So yeah, had a crack at creating my first sprite for Roshambo, i was inspired by the new sprites that have been made for SNK’s new King of Fighters XII, if you haven’t seen them yet check out the link, they look sick!

My character clocks in at 29 colours which i think is pretty good, i might change him later as i don’t know if the character is going to appear like this in game, right now i’m just experimenting.

Stay tuned!

So i tweaked a couple of things on the sprite that i noticed and that were pointed out to me by the fine people at FMHQ.us and i think he’s looking a lot better for it now, i figure i’m going to start animating him over the next couple of days which i’m looking forward to.

Still not sure if he’s going to make it into the game like this, if anything this has just been a learning experience while i figure out the techniques i’m going to be using to create all the characters.

Glynn’s up in Leeds for a couple of days, i got him to do a bunch of moves for use in Roshambo, the early days of Angry-san are here, exciting stuff!

Stay tuned!

One of the reasons Roshambo ended up derailing originally was that trying to animate a sprite in Photoshop is like placing your testicles on a desk covered in rusty nails and broken glass, then smashing them to a bloody pulp with a lump hammer.

I’m not kidding, Photoshop CS3 will allow you to animate frame by frame, but there is no onion skinning and skipping back and fourth between the frames was a chore, I spent most of my time guessing rather than observing the next frame, it was frustrating and in the end i gave up.

Well the other day by chance i discovered a free sprite animating software called Pixen by Open Sword, it’s pretty damn good, I can onion skin (only the previous layer but better than nothing) and skip back and forth between frames using keyboard shortcuts, meaning i can see what i’m trying to achieve easier.

Now it’s not perfect, it does crash a lot, but so far i haven’t lost anything important, while getting to grips with this program and learning the shortcuts, layout, etc, i’ve developed the frequent cmd-s habit. Also for some reason certain layers seem to darken or lighten slightly, i’m not sure why yet and as the Pixen forum is down i cannot ask why or for a solution, oh well.

Still, it’s free and has allowed me to throw together a rough breathe animation for my guy here, so i can’t complain, i’ll be able to flesh him out in Pixen easily then colour correct as needed in Photoshop afterwards, things are looking up!

Not perfect i know, the knees are floating all over the shop and the muscles are not convincing yet but as you can see this is just the rough, and i’m one hell of a messy artist, next time you see this he’ll be tightened up and looking sharp. Stay Tuned!