Custom Chao sprite project

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Metalsonic3
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Custom Chao sprite project

Post by Metalsonic3 »

Sooo I appearently haven't posted here since 2011, figured I might aswell since I picked up my old sprite project (intended for a fangame) and well, decided to continue it. Thought I might aswell share what it looks so far, sooo;

Image

Ramble about the project:
Spoiler:
All I have so far is basically these, simple standing poses. I intend to have all the needed animation for all the different evolutions (up to type+type, not a combination of three), though it's going to be an insane project, even with just these basic evolutions. I'd work with the body and the head parts (as well as wings and emotion ball) seperately, but even so, I'd need to make the animations for all the different body types which have different coloring or patterns, or maybe even different shape (that one I prolly won't be doing though, too much work as it is :I )

Concidering I have to make 516 different heads; looking to the front, to the back, and to the side, and then a mere 22 sets of bodies with different markings (I'd reuse, for example, run type's body for all the run type second evolutions)... yeah alright, it seems like a pretty crazy project. I'd be happy if I'll just get these basic view sprites done with all the different heads XD and well, doing that.. it doesn't seem that bad really.

Hoooowever, as doing the animations that way seems like a HHUUUUGE project, I'm also kinda planning on simply doing the animation inside the program I wish to do the fangaming with, in which case I'd only have to draw all the pieces of the chao's body seperately a few times, then could change the look of each part seperately in MMF2 (the program mentioned), which honestly doesn't seem thaaat big of a job... so hey, that kinda makes the job easier :P just might not look as good at times, but yeah, allows for way more flexibility.

Oh and yeah, I'm still not fully sure how the fangame would be, but basically something like the Chao gardens in Sonic Adventure 1/2, with new stuff added in, new races and skills to play with, aaand well, yeah, just more new things to widget around with. Chao behaviour and life and such things would mostly work like in SA1/SA2 (adventure), though races, karate, and other things like that would have more to them than player just hitting a single button to boost chao's stamina.
New chao types wtf is this?
Spoiler:
You might be wondering about those last columns of chao's. Those are pretty much my custom ones, thooough are based on existing chao stats. The blue/purple column are all Wisdom chao (color of the stat being blue), and the orange/yellow column are Luck chao (the color being orange/gold). Neutral and Dark Luck chao might be changed, but the other ones will mostly stay unchanged, so heeey if you got ideas for those two, lemme know. I tried to somewhat base the Neutral Luck chao on Ristar, while dark one... well, that one's not really based on anything :P

With wisdom chao, they are sliiightly more based on something. Neutral Wisdom chao is in a way just... a weird alien with antlers on it's head, but is also partially based on Silver the Hedgehog. With Hero Wisdom chao, I kind of thought of Maria (this chao was originally white+yellow), though in a way, Hero Luck chao is also kind of... Maria-potential (lol). Dark Wisdom Chao is accidentally based on Eggman (and Bokkun). His wings are very cape-like (ofcourse not shown here), while those spike things at the sides of it's head someeewhat resemble Eggman's mustache.

Wisdom chao designs are pretty much what I'll go with, buuut like said, Neutral and Dark Luck chao are still kinda... unsure. Would love to see some ideas.

With inclusion of these Wisdom and Luck chao, I pretty much want to give the players more to find and play around with, pluuus I've always thought it would be cool if there was Wisdom or Luck chao. These two new chao types in my project also give room for more character chao during first and second evolution~ And yeah, I know that there's some uh, dare I say, chao elitists those won't approve of inclusion of new chao types, but I'm fine with that, this isn't official Sega thing anyway, nor am I trying to make this 100% similiar to what they have done, I want to add my own stuff too. Don't worry though, if there will be Sonic characters in the game, there won't be some ugly recolors running about :P
Wanna help with the sheet/sprites?
Spoiler:
Soo yeah, if there's anyone interested in helping with the project and doing some of the second evolution sprites (mainly head), that would be pretty awesome. Some rules to go with the spriting though;
- Don't use pure black (transparency issues)
- Don't use pure white (more transparency issues)
- Each chao should use 9 colors for the body, preferably 3 sets of colors, those all have 3 tones to them. This is just so that making the game part and doing the gradually changing colors for the chao won't be a horrible nightmare to work with lol :P I don't want to get technical, but even working with a single RGB color can be hard as all hell, gotta limit the amount of colors somewhere.
- Other two pallettes are for wings and for the emotion ball thing. I have some sets of wings to use not shown in the pic above.
- Shading is very simplistic, I'm sure it's easy to figure out just by looking at the sprites. One color is the highlight, one the shadows, and third one is the outline.
- Outlines are generally 2 (or 3) pixels thick.

And please note that the bodies for all the second evolution sprites will use the same first evolution body, but it can change colors.
If anyone wants to use the sprites done so far, I don't mind, though I'd like if you'd give credit :P I can also share a more complete sheet (with wings, emotion ball(s), and mouths) at some point too, once I've worked with those abit more.

Aaand if anyone wants to check out my previous chao sprite project whiiich I kinda scrapped, here: http://fav.me/d5zwmv9
Last edited by Metalsonic3 on Wed May 07, 2014 3:09 pm, edited 3 times in total.
eblu
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Re: Custom Chao sprite project

Post by eblu »

whoa, that's pretty much the best quality of spriting i've seen here

i'd do so much spriting, but i'm not necessarily that good at it

just going to say that you shouldn't recolor young chao, they have different appearances too

also chao ai is hard to replicate, kudos to you if you can actually make that in game maker/stencyl
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Metalsonic3
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Re: Custom Chao sprite project

Post by Metalsonic3 »

eboy wrote:whoa, that's pretty much the best quality of spriting i've seen here
Thanks! Weeell, my sprites are based on those SA3 sprites, though yeah, just based on :P Would've used those SA3 sprites cos of their perfect sizing compared to Advance-Sonic, but damn, those sprites are just too damn small XD
eboy wrote:just going to say that you shouldn't recolor young chao, they have different appearances too

also chao ai is hard to replicate, kudos to you if you can actually make that in game maker/stencyl
Young chao will mooost probably have just simple recoloring instead of any shape changes, but yeah, the color will change gradually between hero, neutral and dark alignments, aswell as any type alignments, so you can tell atleast from the color what your chao will be evolving to. I mean yeah, I couuuld make sprites for pre-evolution stuff too, but eh, I don't want to have 3 evolutions for the chao XD cos well, the second evolution in my game would be a quick cocoon evolution, waaaay quicker than normal evolution sequence. Would be waaay too much work to have sprites gradually evolving to different shapes hah. Though well, you know, I MIIIGHT add in pre-evolution sprites too haha :P I know it looks kinda dumb how a child hero chao isn't shaped like a hero chao. It's just that in-game it would look ugly to have it do the transition between normal and hero (or dark chao) smoothly if the shape is different without cycling through many different frames... which I'm definetely not doing.

And yeah, the AI will be pretty troublesome to make happen, I have ideas on how the game will work technically (how it calculates movement, wall/object detection etc)... but yeah, chao movement and behaviour and such will be pretty tough to make happen, but I'm pretty confident on how I'll make it work atleast to some extend.
dracomageat
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Re: Custom Chao sprite project

Post by dracomageat »

First of all, the recolour babies look fine. Second, the luck neutral and hero look amazing but I'm thinking the neutral might be better off as a luck + run or power second evo. Third, consider elongating the head of the dark wisdom and bringing the sides of the hero out a little at the top. This would fit in with the stat and might help balance their largely bottom heavy head designs.
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Metalsonic3
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Re: Custom Chao sprite project

Post by Metalsonic3 »

Yeah, definetely agree that my Luck neutral seems very... power-chao like XD I originally had more of a yellow color for this chao, buuut couldn't find a balance with the tones sooo... though yeah, thanks for the suggestions, I'll give em a go soon enough!
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Re: Custom Chao sprite project

Post by dracomageat »

I don't know, colourwise he seems very power but the spikes remind me more of running evos. Regardless, keep that jaw line in the final version, it really works.
Here's a rough approximation of what I suggested earlier:
Image

I'm still not 100% happy with the hero wisdom but the dark works a lot better like this IMO.

While I'm here, I had some thoughts on the second evolutions:
-Neutral swim/wisdom or wisdom/swim should have the swimming type V and lose its ears/antennae. Its lower head should consist of more downwards pointing wisdom points, somewhat resembling a two-pronged zora.
-Neutral normal/wisdom should have a crown of tiny bumps surrounding its spike but otherwise lose much like a normal type.
-Neutral run/wisdom should be an azure run chao with its 3 spikes in the style the wisdom chao's two. It should have the stripes in the wisdom's purple.
-Hero swim/wisdom or wisdom/swim should have a slightly taller head, with the swimming head bits coming out the upper sides rather than being tufts ontop. They should be a tiny bit thicker and longer than before
-Hero run/wisdom or wisdom/run should have less rounded wisdom head bits and the spike should protrude from its forehead rather than the top, resembling a unicorn's horn.
-Hero normal/luck should be a normal with yellow highlights rather than blue and the nodules pointed less upwards.
-Dark fly/wisdom should be like the fly but with more curve to its headpieces (less sharp turns) and a darker, bluer colouration.
-Dark swim/luck should have 3 little spikes on each cheek, resembling certain fish "whiskers".
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Re: Custom Chao sprite project

Post by Ciao »

OOOH, you're using MMF2? I've got a lot of experience with that! If you need help coding something, shoot me a PM! I can try to help. :)
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Metalsonic3
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Re: Custom Chao sprite project

Post by Metalsonic3 »

@dracomageat Oh yeah, especially that Dark wisdom chao looks alot better like that actually! That Hero wisdom looks pretty neat too, makes it look pretty unique, but yeah, gotta play around abit more with that design. And as for that Neutral luck chao (I mean yeah, my version), the lower side spikes wouldn't protrude as much to the back of the head as with Run chao, they kinda... just slightly point to the sides, while the spikes at the top point more backwards. It doesn't ofcourse really show up here that well, but yeah :P

Also I really like some of those second evo ideas! All the second evo ideas I've thought of have only been character chao, haven't thought of any more unique-kind of designs like that really. Thooough yeah, when it comes to char chao', I have ideas for about 10 more char chao to add in (all from Sega games, mostly Sonic chars)


@Ciao That could be neat!When and if the fangame project even actually.. gets going, I'd mostly/especially need help with the kind of... well, tedious stuff, like adding in all the graphics and setting their hotspots and action points and all that jazz :P and then adding in all the events for the chao to display the right graphics and all that. I'll still have to test around to see how it'll work and/or if there will be too many fast loops (for all the IDs, active objects, etc) going on for MMF2 to handle that well haha. Hopin I can have ATLEAST 4 chao per garden heh (though yeah, there would be a storage system and multiple gardens etc)
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Re: Custom Chao sprite project

Post by dracomageat »

Some more messing around shows you can easily do coloured chao, though two-tones are a little weirdy looking.

Image

Chacron and other chao that maintain markings are also possible under this system.

EDIT: Threw in an attempt at jewels. It's not ideal but nothing will be when you restrict them to a basic palette.
Last edited by dracomageat on Sun Jun 01, 2014 10:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Metalsonic3
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Re: Custom Chao sprite project

Post by Metalsonic3 »

Yeah, two toned chao would have different colors for the two-toned... stuff, like uh, for example, blue two toned neutral chao wouldn't have yellow (or green) tips, but instead cyan or something I dunno, but yeah.
As for those jewel chao (and well, shiny caho too), they actually seem pretty neat! A friend of mine actually had this idea of instead of having Shiny chao, there would be "glowing" chao, those would glow... in some way :P haven't given it too much thought, but yeah, could have some sort of sparkles (those I'd do ingame) for example.
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Re: Custom Chao sprite project

Post by dracomageat »

That seems a lot of work recolouring every chao's two tone's by hand. That's why I attempted to see if swapping just the first 3 colours would work (seen in last post).
I'm not all that pleased with my results but I will say that I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to palette swap a chao to monotone.

For the jewels, that was a 6 shade, 1 colour palette that cycled diagonally rather than horizontally. I guess, with the sparkles (or a glow), it could look pretty good.
Shiny chao wouldn't need anything more than a sparkle to work.

Here's my latest piece. I think it's a decent starting point but it's not a finished design:

Image
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Re: Custom Chao sprite project

Post by Metalsonic3 »

Yeah, I'll have to think about how I'll wanna go with two-toned. I might again kind of simplify them (compared to SA1/2B) and just make it so that two toned chao always have a basic body color, let's say that blue again, and then two of those... other colors, and I mean this is how it would be for all the evolutions, soooo all neutral blue two toned chao would be blue with cyan (and maybe light blue), while all hero ones would be lighter colored aaaand yeah I guess you get what I'm goin with here :P

Also, that Chaos chao is pretty awesome! I played around with alil bit myself too and well, this is what I got;
Image

Added in fourth body color pallette to, figured might aswell, would work with how child has just 2, adult have 3, and well, chaos would now have 4 XD
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Re: Custom Chao sprite project

Post by dracomageat »

Yours looks so much better. Is that final palette for the ball/flame?

I through together some monotones, just to see what they'd look like. The first version simply spams the first palette into every slot.

Image

The heroes are really boring though and the dark aren't much better so I thought to myself, why not break from the canon and use the second palette for non-neutrals? On all but the dark wisdom (he just looked too badass in midnight cyan), I think it turned out really well.

Image
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Re: Custom Chao sprite project

Post by Metalsonic3 »

The flame/ball pallette is just... quickly put together, I didn't test it or anything as I haven't made the flame sprites yet.
As for those monotone tests, that's pretty neat actually, kinda makes me think I'd like to have something alike to that in the (yet to even be started) game.

And also, seeing em monotone made me notice some small problems with my sprites here and there (just really small stuff such as Neutral Luck's head but yeah), gotta work around with those.
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Re: Custom Chao sprite project

Post by dracomageat »

Again, not perfect but hopefully workable:

Image
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