I'm not going to pretend to be good whatsoever at this whole spriting thing, but I'm definitely getting better each day, and enough so to do this whole project on my own. Here's an inside peek at how I made my latest sprite this morning.
I start by shamelessly copying an existing sprite from a better drawn game, in this case, a lizard dude from Castlevania, Order of Ecclesia (which I've never actually played, but I certainly would love to, if I had a DS or 3DS).
I do that just for the body shape and posture and to give a general idea of the outline, something to look at for reference while I draw this by hand. Then I add in the base colors to the dude- I know normally I shouldn't make them all blue, but theses guys needed to be due to how color factors into the game, as this is just one of three enemies using this base (one red, one white, one blue- and no, nothing to do with flags, theres also a green color in use).
Add in the texture and basic shading, I try to follow a simile of phong illumination on top of the very simple texture I put on him. In this case, theres only ambient & diffuse at this step.
Then I ran it through photoshop to bring up the contrast greatly, and a few other hue touchups. Its not immediately noticeable but helped a ton.
Then I add in those spiffy arms and big axe
Then I finish it off by putting on the specular reflections, and chop the result up into bite sized pieces, and add some extra leeway to those pieces where joints will rotate during rendering, then I load those pieces into my happy little kinematics program and can animate him easily. Add a few particle effects that spawn on his axe, and shazaam.
Its nothin to be proud of, not great work by any means, but I'm getting it up to passable at least, and the waterfall assembly-line process I've been using (and the nearly dozen different programs I've written as tools) have sped up development by a metric ton. A metric ton in metric time-units.
Advertisement
Pixelthief 
Favourite