to apply this shadow to the Mushrooms with the topdown lighting. Maybe I was thinking it wouldn't look good? Also, should I use the topdown light, or the light at an angle the next time I create sprites like these?)

Note nine

This variation breaks the rules of a sprite palette just a bit. To create the shadow underneath the cap of the previous variation, I used a color darker than the one in the shading area the shadow is going through. The only two exceptions where when it was running through the area with the strongest highlight (I wasn't sure if it looked appealing) and the area with the darkest shade. In the case of the later, the shadow underneath the cap and area with the darkest shade "merged" together. As an experiment, I decided to create one more shade value to create a color that is darker than the darkest shade value I was currently using for the Mushroom "head." Do you think this is a good idea? Should I remove it since it "breaks" the "rules" of how sprites appear in video games, or should I remove it because it looks visually jarring?

These are all my thoughts on the sprites. They actually turned out better than I imagined, but you guys know better than I do about these things.

Before I conduct any new experiments involving sprites, I have a question about frame-rates. Is the typical frame-rate for sprites 24 frames per second, or is it something like 12 or 10 frames per second?

By the way, I have other ideas in mind relating to sprite research. I will place them here in case any of them sound good to you. Which of these projects do you want me to tackle? I would like to do all of them to be honest, but I know that not everyone would care for them and/or some of them have been done already.


- Emulating the Paper Mario style to create the faries that will appear in Super Mario 3D World (loosely suggested by Devicho).

- An annalisis of the sprite style featured in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team and ideas on how to rip/emulate it.

EDIT: Not everyone wants to read a wall of text, so I took the liberty of placing all my thoughts and notes into spoiler tags to reduce clutter.