Experimental Sprite Comic: Death By Chibi (take 2)

[Lordthenightknight]

Better. Much better.

Now you need to keep pushing the envelope here.

What I'm going to push is making pictures that I can do multiple poses in, since the static look was a big problem with the experimental strips. If that's something you mean, then yes I'm doing that.

Your new sprites are considerably larger, this is better than the opposite of drawing small. Try to keep your characters, ships, faces, etc at the largest size shown or larger, unless there is another image in the frame which is taking priority.

Yes, keeping the focus on relevant parts of a frame is important. I've been working on that.

Consider that your page is currently at roughly 700 pixels by 1200 pixels. Your frame needs to be made smaller (which I would do anyhow, 600x800 is the largest I'd suggest, considering you have additional materials on your page like comments and you want to limit scrolling for the comic itself).

Actually it varies depending on how many panels I'm using. I don't want to shrink that because using smaller panels would reduce my ability to keep focus on the things you mentioned. But I will work on keeping the panel count down unless a strip needs to be long.

Also consider that your standing characters/ships/whatever the frame is of should be at least half of the content of each frame. Currently, you are focusing on dead space. This is fine for panoramic shots to establish that yes, space is awesome and vast and such, but on every frame it will make your art diminished.

The point of the wide shots was also to have the stars always moving, so that it would show the ship is moving forward. But I evidently made that too subtle. Any suggestions on how to make that more obvious? Anyway the look I'm trying to do here is that you see the "game" below and characters talking above. But I should have stated that from the first strip.

Just because video games inspired this, doesn't mean you have to limit yourself to side-scroller, as well. Take a look at some other space-opera comics (I'd recommend Outsider: http://www.well-of-souls.com/outsider/ ) and see how this artist depects space ships. He uses 3-d rendering and sketch-work, but that doesn't mean his perspectives and angles exclude pixel art. In fact, taking what you are doing here, and applying it to a wider range of angles, expressions, and features might make for a pretty damn awesome effect.

Think about this guy:

(Image cut to save space, and since we already see it here.)

Aside for web memes, he is entirely pixel art.

No, he is not. Sprites and pixel art are are NOT about how they look. They are about how they are CREATED. That image is still made by the data on the game rom, and then rendered into an image by the game system. Therefore it is a sprite. A pixel art image is created by drawing with an image editing program.

Push yourself to this sort of level while keeping true to your medium. It would be impressive, demonstrate a damn good quality of colors and design skills, and would have enough of a novelty factor to attract people to you regardless of your story.

Regardless, I might go that far, but that much detail would make it harder to do multiple poses. I'm going to work on that before I try pushing detail again.

Don't ditch the side-scrolling aspect either. It's pretty cool to pay homage to the source, but go beyond it too.

I will have occasional farther and wider shots along with other shots entirely.

Move zig!

~edited once for clarity~

[SevenCurrents]

With the stars thing, maybe look at the lines on Star Trek or that infamous windows screen saver. Lines, while in accurate in the reality sense, portray movement easier in sketching (and fewer of them might make it easier to immediately grasp). I'm not really sure though. This might be the kind of thing you have to play around with. Space is tricky when it comes to portraying movement. Usually you can only tell speed by having something else in the vicinity to compare it to (asteroids, other ships, planets) and stars are difficult to portray.

I'd really push the reduced canvas size, and here's why: screen resolution.

"Most webcomics have a format of less than 600 wide by 800 tall, primarily to keep all viewers able to see your content (this is also true of most websites). You have to assume that your viewers will have the lowest common denominator when it comes to screen resolutions. Sure, most of us have larger monitors and such, but you won't want to alienate those who don't.

The second reason would be to isolate the content you are working on in each page. If you find you need more canvas, is everything essential to the punchline? Does it need to be one page? The Answer is usually no."

I put it in quotes because it's something a web-design buddy told me when I started out a few months back. Take from it what you will, his design philosophy focuses on the single concept/message in as efficient a format as possible. It doesn't apply to everyone.

I'm looking forward to your page four!

[Lordthenightknight]

I have an alternate starfield in mind. Working on it, and hope to post it here soon to see what you think.

As for the size, I started it when most PCs seemed to be 800x600 or higher. Now with video game systems having web access, a smaller size would be in order. Perhaps shrinking down from 384x288 per panel to 256x192 (DS resolution, BTW). That way I could fit 8 panels and still be smaller than that. But I will go higher sometimes if it calls for it, since I read a lot of comics that are usually bigger than that (especially Order of the Stick).

[Lordthenightknight]

This is the new starfield.



It looks a bit goofy, but if it's unlikely to make any of you think I stole it from a game, I don't mind.

Also did a little reworking with Pinkstar, since she's a tester for character images. I "tilted" her head down slightly, since her dress was drawn that way (and since it puts the eyes in a better position), and I dropped some of the extra colors just to make it easier to get multiple poses. The detail will be added back once I'm used to working with those drawings more.

[SevenCurrents]

I like it, its pretty retro in a good way.

[Lordthenightknight]

Okay, I have a new first strip, basically warning that the first year can be skipped. And a new current strip, that the first strip links to.

The first new story strip is up now. It's a redoing of the earlier strip, since I'm even starting that over.

[Lordthenightknight]

Okay, new strip, but I'll just ask that this thread be locked, and I'll re-pitch it with this new style once I have enough strips up.