On Critiquing Vyrots

[Woodledude]

Hello, everyone! I'm looking to get some opinions and critiques on some of my pixel art. Here they are:


First off, the lightweights. Good for scouting, special operatives, and the like.


Then something with a little more weight. These guys are more front-line guys, taking hits and dealing damage.




Let's take a closer look at out friend the Standard soldier (above, right). This might start to give you an idea as to exactly what these things are, though I'll cover that a bit more closely later.


And finally, I think this guy speaks for himself. He's the general of the Vyrot military (those guys abouve, as well as some others). I pulled from General Grievous a lot while designing him, while also mixing in a bit of Darth Vader for his personality.

Now, I'm sure you're wondering what these things are by now if you've bothered to read this far, so let's resolve that. These things are what I like to call Vyrots. The general idea behind the Vyrot was originally to be a physical representation of a computer virus, so the original designs started out as just geometry, as I was trying to pull from a sort of "evil nanobot" vibe. Triangles, squares, pentagons, and the like. I decided to lay off the higher side counts, and stick to shapes that were either four sides or under or an evident combination of such shapes. I felt they needed limbs, but I decided that connecting them to their body was too inefficient, as it was very limiting, I felt, so the disconnected limb structure you see here was used instead. The bichrome color scheme and flat, unshaded texture is partially an aesthetic choice and partially a result of my utter incompetence.

So now that we've cleared that up, I'll clarify what I want help with. All suggestions are welcome, of course, but what I want to do is to improve the design of the Vyrots, add more detail, figure out the internal structures and their supplementary external hardware, and figure out where to go from here. I've got some very vague ideas for a story for these guys, as far as their history and environment, but I'm not sure this is the right forum for that.

And with that, thank you for your time, and tell me what you think. If I haven't made an important detail clear, feel free to ask questions, and remember that his is all very much subject to change and a work in progress and all that, which is kind of why I'm here in the first place.

[Novally]

1. What are those (curious)
2. Are they supposed to be that big? It looks like it was scaled to be bigger.
3. I don't know how I can critique these. So I'll just have to wait for a more experienced/skilled artist to see if I can rebound of their point(s).

And Welcome to tSR. I love it here, and I hope you will too.

[Bombshell93]

2 immediate problems which are quite strongly linked,
lack of contrast and lack of definition. with the style your going for you want a lot more contrast to emphasize the form, alternatively you could have outlines, but I think contrast would serve you better.
In terms of design its an interesting idea, but their not very readable and need some immediate context, for presentations sake you should consider designing a world for the vyrots to reside it.

[Previous]

You should post these at their original size where one pixel is one pixel. Most of these are blurred due to bad rescaling, too.
Some of the greys you used are awfully similar and should be more different so it's actually visible that they're not the same. Other than that, your things here are mostly simple shapes glued together. You should consider adding shading and outlines to give them more volume and make them look less flat.

[Woodledude]

Thank you for the critiques so far, here's what I have to say to the advice:

These were scaled at 400% original size to be prepared for display, as I've pulled these from DeviantArt. Upon scaling I used GIMP's "No interpolation" feature, and I thought it did a pretty good job of scaling them. I'll have to look into this, and I think I see now that these should be presented much smaller than they are being currently. That actually might be part of the problem, if the site is scaling it down to fit, which is very possible. With that in mind, I'll take these pics down at the soonest possible opportunity and post 200% and 100% versions in their place (twice native and native).

The contrast is a problem that's been worrying me, but for some reason only now that it's said to me that I realize there's something I can do about it. As for outlines, I've tried adding them to the existing sprites, but it looked awful, which I suspect is partially due to them not being originally designed for it, and partially due to a bad color palette. That in mind, the most obvious solution is to increase the contrast between the colors. Also something that might help would be to actually post the color palette with the Vyrots, and I should've thought of that before. Would this be a better palette for contrast?



And a world, huh? I think I had a demo of a street lying around here somewhere, I'll clean it up and see what I can do with it, as well as maybe describing the setting in the OP.

[Novally]

Much better, but it's just hard to critique these. To me it looks like a bunch of shapes placed together, which is not a problem if that's their design. They showing depth with these sprites, these look really flat.

[Xeroph]

I think they look great, there are sprites out there like these, but if you want to make them more realistic and such, it's lacking shading, a lot of metal type shading.

[Gors]

No contrast, no depth, nothing really catchy about the design per se. As some people said, it looks like a bunch of shapes together. It looks too abstract to be read properly in the first time, I'd say.

Designing characters is hard and purely a balance between functional and charisma so if your character causes some confusion upon people seeing it, it probably means you'll need to rework it. This is not 100% true though, so maybe you can make it work this way.

One thing that needs to be changed, though, is to give it depth. Imagine this character as a 3d model, and try shading it as such. Also, better colors, contrast and hue shift might help your sprite pop.

[Koopaul]

Yup just what Gors said. Why I've been redesigning my same characters for years, and I continue to do so!

Why I once made a pretty basic character years ago and I continued to work and change him over the years until I created something I was really proud of.

Just some friendly words of encouragement. Good luck!

[Woodledude]

Hmm... I think I've discovered the problem here. Several problems, actually. It seems that a lot of you are concerned about the "flatness" of these characters. I'd have to agree, the characters are VERY flat - because, well, they are, in fact, flat. First of all, they're physically flat. They're essentially armored circuit boards, which leaves little room for excitement in the 3rd dimension. Obviously, that's no excuse for not shading them, I'm just not sure how to approach it, really, and I can't expect anyone else to, either.

Beyond that, though, their world is physically flat. The Vyrots were originally meant to inhabit a layered 2-dimensional world, with physics accordingly. Not like Mega-Man, or Metroid, where it's a 2d space trying very hard to be a 3d space, the world is actually meant to be a 2 dimensional space, represented as such. Everything revolves around that, including the way things see the world, how they move about and collide, everything. This is conceptual, and I'm honestly not sure about it, as it makes everything harder for very little reason.

Another thing about the Vyrots is that they depend on a lot. Firstly, as a militaristic nation, they depend on each other, as every Vyrot is simply another part of a larger group that functions together. But, more to the point, they depend on each other and their world to give them personality; essentially, they are context-based creatures. They are emotionally and logically flat, and of course they are the antagonistic group, and as a result, they depend on the world to have something to give them meaning, and they depend on their victims to give them personality. Bombshell was right on the money when he said that I needed some sort of environment to put the Vyrots in to make them readable, but, unfortunately, I haven't gotten around to solidifying their environment in any meaningful way, so I'd have to start there, and work my way out from that, essentially the opposite of what I've done.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that I've started in exactly the wrong place (with the antagonists), with ideas that are way above my head, and not nearly enough experience to pull any of it off. On top of that, I'm very much overcomplicating things. The irony of this situation is that I specifically started my pixel art AND game development career with the Vyrots because I assumed they would be easier to program and do art for, yet they seem to be the most complicated thing I could have possibly chosen.

From all this, I've decided on a few directions I could go from here:

- Rework the Vyrots into a more 3-dimensional design, making them easier to draw.

- Start over by switching to the protagonist group, which would probably be easier to draw and animate.

- Start creating environments for the Vyrots, to give them more context.

- Or I could just give up entirely, and try something else, possibly something more normal.

I'd like to hear what you guys think about this, and thank you for all of your help so far, you've given me exactly what I needed to think about and allowed me to figure all this out.

[Xeroph]

http://www.spriters-resource.com/communi...?tid=13868 This link will bring you to place to help you do shading, it is very useful

[Novally]

The fact that these are easy to draw kind of shows that there is a problem. add depth. It's possible. And if they are flat, there is a way to show it.

[Shade]

I wanted to make a little edit to see if I could help in some way.

I'm still not so sure what you're going for so I just tried to improve the original.

[Gors]

A fully 2d environment is a very difficult thing to conceive. This is because despite a lot of games being 2d, they are representations of 3d worlds, you can imagine it in 3d with little effort (backgrounds, characters looking in other directions, shading). By making a world that is strictly 2d, everything mentioned before is discarded, there won't be any foreground/background details as they wil always share the same axis; shading is inexistent because it is a representation of how light interacts with solid objects, and characters will have its movement and perspective severely handicapped. In other words, shadedbz's edit would be wrong due to placing pieces in different depth positions.
I suggest making the virots more tridimentional. Better use a common point of view which allows for more flexibility than a limiting one IMO.

Also in addition to that, make them more charismatic. Enemy robots and robots in general popular media are easily recognizable and easy to relate to, use this as an advantage to your designs.