Need Some Help From You Guys


Dannyxzero

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Jan 5, 2010
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Hello everyone I come asking for help, i want to make a 2D game that looks like a old Sega game like Contra or sonic. I would like some info on how to draw 2D Sprite, maybe a book or something online, I do not mind. I would be very happy, i have looked in all book store's and i cant find anything ;____; please help me out guys thank you for your time ^_____^
 
Oh dear, that's not a lot of information to go on! Unless we know more about what you're planning, there's not a lot of general information we can give you. Mainly, what programming language are you planning on using? This will affect which libraries you can use, which affects how you draw sprites. If you don't know which language to use, everyone on this forum seems to have an opinion.

Me, I'm partial to Python. First, you should get comfortable with the language; Dive Into Python is good for this, as are all the Wikibooks on the subject. Once you're familiar with the language, you can use Pygame for doing all drawing and other game-related stuff (they have a good collection of tutorials too).

Another popular choice seems to be the C++ language, using SDL for drawing and game stuff. I hear people talking about the LazyFoo tutorials a lot.

Or, if you want things to be really easy, take a look at the various game maker programs out there (like Game Maker). Any such games would be unlikely to be playable on the Pandora, but it's one way to get nice results quickly.

Good luck!
 
thank you both very much sorry about that tempel, I should have made what i need help about more clearly.... thank you very much ESN! i am studying C++...reading a book on it called "C++ with out fear"
 
Esn said:
Tempel, I believe he asked for drawing advice, not programming advice.

Go here and read some tutorials:
http://www.pixeljoint.com/

The OP could mean actually creating (drawing) 2D sprites, or asking how to draw them to the screen programmatically. Their second post seems to imply the latter.

@OP
Wikipedia seems to be as good of a place to start as any, Googling for specific tutorials afterwards will help you further.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_DirectMedia_Layer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opengl_es

Best of luck with your game.
 
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Triumvir said:
Esn said:
Tempel, I believe he asked for drawing advice, not programming advice.

Go here and read some tutorials:
http://www.pixeljoint.com/

The OP could mean actually creating (drawing) 2D sprites, or asking how to draw them to the screen programmatically. Their second post seems to imply the latter.

@OP
Wikipedia seems to be as good of a place to start as any, Googling for specific tutorials afterwards will help you further.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_DirectMedia_Layer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opengl_es

Best of luck with your game.

thank you very so much, im looking on how to learn to draw beautiful 2D sprites (like Contra for exp) know of any books or anything of the likes??
 
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Dannyxzero said:
Triumvir said:
Esn said:
Tempel, I believe he asked for drawing advice, not programming advice.

Go here and read some tutorials:
http://www.pixeljoint.com/

The OP could mean actually creating (drawing) 2D sprites, or asking how to draw them to the screen programmatically. Their second post seems to imply the latter.

@OP
Wikipedia seems to be as good of a place to start as any, Googling for specific tutorials afterwards will help you further.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_DirectMedia_Layer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opengl_es

Best of luck with your game.

thank you very so much, im looking on how to learn to draw beautiful 2D sprites (like Contra for exp) know of any books or anything of the likes??

If you're referring to the actual creation of the sprites, I can't think of any books that focus on pixel art, unfortunately. It seems to be a dying talent. Likely your best bet is to do as Esn suggested and find some online resources with tutorials.
 
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To be perfectly honest, the easiest way to make good pixel art is simply tracing over good pixel art, changing what needs changing, and maybe adding a few details.
 
Get Inkscape and do some tutorials, use it to make your images look nice, then convert to bitmap.
 
I did some pixel art about 10 or 11 years ago, and eventually got a job doing it. Best advice I can give you is to study some sprite rips, and adhere to certain rules. Old school sprites were restricted by the hardware they ran on, which resulted in restrictions such as 16 palettized colors (15 colors + transparent color), 16 x 16 pixels, etc.

NES, I believe, had 4 colors per part, 3 colors + 1 transparent color, which was often worked into the sprite but allowed background elements to show through. Sometimes a character would walk across a background full of stars and you'd see those stars on areas of the character that should have been outlines. Some characters or sprites appeared to have more than 3 or 4 colors, but this may have been achieved by layering more than 1 sprite.

Genesis and SNES (among others), had 15 colors + 1 transparent. SNES also had the benefit of different transparency modes. I can't remember too well, but I think the Genesis had a 64 color limit on the entire screen, while the SNES had 256 or something like that. GBA was similar to the SNES, though they had different transparency modes.

Tile sizes that made up sprites were restricted to powers of 2 in either dimension. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc. You could have a tile size 8 x 32, or 16x16, and a bunch of them stacked to give the illusion that a sprite is more than 16 colors, or larger than 64 x 64. 4 or 8 may have been the minimum size, though. A programmer could probably answer this one better.

I haven't used any modern 2D game engines, but my guess is they support some kind of basic, widely-available image format that allows a transparent color or alpha channel. Those include GIF, PNG, and probably others, so most any image editor should be able to create these. You'll want a more sophisticated tool than MS Paint to make these, though.

If you look past those restrictions, in general you should create your sprites with a specific amount of colors (the lower you go, the more retro it tends to look), and try not to use more than 256 colors over the entire screen. Separate the colors with visible gradients or dot patterns. Antialias by hand, using any leftover color slots first, then with colors that already exist in the palette for the sprite. Don't antialias the edges; they should be sharp with visible pixels.

Drawing the sprites themselves is like any art form: you develop your own style. Personally I like to go one of two routes to start them. I'll either start off with a rough sketch or pencil test of animated frames, scale them to size, and trace over them on another layer with black pixels, or start drawing the sprite from scratch, drawing with black pixels instead of tracing. That consumes 2 colors either way, black and transparent, but the tracing method is best with a program that can handle layers (photoshop, gimp, paint.net). In Photoshop, drawing should be done with the pencil tool at 100% opacity. This way there is no danger of drawing transparent or slightly off-color pixels. Other programs operate in similar ways.

Next, I fill the sprite with white or some base color that I can separate the background or transparent areas from opaque areas. From there I start filling out the character with colors and keep a swatch of that color on the canvas somewhere. Then I create darker versions of those colors and keep swatches of those, then use those colors to add depth to the sprite. If there's space in the palette (or you don't mind working outside a certain number of colors) you can start adding lighter or darker colors. If I don't want the black 'outline', I draw over those. From there it's just tweaking the art and adjusting the colors. Animation can be done on separate layers, or on a different frame if the program supports it.

Now the nice thing about palettized colors is that you can adjust the colors very easily. Just select all the pixels of a specific color using the magic wand selection tool, then adjust the colors as you see fit. If you did it properly, you'll also adjust the swatch you made at the same time. This is essentially how palette swaps work.

That's about all I can think of on the subject... I could go on and on, talk about tiling background tiles, etc., but alas, there is no time. Hopefully the above points you in a good general direction though. :)
 
This is the best pixel art tutorial I've ever found.

So you want to be a pixel artist

I wish this had been about when I started 20 odd years ago.

When I first started I used 2 colours :)

I'm pretty rusty these days and my last stuff was a few sprites in the NDS version of Warhawk including the main ship. My stuff was eclipsed by Lobo's excellent work though.
 
Esn said:
Tempel, I believe he asked for drawing advice, not programming advice.

Go here and read some tutorials:
http://www.pixeljoint.com/
WOW! :blink: Great site! We should inform these guys, that there is (soon)an Pandora Handheld out there that just waits for talented artists. :)

Gruso said:
Great post TJ. :)
Indeed. But in a shorter form: Do it like I did. :lol:

Joke. I needed many weeks even for the Background. But I actualy had no clue what I'm doing. ;)

Just keep the "rule of 8" and optimize the colours so that everything matches togehter. BG always should have less saturation/contrast as the foreground and the moving sprites like Player/enemy should have the best visiblility. Many Parallax Layers are always a good Eyecandy (I used quite alot, each cloud layer for example) and with the Megadrive "linecroll" technique you don't even need transparency in the Parallax-Background. :D
 
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I am not sure if this is the right direction for you but you could try hacking some nes games like contra,mario bros games ,zelda and castlevania ,you can do a full pallethack of these game roms turning the default charactor into something new ,it also shows you exactly how the sprites have been drawn ,that should help ,also you could do some sega megadrive rom hacks like sonic games or super nintendo games like marioworld.


Just a thought that it might help you.

Paddy
 
Thank you -TJ- your info Guide was of the most helpful-ness to me ^_____^

VRAndy thanks for the book I im ordering it soon ^_____^ and everyone else who helped me out, all the info was just perfect thanks to everyone <3<3<3<3<3<3
 
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