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]

Again, there's no magic technique that the guys at Square used...it's just good pixelling skills using the drawings as reference...

I did this in 1/2 hr, using 13 colours...very low-res stuff...



So just take your concept drawings and practice copying them in pixels...

One thing could be, if you adapt the old style to new technology, quite sure you aren't going for this, but,..

with stuff like free alpha-blending and full access to 3d hardware that mostly everyone has these days, sprites could essentially be quite highres, and handdrawn, and not to forget, antialiased.. modern day sprites..


I see that as a more effective sollution ;)..


but on older sprites, I believe they'd first draw the outline of the sprite, lines and stuff, then color, and after that go into details..