At first I though he was joking, but I zoomed in a bit and they are actually pretty good.

I've got swine flu and am dying and stuff so I can't be bothered to looked through the thread but if you need someone to sprite something simple moderately not terrible then I'm you're man.

(Also offering self deprecation.)

I guess I should iron out some edges then. It's nice to know they're not total crap, but I think I'd like to have a better first impression, ha.

I'll get to work on some new things tonight.

I'm liking the theme. could draw some concepts if you like, to develop the idea a little. Its based on the aftermath of like a huge plague apocalypse right, with these guys being plague doctors?

Well it's just that you used such similar shades so that when looking from far away, you just see black. I dunno, maybe my monitor is just suck.

It really is pretty in in-game conditions.

I have a problem with shading it seems. I've gotten more than one "Too Dark" comment, but I'm trying to take them to heart, and really, it's all constructive criticism which is something I need, so thanks, haha.

And, thanks, they do look better in motion, but as I said a while back... so do a lot of things.

As for concept, I have a little sketchbook full of wonky stuff that I'm drawing inspiration from, so I'm good as far as that's concerned, but thanks for the offer anyway!

I'm nearing the end of this leg of the process. Just have to sprite a few more things and then it goes into testing, where I'll gladly throw the mod up to get some feedback. Speaking of which, re-working the "Templar" character sprite right this very moment.

cool beans. i might play around with it anyway, doing some iterations for heavier units and the whatnot because doing my usual procrastination i've been scrawling some of these down, and they're pretty fun.
i initially thought they might be a bit dark, but in game they look fine.

Well it's nice that they're not too dark. I was initially going to go for a very rusted look but then I found out that I can't "do" rusted. It all looked like... wood.

Anyway, yeah, feel free to do whatever with anything I upload. I'll have some actual, playable stuff up sometime this week, most definitely.

One shading recommendation I think you should take to heart is contrast. Contrast means having the darker color different from the lighter color, and so on. This will also add volume or depth to your sprite.

Don't have the darker colors just be a little bit darker. Make it noticeable. When I shade I usually go up or down by 20 on the 'Lum' or Luminosity (As it is called in MSPaint) when shading. Usually you want 3 or 4 shades for every color.

Changing the color ever so slightly with different shades can also add a lot of character to your sprite.

When spriting every now and again you should zoom back to normal and take a good look at your sprite. Sometimes if you look at it for a few seconds at normal zoom you'll spot flaws when you usually wouldn't when zoomed in.
When using extravagant colors make sure they aren't too distracting, unless you really want them to be, one good way to do that is to decrease the 'Sat' or Saturation, that will make it a little grayer, which will usually hep a lot.

Aye, I've been trying to do that, but I haven't been doing it enough I guess? Like, dipping into the light blues for metallic surfaces, or the dark reds for outlining some of the wooden areas.

Regardless, I'll keep that in mind. It won't kill me if I have to re-do a sprite every now and then, and I'll end up going over everything at least once before I unleash this into the public.

Some more recommendations:
Except for the outline, You shouldn't ever use black in a sprite.
Speaking of outlines you also want to shade your outlines, if they are pointing up or have a lot of bright colors around them, make the outline lighter.
If the colors around the outline are dark, or the outline is on the bottom of the sprite, then make it darker.
Try to make things flow, but don't be afraid to have dark colors next to light colors.

If you look at it and you don't like it, then redo it. Simple.
And yeah, major contrast jumps should only be intentional.

And if you're out of shades on the palette, when it's on the light or dark end of the spectrum just use a different colour. As long as you've got the main colour there it should look alright.

Aye, I must not be having enough differentiation then, since I do shade my outlines, and I only use black, dark blue, dark green, etc. in outlines. I'll keep all that in mind when I touch up the sprites. Probably just making the inside a shade lighter would fix MOST of the sillyness.

Edit:

A little preview of what I'm working on. Just a small body shot of another unit. I remade the Templar. All metal (on the guns now, and anytime I use it on armor) is now a sort of polished steel, a bit shiny.

Bumping my own thread here to ask a quick question:

I guess the simplest way I can ask this question is, is it possible to have a weapon's ammunition shown on the weapon itself until fired? This RPG-7 I'm making looks odd without the rocket on the very tip of it, but the closest thing I can think of is just having the magazine shaped like the ammunition itself. That seems like it would looks strange though, firing a rocket and seeing the rocket dropped from the barrel as the magazine is swapped out.

Do I have to dip into Lua to get this to work? I can't find any examples on this being done on existing weaponry...

No, no.
You edit image000.bmp to have the rocket on the end then have image001.bmp without the rocket, and set the amount of frames on the gun to 2 in the code.
The second frame will only show when the gun has fired/is reloading.

Ah, see, I didn't know it would stop cycling frames when the weapon was reloading. I thought it just went full circle every time you fired. Thanks.

Now I feel like a big dummy.

I'll upload a screenshot here in a second.



Alright, here's the weapon itself. Captured the rocket in flight.

Still having difficulties though. Everything should be set up right. RPG7000 is the weapon with the rocket, and RPG7001 is the weapon without it. FrameCount is set to 2 in the ini. Am I missing a line of code or something?