(I'm the aforementioned founder [grin])


We had an artist in the past that had to leave us because he was moving who did a little bit of everything. He made an awesome sketch of the Goliath Scorpion (link to our artwork section here) , which is the first boss-type enemy in our game, and immediately after seeing it I thought "this is our battle sprite". We colored it in a few different shades and it ended up looking really nice.


Maybe for the boss enemy sprites (which will typically be large and the only sprite in the battle area) we can use this detailed sketch and color technique, and for the smaller, more common sprites we can do everything with pixel art? It might work out nicely.


The Goliath Scorpion sketch and colored finish in question are below.

You could try creating the art as a line drawing, colour/shade it, scan it, use it as a background layer and pixel over the top.

Draw it on grid paper!... no seriously... it sounds like an idea to me...

There is a comic we have in the uk called The Beano, for which they first draw each page in a hard pencil to get fine lines, following which they do it in a fine black ink pen. This is then scanned into a computer where all the colour is added, using something like PSP.

Areas of colour can be filled easily because it was done in a fine black pen, so there is no discrepancy of where the borders are on the picture when it was scanned in.

So in answer to your original question, yes do it the hard way ;-)

MidRi--

That's actually the path I just thought of taking--genius man. It's gonna work baby! I'm psyched about it.

There's a pretty good tutorial on making sprites here that you may be interested in.

this works really well for making small detailed icons but will probably work
for your case as well

use adobe illustrator/streamline or other vector programs to draw the images.
resize the vector art into sprite size and save as image file. the results are better than resizing a scanned image to sprite size.

Why don't you go to Square Enix's website and send them an email? I'm sure they wouldn't mind giving you their method, because they aren't really making too many 2D games (unless they make more GBA games)

Kazgoroth--thanks I've seen that site already. I don't like his blob method because I'm particularly not skilled at it. It seems to work though!

James Campbell--yeah I visited their site actually but it didn't navigate when I clicked on "contact" for some reason. I couldn't find a way to contact them.

If need be, I can read/write/speak Japanese so I can ask the original artist themselves [wink]