[MOB] Snake Guardian

[pateame]

The following experiment comes after merge two different pixelarts from TMW never finished, the "Centaur" and the "Snake Lord". As result, a light version of a soldier with less muscles, but armed with a spear.

[+] Spritesheet:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/364 ... -guard.png
[+] XML file::
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/364 ... -guard.xml
[+] Preview:

[SDN]

Look scary.
But yeah, its tail look sliced at the tip in some frame, and there is odd black pixels when it moves. Also when it's moving south, the hand movement looks awkward.

[pateame]

I did update the first post again, now with animations and spritesheet updated to current WIP. What I need now is to draw death frames and fix most of animations for north and south view. I'm trying to finish the spritesheet first, and later put the details on it to save some time while drawing pixels.
Have a nice double EXP day!

[Crush]

Why the checkboard dithering? TMW supports 32bit color depth.

When you want to give it texture, it usually looks better to not use checkboard dithering but rather to place pixels randomly. Also, the shading on the head looks strange. This is how you shade a spherical object:



Otherwise I really like the animation.

[pateame]

I tryed to do a more detailed texture with snake scales, but as spritesheet demands a huge work on each frame I used the dithering as a base. In that way, random color textures can be obtained when doing some blur over dithered areas, for example:
(Dithered > blur)
I wish to have a reference, something like one drawed frame on each view with a suggested texture to improve the final result when the spritesheet be ready to put details on it.

[SDN]

Hmm, just suggestion, instead of trying to draw scale textures on that small sprite, why not make simple snake skin motifs like diamonds or stripes?

[pateame]

I'm far away from finish this... but did update the spritesheet and animations again, now transforming most of checkboard dithering into a solid texture, also redrawing the north view with a wide chest, the south view now is attacking using the right hand and I'm including the death animations on it.
More frames, more problems ... maybe trowing a Mylarin dust bottle over it

[SDN]

I wish to have a reference, something like one drawed frame on each view with a suggested texture to improve the final result when the spritesheet be ready to put details on it.

Oh, i'm sorry. I forgot you wrote this before i make suggestions. About drawing snake skin motifs rather than using dithering or blurring method, maybe you can try make something like this:

snake-soldier-diamondback.png (3.17 KiB) Viewed 13231 times

Or you can do other snake skin motifs like srtipes/rings:
Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake

If you really want to draw each scale pixels on every frame in small object, you might want to look for one of Might and Magic II Medusa sprites. I believe that is copyright protected tho.

But it is all up to you. You've done a good job for this snakes soldier.

[pateame]

Thanks for your time doing texture examples. God's geometry is quite hard to emulate, but I'll give a try to learn when finish with stand animations.
Recently I was having fun with a customdata patch, trying to test the recently developed mobs and their XML files, but I got some problems with this big guy.
The problems were the following:

1) When using item transformation (replacing yeti), the graphics in the nickname area are missing.
2) Using it as a monster (replacing mouboo xD), the target name displays too high (already notifyed)
3) When getting closer to collision areas, monster overrides the tile layer
4) When attacking using item transformation, spear graphics on left and right are missing.
I tryed modifying offsetX and offsetY in animations, and monsters.xml with a different targetCursor, but still got the same errors. Any help is appreciated, I'm lost with coding stuff...

@@EDIT: Spritesheet and XML file updated with stand animations, I think it's now a usable version. I'll do fixes if needed but after all this work, current version makes me happy. later!