Xeon as he is sprited!

Xeon as he is sprited!

Redshrike's picture

OK, if you're on the IRC much I've probably already bombarded you with this to within an inch of your tolerance.  But not everyone is, which means I have more bombarding to do!  I have taken up an ongoing personal project: to resprite Xeon (http://opengameart.org/content/xeon-ultimate-smash-friends), a character who I made for Ultimate Smash Friends.  I am doing this for a few reasons:

1) I want to get better at animation, and a personal project with no time pressure and a smaller size than your standard USF sprite (thus easier to work with) seems ideal.

2)  these sprites would be more useful for a platformer, as opposed to a fighting game.  His appearance in Last Escape was cool, but in the platformer environment he could have used a bit more in the way of fluid, dynamic movement.

3) There just aren't many character-driven FOSS games.  This is something I discovered in the process of looking for characters to make cameos in Ultimate Smash Friends.  Tux makes quite a few apperances, but he's not so much a character as a prop in my mind (and, I think, many others' as well).

  I would like Xeon to serve as a viable open-source character with some character. One of the perennial problems of game-making enthusiasts is the lack of ability to make fangames (often to soul-crushing consequence when the C&D order comes).  It would be cool to have a series where "fangames" were not only legal but encouraged, and could be anything from free software to commercial indie games.  But that's just a pipe dream--for now, having a truly complete platformer character would be neat.

First off, here is a design sketch I did before starting these.  there are a few differences from the original sprites, both in proportions (sleeker) and details (minor): http://i.imgur.com/uuSyZ.png

So now, for the promised sprites!

The style of the adapted sprites is somewhat similar to Megaman X 1-3, though with some important differences in outlining and proportions.  Why does he have a scarf, you might be asking?  Because... I added it as a joke (Protoman reference) and started to like it.  I don't know if it'll make it to more animations, though.  Time and people's response will tell.

Rotation:

I made this animation to really nail down his design and to get all the basic building blocks for later animations.  I don't know how useful it would actually be in a game.

Running:

This animation follows the basic 10 frames shared by a number of similar characters, including Samus and Megaman X (including X and zero from 1-3 and Zero in Megaman Zero, and probably more).  Still, I think a bit of individual character emerges.

Now, the unfinished jump animation:

I took a fair amount of inspiration from Zero's jump (from Megaman Zero) for the keyframe.  Note that this is much shorter than an ingame jump would probably be--if I made it higher, the added translation makes the preview a lot less useful.  This is actually my second attempt at this animation.  You can see the first one here: http://i.imgur.com/rPTkG.gif

You can see the individual frames to all of these animations here: http://i.imgur.com/XPCWa.png

 

At the moment, the major issue is the jumping animation.  How does the new one look?  Etc.  But any and all comments on anything are generally good and useful.  I'll try and keep this updated as I make more stuff, though it will inevitably lag a bit.