Hello
So you want to be spriter? Well first thing you got to know is you won't be able to sprite real good right from the start. Like anything else worth doing, it takes practice. Don't be discouraged though, this thread is here to aid you! Go on, post your pixels, and CrazyMLC, Coops9753, myself, and anyone else who wants to help will do our best to critique and improve your sprites!
What program do I use?
In my personal opinion all you really need is MSPaint and confidence- but many use Paint.net or GraphicsGale, allowing you to do fancy things like layers.
Where do I start?
Well first you need to use the palette.
Cortex Command will only recognize these colours, your sprite will look really weird unless you paste it into a copy of this document. It's weird but trust me. Save this image, open it up, expand it so you have room to work, and use the eyedropper tool to select the colour you want! Switch to your pencil and you're ready to draw! Just remember that the pink colour in the top left hand colour is the invisible colour- so use it as a the background for your sprite and where you want it to be see-through. However, I recommend that you don't use it as your background while you're spriting- use a neutral gray or blue so the sharp pink won't mess up your perception of brightness.
Another thing is using a reference. A picture or something of the thing you're trying to make. Even if you don't follow the reference detail for detail or colour for colour, it helps a lot.
My sprite looks all flat, what do I do?
You need shading. Shading is making different bits of your sprite different colours so that it looks like light is hitting it.
Crazy MLC wrote a fantastic guide on this, you can read it here.
Here is a small collection of Vanilla (that means unedited content that comes with the game) sprites so that you can compare technique. Don't sweat it if your sprite doesn't seemlessly blend in- everyone has there own style of spriting, and that's ok.
My sprite looks all smudgy and blurry, what do I do?
Likely you saved your image in .jpeg format. Jpeg is a file format which saves space, but does this by cutting down on a lot of detail. Try saving in .bmp or .png, so that all of your work is preserved.
Other Links
The Sprite Dump is a great place to view other people's works, or to post your own when you're done.
This spriting tutorial is a really helpful guide created by internet and Indie Game superstar Derek Yu.
Post your sprites here!
And as a result of this, everything else looks a little odd. The backpack/shell looks to be jutting out on his right side, rather than out of his back. The only way you can really fix this without hiding it completely is to make the body face to the right more. I see you are trying to solve this by squishing up the right chest plate thingy, but that mostly just makes it look a little squished. Try to make them overlap more, as they would with a more sideways view.
