Splice The Hedgehog: RPG Fangame.

Well I always imagined the one part of the forest being closer to a park, but eh. My ideas for this place are really running dry. I only went ahead and did this because I wanted to try and get some kind of general idea for a layout instead of leaving more than half of the map a huge empty space. I thought you were going to help with this map in particular though, Roy. You're better at making forests than I am.

I haven't done any real spriting in a while, so I decided to work on something today. I wanted to update Pearl's battle stance since her hair was rather stiff, but I really suck at dealing with hair so I have no idea if I overdid it or made it look worse or what.


Before --- After

The animation's great, but the coloring really needs to be looked at. There's hardly any contrast between the different shades of her hair. And her clothes. Everything, really, which makes the entire sprite difficult to read. Her hair specifically looks like a big blur as it is now, so even within smooth animation it's hard to work out.

There's also some inconsistent outlining--part of her sprite, her hair once again being a primary example, does not use any sort of outlining. However, other parts of her sprite, such as her gloves and dress, not only use outlining but use a really bold black color for their outlines. It's rather jarring.


I think this goes for all the spriting in the game, actually.

I'm aware that Pearl's colors are kinda messy at the moment, and did touch them up ever so slightly. My main focus at the time was the animation, which I'm glad that I have your approval of. I'll see what I can do about the colors now.

Tried again.


Before --- After

Made the black outlines less bold, changed the outlines to dark purple on her arms and dark blue on her dress, darkened her hair a bit and reduced the amount of colors in it while still retaining its shine.

Edit: Might just be me, but I found it harder to tell the differences once I posted the picture.

Contrast is still greatly needed on the sprite. The changes aren't really that noticeable aside from the outline fixes (which is a great improvement, although her face still uses deep black).

EDIT: my bad, the black on her face is also changed.

Like I said, it's difficult to notice the changes on the forum for some reason; though I'd figured that was because for some reason on this particular computer, some pictures I upload come out discolored.

Anyway, I just remembered that her face could use a bit of work too.



So how's that?

I think the contrasting might be better now, but it's a bit hard to tell due to a different problem, which is the way the colors are distributed on the sprite. It's excessive enough to have 7 different shades for a single color on such a small sprite (and perhaps any sprite, really), but they also seem to be placed in a way that's similar to pillow shading.

Ironically, the older sprite is slightly easier to make out because of this. Since there isn't much contrast on the older sprite, the shades kind of blend together and it looks like mostly one or two colors. In the newer sprite, there's more contrast in the colors, and because of that you realize just how many different shades there are and how strangely they're placed. Look at her face or her gloves and see how little shades are used there.

fixing battle animation alignments is THE most tedious thing you can do in RPG2K3.

All of Smash's animations have finally been fixed. I procrastinated a lot because I really, really did not feel like dealing with this. Eventually I'm going to save a backup of everyone's properly aligned animations so that if this ever happens again, I won't need to go through so much dread.

So, I remembered that Kitty actually has green eyes while I was fixing the buttons on the site, so I went back to go and fiddle around with his sprites.



The top row are the original three alignments, the second row is me fixing their eyes and also trying to give them all whiskers because I still feel like there aren't enough cat traits in the Hero Chao, seeing as it has one less trait than the other two. Thought they looked weird though, so I spread them out a bit in the third row (not counting neutral kitty since he looks fine.) I then fixed the spiky emotiball on Dark Kitty to match the rest of his secondary colors.

I actually had been working on Kitty during September. I don't have much to show, but I realize he needs quite a bit of reworking.