The Mana World Forums

Wanting to continue to practice pixel art so i've decided to start on a monster. I imagined it being a boss monster because of it's size where players would have to attack it in groups. Somewhere near the forest in Hurnscald.

If not maybe shrink it down a bit and make it like the flower.

Looks great. It could get some of the higher levels out of the caves and out in the forest. Also since it is outside it would allow mages to use falling arrows and other outside attacks.

Thanks Ink. Would appreciate some feedback on how to make it better. What to add, what I did wrong, etc.

Is the first image yours or one that you're using as concept art?

They are both mine, the 2nd one was the start, and the 1st image is a smaller version that I have worked on and put detail into.

Yeah I used GIMP to make these. My first try at a monster and it's not finished so i'm asking for some comments and advice.

I wouldn't recommend going any farther with putting more detail into single frames... do your line art first (remember to strip away needless pixels in the line art and refine it to 1px at most). I highly recommend making the line art for the first frame for each one of it's stand directions, THEN (skipping any idle stand animations for now), give thought on what kind of animation you want for the attack, and make the line art for 1 frame at a time for each direction. This keeps you consistent, and by doing the attack animation first before any idle standing animations, you prevent yourself from limiting your attack options, and save the easiest frames for last.

Oh, and one major major thing... break down your line art into components.... make the mouth, stem, and base on separate layers (you'll be glad that you did, because you will be able to reuse parts of those frames throught the animation.) You've chosen a fun sprite to make... don't worry too much about the stem and the base yet... start the line art animations for the mouth (head) first since that's going to be the focus of the sprite's main animation anyhow... heck you could probably be safe even coloring the head in after the 4 directional line art, before you've even started the line art on the other components for that matter.

Work in multiple files! Save plenty of revision versions! (multiple files!)

Sorry for sounding naggy, I'm excited at the prospect of this sprite.

Well I wasn't thinking about the whole sprite set when I first made this. Just trying to get a project out there and get some feedback to see if I had any talent in pixel art. I'm not sure if it even follows the guidelines on the wiki, like the perspective, shading, and as you mentioned outline, etc.

Thank you very much for these tips Fother J. I'm pretty sure they will help out a lot with this monster and in the future. I'm gonna start working on the outlines of the different frames soon, right after I read up on a few more pixel art tutorials.

Edit: Btw any suggestions on the size? Just right? Smaller?

We want some large monsters! I'd recommend checking with Rotonen to see what size he thinks would fit in.. but personally I'd say that the smaller of the two sizes you have is a nice size (if you get too large it can look a bit odd when it's attacking players, either the player is too close, so it lunges and bites past them, or if the player is below the monster, it's mouth will appear to magically slide underneath or through the player [which we're use to that happening with our current monsters, but they're within a tolerable range] if that makes sense? ).

Finally something which actually seems threatening to the player! (Size-wise.)

Really happy to see this. Just about anything I wanted to say was already said by Fother. Best of luck to this.

(As the final word of warning, the attack animation will be a really fun excercize to learn hand drawn pixel art motion blurring.)

Thanks Rotonen. Okay I guess i'll keep the size. Was just wondering if it was still too big. And I can't wait to tackle the attack animation, hope I can be creative. Again, thanks for all the comments, hope I don't disapoint.

Great job so far Goku! I don't know how you plan to do the attack animation yet but it seems you could go two different ways. The one I'm sure most would like to see would be a bite attack. This is obviously going to be more difficult to animate but I have reason to believe you could pull it off based on your skills so far. However an easier one would be a whip type attack with the front vine appendage. Once again Kudos on this and I can't wait to see the progress.

Edit: Nevermind, found it.

And thanks man.

Here's a little attack animation I made for it. This isnt' going to be the final one. I know it sucks, but it's something I made for fun for myself cause i've never made a gif animation before lol.