HOW DO YOU MAKE SPRITES?

Practice! As was said above, start by examining sprites that already exist. Try to figure out how to get the most out of every pixel. I'm amazed at how detailed some sprites can get, even if they only have a total of eight pixels for a head. Once you start to get a feel for which lines you need to weight heavier, and which ones you can kind of smooth over, you'll see a big improvement.

Build a Library. I don't mean that building with the books you need a card to enter, I mean a repository for pre-made parts that you can use. I have a set of templates I made for the basic walking directions for male and female characters. I like to take a basic template, and then just try to make up different looking characters. When I get a piece I really like, be it a hairstyle (which I am still struggling with, hair might be my weakest area), a piece of clothing, a helpful pose I save it for later. This way, when I'm actually trying to make up sprites for a project, I have this reserve of parts I can try out. Knowing that you have basic walking animations and some jumping off points for clothing covered makes it a lot easier to focus on the personality of the sprite instead of just trying to figure out how to make it look like what you want it to.

As an example here is a character sheet from my western in progress.


As a practice exercise, I made the surrender, drinking, sitting, quickdraw, eating and aiming poses. When I started making the character, I didn't have to worry about blocking the pose out, I just had to worry about how THIS character looked in a given pose.

Deluxe Paint 2 Enhanced. I've used this program since I was a kid back in the late eighties. It was, for a while at least, Lucasarts' go to program. They used it for everything from Secret of Monkey Island to the character graphics in the first Dark Forces game. It was possibly a decade ahead of its time when it first came out, and even now there are things that it still does better than other programs. You can make masks and stencils with a couple of clicks, you can shear and bend things in perspective, you can set it to automatically shade things for you, you can use angular/circular patterns on gradients so that they don't just look like gradients. It has a smooth feature that, when used correctly, can take a slapped together sprite and make it look like someone knew what they were doing with it. If you know what you're doing, you can even set it up to test your animation cells in sequence.

The only downside is that being an ancient piece of software, it is kind of finicky about detecting modern graphics cards. If you're lucky, you can get it running in 1024x768, but you're stuck with a 256 color palette.

If you can't find a copy of it online someplace, I'm pretty sure I've seen a couple of sites that have new programs that are built to replicate its functionality.

I started with one of my templates that fit the rough dimensions I had in mind for the character. Initially, I planned for him to wear a full length dark coat like my previous versions of the sprite did, but I figured that was way too generic. A while back though, I had an idea for a private investigator character. It turned out I didn't like the outfit, but it gave me a springboard into the button up shirt and holster harness look.

I tested the look out by pasting the clothes I made onto the template, with one of my stock hairs. It was a good fit. Next, since the character is an archangel, I decided to try making some wings. I roughed them out really quick. When I tried then out with the sprite, it looked okay, but there wasn't as much detail in the wings as there was in the clothing.

Using DPaint2, I made a couple of shading brushes. One with some feather outlines for shadowing, and one with just a few dots sprinkled around for highlights. I used the shade function to darken in the outline of the wings, then shaded lighter on the highlights.

Since I always saw the character having long hair (which went with the trenchcoat aesthetic, I guess), I tried a different look out for him. Ultimately, I wasn't happy with it and just tweaked one of my standard hairstyles a little.

Since I had the basic look for the character established now, and without really having to beat my head against a desk trying to figure out how to get everything to look, I started to focus on his personality.

He's a former archangel who still pulls odd jobs for Heaven, basically a private investigator/bounty hunter. In exchange for fighting people possessed by demons and carrying their tainted souls back, he gets to live on Earth instead of getting torn to shreds by his brothers.

This is not a happy guy. He's seen shit, hell, he's done shit that would turn most people sick. Fact is, he does it on a daily basis! He wears a tie, because he wants to look professional, but at the same time he doesn't really give a damn. His shirt is untucked, it isn't always buttoned up, and his pants are frayed. "Lived in" is an understatement for this guy. Once I put those little touches on, you can pretty much look at him and get an idea of how his average day goes.

Next, I set him in a box to make sure he maintained the right proportions and adhered to the size constraints for use in Rm2k3. He did.

I mocked up a pose with him holding two pistols with his wings showing to see if the grizzled P.I. look still fit with the rest. I was pretty pleased with it.

Then, once I had one direction figured out, I used it to help model the other directions for him. You'll notice that my "facing north" pose for him is still a little off. Because of the shirt I put on him, it looks a little like he's kind of slumping his shoulders forward. Since I might have use for that sort of pose, I'm keeping it. It may be fine to use as part of his normal animations, or it might be the first step into a new gesture that goes into my template folder.

A step that was not really illustrated well would be the removal of the hard black outline. There are many schools of opinion regarding how to go about outlining your sprites. For this character, I liked the look of just using the darkest shade of each color as the border. The one exception is on the face, which still uses the black line. This is just a personal preference, since I've found it helps the character faces to pop better.

Lastly, now that I know pretty much how this guy looks in each direction, I can start moving him into a couple other poses to make sure that everything still works.