sprite Sprite Advice

[piders7]

I'm developing a scavenger hunt-like game based on the 1979 film, Alien. I realize there's already an Alien game on the Atari 2600, but I wanna make a game that's not a Pac-man clone.

 

Anyway, I'm not very good at creating nice-looking sprites. Does anyone have any advice or tips on making sprites?

[Jinroh]

For the VCS I find good use of negative space to be helpful, use the negative space and a few pixels to give just enough detail. Additonally you could flicker or combine sprites for bigger sprites or more colour.

 

Also I like to use the PlayerPal sprite editor to quickly doodle VCS sprites, if you've never used it before.

 

I used it to doodle this quick xenomorph, it's not super great, but maybe it will give you some ideas. You can also use the attached text file and load that into Playerpal.

 

Alien.txt

[piders7]

For the VCS I find good use of negative space to be helpful, use the negative space and a few pixels to give just enough detail. Additonally you could flicker or combine sprites for bigger sprites or more colour.

 

Also I like to use the PlayerPal sprite editor to quickly doodle VCS sprites, if you've never used it before.

 

I used it to doodle this quick xenomorph, it's not super great, but maybe it will give you some ideas. You can also use the attached text file and load that into Playerpal.

 

Alien.PNG

I do use PlayerPal and negative spaces every now and then, but sparingly. It's just my spriting abilities that're lacking. It feels really different from drawing on a piece of paper, y'know?

Actually, that Xeno's better than anything I can do. Mind if I use it in my game? I could really use some help with this game's sprites.

[piders7]

Update: I drew this terrible-looking Ripley sprite. As you can see, I'm no spriter.

Edited December 12, 2016 by piders7

[Jinroh]

Just playing around for a few mins. If you used two colours and flickered, I came up with what I think is a decent looking Ripley.

 

And go ahead, feel free to use any of these. Modify them whatever you want. ^^

 

RipleyDva.txt

Edited December 12, 2016 by Jinroh

[piders7]

Thank you so much! That Ripley sprite's far better than mine!

 

Uh . . . how do I add multiple rooms?

Edited December 13, 2016 by piders7

[Jinroh]

For your kind of game where you navigate a maze, you'd wanna setup a room structure. For the one unfinished one I have done, I did something like:

 

;Room Structure

ROOM1:

.byte #00 ;Exit North

.byte #01 ;Exit South

.byte #02 ;Exit East

.byte #03 ;Exit West

.byte <Room1DataLow

.byte >Room1DataHigh

 

Then say you index a table of Room structures based on your level number as an x index, you have all the pertinent data right there for you. Then if you exit say North, you just look up Room index 0 from your table and display that room.

[piders7]

Could you explain in Batari BASIC code?

[Jinroh]

Ah sorry, I'm not familiar with bB so I am not really sure how to explain it in bB terms.