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[NW_Kohaku]

Since it looks like all naga-lovers hang out here, I would like to ask what do you think about these sprites:


I was tired of a "generic snakeman" tile for all jobs for my naga in Genesis, so I've decided to work on soldier sprites for them. I was aiming for a more "monster-like" and less "human-like" look. How did they turn out to be?

So their heads and upper torsos are flesh-colored? I thought snakemen had scales all up and down? (And I think snakemen are supposed to have white scales as an albino cave species type of thing.)

I don't honestly like "snakemen" too much, since they are flat-out described as "evil", which I find a highly unfair assessment, considering they're no more characterized than any other creature in this game, and even goblins aren't treated as outright "evil", and they associate with demons!

Now then, as for the sprites... well... to be honest, I kind of thought they had giant pink afros at first glance.  (I didn't realize those were heads and arms.)

Something I find the more I try to make these sprites is that you really need to worry more about the silhouette than the details of these creatures. (And yes, I know I don't always follow my own advice in several of these cases...)  If you want to imply "serpent tail", you have to show it in silhouette, like you were making a heirogliphic, because you can't see line very well in a 16x16 type of sprite.  Coiling the tail and drawing a black line around it makes it harder to see, making the tail take up the whole bottom of the sprite is easier to see.  Making whatever they are holding take up blank space away from the body so you can see the silhouette of the object is more visible than putting a bow over the body.

For example, the guy with the spear is very clearly holding a spear.  The third guy is only slightly different from the fourth and fifth guys, and I can only tell that he's holding something wide and grey.  The fourth and fifth of those sprites look almost identical to me.  If you put those weapons away from the body, so I could see it in silhouette, I would be more clearly capable of telling the differences in shapes.

[Deon]

Yeah, my naga has lowerbody covered with scales and uppedbody covered with skin.

[NW_Kohaku]

OK, I got inspired to try a different pose... this one has a more aggressive naga fishing technique.  When the fish bites, the naga would potentially just be flinging the fish straight onto a rock behind her. 

(But if they wear skirts... umm... they wear something a little like a fat elastic band as underwear.  Yeah, that's it.)

[NW_Kohaku]

Yeah, my naga has lowerbody covered with scales and uppedbody covered with skin.

Ah, sorry, I missed the part where you said you were talking about a naga race, rather than them being new images for generic snakemen.

[Patchy]

Hehe, the fisher with her tail going over her head is funny... I like it. It's almost like she's getting ready to strike it once she pulls the fish out of the water with her tail.

On another note, have you tried drawing the nagas coiled up a bit? Or would that jus not show up well enough at 16x16? My own attempts I made at spriting tells me it probably wouldn't look good, but ya never know.

As for Deon's nagas, I think they look more like a fish tail with a peach blob of sorts on top. But if the monster look is what you are going for it is good enough if you ask me. I can tell which one is the spearman, but I'd have to use 'v' in game to tell what the others are though. Hope that helps.

[NW_Kohaku]

Hehe, the fisher with her tail going over her head is funny... I like it. It's almost like she's getting ready to strike it once she pulls the fish out of the water with her tail.

Spoiler: Look out, she's gonna pounce! (click to show/hide)

fierce!

Redid the tail a little so it doesn't look so straight and kinked in one spot.

On another note, have you tried drawing the nagas coiled up a bit? Or would that jus not show up well enough at 16x16? My own attempts I made at spriting tells me it probably wouldn't look good, but ya never know.

The soldier types (see: ) are the closest I've done to that.  I did more coil-y nagas before that, but they didn't come out right.  Simply using color and form to imply there's more tail behind the tail you can see is the best you can do.  (The regular soldier's darker, thinner tail behind the foreground tail you can easily see.)

Keep in mind, you can't really see one pixel.  You need to make anything at least 2 pixels thick if you want people to see it, and you need high contrast to get people to distinguish it.  That's why my hands are generally just 2x2 blobs of flesh color near a 5x5 blob head, and the rest of the body is just a silhouette, with a single hand stretched way out to the side so that you can see whatever she's holding without having interferance from the color of the body. 

I don't use any line, nobody would be able to see it, I just use the color of the form.  I use shading just for detail, to make it not look like a blob of one specific color, but it's just to make the form look complex, not to inform the viewer of changes in the form, which is impossible. 

I also like to use transparency - I tap the edges of forms with 20% eraser a time or two to make the forms look less hard-lined, and more curvy - that fishernaga up top has almost no 100% opacity beyond the first little dip downward in her tail on the right half of the image.

[Patchy]

Haha, there you go, awesome picture. Come on little fishies, want you come over for dinner tonight?

And kind of figured you tried coiling already, you seem to be pretty thorough about exploring options in most everything you do, but had to ask to be sure. Didn't know how it'd work out especially if you had to do a black pixel line to contrast the coils or some such. That was one of the mistakes I made first in my sprite attempts, I tried to outline everything in black and that ate up my 16x16 quick, fast, and in a hurry. Eventually got off that, and my sprites looked a bit better for it. Maybe I might give it another go later after my next fort or 2 falls.

[NW_Kohaku]

OK, I was going to wait for farmers before posting this, but I'm kind of proud of several of these, so here's the craftnagas...



craftnaga generic, woodcrafter, stonecrafter, leatherworker, bonecarver, weaver (with spinning wheel), clothier (in front of a loom with a robe), glassblower, cotton-candy picker, glazer, and potter.

[Patchy]

Very nice work Kohaku. Those do look exceptional.

[NW_Kohaku]

Does the glassblower look OK?  I could redo the hand on that one, and make the pipe not overlap the tail. 

I was also not terribly sure about the woodcarver - that's a knife in the right and a block of wood in the left hand.

I was really happy about how the weaver turned out, especially, but I want to make sure the weaver and clothier don't look like they have too large a set of items, as well...

I'm not terribly happy with the leather, but I can't think of a better way to give the idea of leather than the stretched out hide concept.

[Thrin]

Hey deon, if you're still looking at this thread, I tried to touch up your design:




The original is for comparison.

Most of the touch up was done to the generic sprite, by extending the tail so it would be less confused with a fish's, defining the head better and smoothing the flesh shading. I also outlined the weapons and smoothed their colors, but it would probably be best to go with Kohaku's suggestion and keep them separated from the main sprite.

The dull red eyes and gray teeth just blended in, and I couldn't get any other 'monstrous' eye color to stand out enough, so I just made them black and the teeth off white. The more complicated shading was just distracting the eye, so I simplified it.

@ Kohaku:

Those sprites look awesome. All of them do. Really. Though you might want to use a lighter wood on the clothier's loom, as until I looked close, it looked all purple to me.

[Patchy]

Does the glassblower look OK?  I could redo the hand on that one, and make the pipe not overlap the tail. 

Well to be honest, I did confuse the glassblower and addy extracter at first. Until I noticed green glass at end of the pipe upon zooming in and re-reading your posted order. You might want to try and seperate the tail and pipe end a bit, as teal of the tail and green are fairly close colours.

I was also not terribly sure about the woodcarver - that's a knife in the right and a block of wood in the left hand.

The blob of brown over her body is noticeable, and while it did take a moment at first to click that it was a wood log, I don't think there is anything to terribly bad about that sprite.

I was really happy about how the weaver turned out, especially, but I want to make sure the weaver and clothier don't look like they have too large a set of items, as well...

Those are fine, I wouldn't know a good way to shrink down their tools anyways. I'm pretty sure the old looms and spinning wheels were pretty large machines back in the day, so they fit.

I'm not terribly happy with the leather, but I can't think of a better way to give the idea of leather than the stretched out hide concept.

Not a clue how to represent leather better here either. Maybe give the frame that the hide is attached too a different colour to contrast it. Or recolour the hide to something else, I just don't think it looks that good with both the same colour. That'd be my only suggestion at the moment.

[NW_Kohaku]

I was starting with a pale stick and a dark hide (see the middle of the hide for the starting color), and then hit the hide with some 10% white progressively as it went to the edges, and it just happened to come out the same color as the frame.  It was kind of a mistake, but I can fix that pretty quickly.

Actually, color has been problematic on these farmers - everything is brown or green or gray, including the shirts and tail and hair of the nagas, so it's hard to get that necessary contrast without doing some color weirdness.

I'll redo the glass pipe, then.  I'll need to move the arm to do it, which was what I was avoiding for consistancy, and to make it a mostly "hat-based" swapping system, but I'm already making exceptions, anyway.

It might wind up looking like she's smoking a hookah afterwards, though... (And a naga with a hookah... now I'm thinking of that caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland...)

Anyway, I'll get the farmers done... *scurry* *scurry* now.



OK, from left to right and top to bottom, we have

• generic farmer
• cheesemaker (that's a wheel of chese, not a Super Mario Bros. fireball)
• milker (is the bucket prominant enough?)
• cook
• thresher
• miller (millers do wheat, threshers do other plants, which is why the thresher has a green plant (probably rope reed, but you don't put that in a bag), and they have a bag which is hard to see, yes, but the focal point is the plant in the other hand, anyway.  I couldn't make a brown or gray or green bag with all those colors represented, so maybe it's a leather bag?)
• butcher (LOOK OUT, MILLER, BEHIND YOU!)
• tanner (with new tanning frame for hides)
• dyer (always a funny sounding job title... that's a white cloth she has in her hands that is turning blue around the tub of dye... it kind of fades into her undertail, but is it a problem?)
• planter (with the triumphant return of the hoe from way back as one of the first sprites)
• herbalist (with bag... mushrooms are fine, right?)
• brewer (Who very much enjoys her job.  The cask isn't a distraction, is it?  I could wipe that out, and just make it the wine glass. It kind of looks better with just the wine glass, but then, she's more a drinker than a brewer...)
• soap maker  (soap is kind of indistinct...)
• potasher (shovel of ashes)
• lye maker (I had no idea what a lye leeching still looked like, had to look it up)
• wood burner  (too literal? alternate is just a log, or a log on a shovel)
• shearer
• spinner (I do like how that wheel turned out)
• presser (too simple?)

I tried to make a big floppy peasant hat, but it didn't work so well, so I made one of those conical straw Asian farmer hats, and that worked better.  I then thought it was stupid to make cooks wear the same straw hat, so I wound up making basically two different types of farmer head styles.  Except I already used the yellow bandana thing before with woodworkers - oops.  At least the woodworkers have red hair to keep them apart. 


EDIT: OOPS! Accidentally put some items in the wrong layer - herbalist, tanner, and planter need tools.




Also, I think Girlinhat has drifted off to go play another game, recently.  She hasn't posted here in about a week, and was talking about a different game before, so... 

[Sutremaine]

Three of those are identical. Second and third from the end on the top row, and the first one on the top row.

[NW_Kohaku]

Three of those are identical. Second and third from the end on the top row, and the first one on the top row.

Yeah, that was an error caused by pasting to the wrong layer (the naga and the things in her hands are on different layers for simplicity) - I made the second image at the bottom to correct those sprites.