I have a sprite of Tops the Pig. I would appreciate any arterial input from the resident experts of pixel art expertery, as I cannot call myself one and keep a straight face.
I intend to animate him. It will be torturous. I will need support.
I would add a highlight to his forehead. Maybe emphasise one on his boxing gloves, too. Add one to the top of his nose also. People may disagree with me though, I'm not fantastic at pixel art. Lookin' good though.
His legs are the same length, but his arms are not. Is this intentional?
I personally always thought that Tops would benefit from elbows and knees (which you can indicate with some simple shading), but it may be easier for animation if you kept things simple. Are you hoping to stay true to the original, or reinvent the character in your own style? You'll be able to take more liberties if you're comfortable with a freer interpretation.
The only other Tops fan art I know of is by me, and it's questionable.
I made the sprite using another of my attempts, a Paper Mario-style one, as a reference. It had elbows, but I drew them awkwardly. They'll probably return in the animation.
Jon Lambert has been thinking about an XNA port of his Tops 2 remake, so I was just experimenting.
Could you make some more frames for it? Intermediate frames?
Does there exist some sort of tool for animating 2D sprites easily?
I've always had trouble with animation.
Yes! But his gigantic junk was showing so I probably shouldn't upload it.
Hey OMC, you seem to have drawn Tops at a sort of 45% angle to what he would typically be drawn. I know I kinda did that too in all of my original sprites. I get the feeling he would be even harder to animate like that though.
Animating pixel art easily - Do you mean like something you can use to help you see how an animation looks, that you're drawing frame by frame? I'd also like to know if there is such software, as at the moment I just do what feels right then export a gif in PS and it's cumbersome.
You could always take the easy way out and animate it with separate limbs, but I feel that this looks exceptionally bad with pixel art. Like Shantae vs Scribblenauts animation, there's a huge difference in quality and believability. I don't think I could ever recommend the Scribblenauts way.
Sprite animation feedback: I think the arm on the left of the image goes back too far, and at some point during the animation there seems to be something a bit off where his leg/arm meet on the right of the image. I'm not sure exactly when it's happening but it stands out to me. It's a good animation though, you've almost got it. I really dislike animating - so much work!
Yeah he's definitely my character. But I don't mind people using him for whatever reason.
I actually made him along with a bunch of other character for an RPG I wanted to make before I owned a PC. It was supposed to be an epic crossover with tons of other stuff where all of the baddies found a way to join up in Top's universe to take over the world. He wasn't actually the main character but he was a sort of an already well known hero that naturally joined up with the rest of the crew.
But when I discovered TGF1 obviously the scope of a game like that was way beyond my skills so I dumped him in a few crap platform games.
You could always take the easy way out and animate it with separate limbs, but I feel that this looks exceptionally bad with pixel art. Like Shantae vs Scribblenauts animation, there's a huge difference in quality and believability. I don't think I could ever recommend the Scribblenauts way.
Yeah, the Scribblenauts way (I'd call it the South Park way personally) does look pretty awful. On the other hand, while animating sprites frame by frame does look a lot better, it also takes a fair amount of talent and time. I think a popular compromise is to rotate limbs etc á la Scribblenauts / South Park, but only use the results as a starting point - spending a bit of time carefully cleaning up the sprites afterwards.
And yeah, I hate animating too (with a passion in fact) - that's basically the #1 reason why I only make games with inanimate objects like tanks, spaceships, etc these days (the problem is that I suck at explosions and other special effects too ).
@OMC - My favourite is the left-most of the three vector versions - although it looks more suitable for an enemy than a player character (I think because the lack of whites in the eyes makes it look kind of evil, like a zombie pig or something).
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Edited by OMC
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