[LPC] bears, deer, lions and more
(Previews are animated, try clicking them! Note attack/death/feeding looks odd in preview)
Here's my entry for the LPC Spring 2022 contest. It was fun, even if the lion and bear I started with are a little jankier than the others.
Spritesheet Info
All animations are timed for 100 milliseconds. The ZIP file contains combined spritesheets and individual spritesheets, which both have the same content. All the walk left/walk right animations are mirrors and can be skimmed to one direction to save space if you want.
Sprite Info
Bear sprites (64x64). Grizzly, black bear, polar bear. Each has the same animations.
- rows 1-4: walk
- rows 5-8: attack
- rows 9-12: die
Deer sprites (64x96). Buck and doe, light and dark. Each row is a walk animation. The does should fit in a 64x64 space w/o shadows.
Fox sprites (64x64). Red fox, arctic fox. Each row is a walk animation. Foxes are designed for 48x48 but were slightly too long.
Lion sprites (64x64). Lion and lioness. Each row is a walk animation.
Mice sprites (32x32). Gray, white. First row is all idle positions you can switch between. Remaining rows are a walk animation.
Shiba dog (48x48). Play the eating motion to the last frame to start eating, and in reverse to stop. While eating, switch repeatedly between the last two frames of the same animation at 150ms or 200ms.
- frames 1-4 in each row: walk
- frames 5-8 in each row: eating
Giant rat (64x64). Each row has 3 animations (walk, attack, die) in the same direction.
- frames 1-4 in each row: walk
- frames 5-8 in each row: attack
- remaining frames in each row: die
Walking mushroom (32x32). Each row is a walk animation.
Shark (160x160). Each row has 2 animations (swim, submerge) in the same direction. Submerging can be reversed to emerge (still underwater in both cases, but submerging implies going too deep to see from the surface).
- frames 1-4 in each row: swim
- frames 5-7 in each row: submerge
Dungeon trap (32x32). The "trap" is a round circle that sits on the wall in a dangerous environment like a dungeon, and at intervals or when the player crosses it, activates by creating a gas cloud or fireball that travels downwards.
- frames 2-3 in both rows: start of gas or fire trap
- frames 4-6 in both rows: gas or fire trap in motion (cycle this repeatedly while it moves)
- frames 7-10 in both rows: gas or fire trap stops or hits something
Use the top right corner to show the trap is disabled or off. Use the snowman below it however you want.
Revision Info
Minor revision to deer, added FiveBrosStopMosYT's recolor of Sevarihk's shark, padded to 160x160 per frame
License
Sevarihk is responsible for the Shiba dog, shark, giant rat, walking mushroom, and underwater tiles. These files are marked accordingly. This is allowed under the CC-BY 4.0 license (first mention in comment #2 here). I adapted these sprites from Sevarihk's Aurora Sprites page.
Note that any work which isn't derivative of Sevarihk's work may be used explicitly under CC0, no attribution required. I also don't require attribution for my adaptations of Sevarihk's work (though attribution to him is still required when using derivative work).
The changes I made beyond converting to LPC color palette include:
- an eating animation for the shiba dog
- attack and die animations for the giant rat
- a fly amanita cap version of the walking mushroom
- submerge animation for the shark
lpc_animals_2022_v1.1.zip 421.3 Kb [541 download(s)]
shark_underwater_160x160_sevarihk.png 7.4 Kb [262 download(s)]
Comments
These are awesome! I know these will be very useful to many people.
If you're interested in some constructive feedback:
- Bears: their legs look too long compared to the height of their bodies. Their proportions are almost sloth-like :p I would shorten the legs and thicken the bellies. Probably increase the size of the east/west-facing heads too, which look much smaller than the south-facing head. South-facing head the perspective doesn't look quite right---it looks like you're looking the bear directly in the face and don't see any of the top of the head. The fur texture looks really nice on the leftmost bear color! The brown suffers from not enough contrast to appreciate the shading, and the white really needs at least one more color; it ends up looking flat with only the 3 shades. I would probably use the darkest color for an outline throughout.
- Deer: I'd make the eyes rounder---they look kind of malevolent as-is :p Same comment about the outline. IMO it looks strange not to have an outline around the belly (in the east-west directions). In general, you could probably use 1--2 more halftones in the color ramp---3 shades (excluding the black for the hooves/eyes) is not very many, especially for big-ish sprits like this! For instance, the top deer color, it doesn't look quite right to me for the front, belly, and the background horn to all have the same (pretty dark) color. Try adding another halftone and use this darkest color for an outline. North- and south-facing walk animations like this are hard... I'm not certain what to suggest, but you could try animating the back legs more deliberately (see some of the things BenCreating and I did in this submission for example---the movement is probably pretty similar https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-horse-extended ). I don't think the shadow sort of swinging back-and-forth is really working.
- Lion: These benefit from some additional shades, but this results in a different problem---banding (if anyone is not familiar with this term, see here and Ctrl-F for "banding" to see some examples https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299 ). Look at the east/west-facing lions, on the top of their backs. It seems you want to avoid transitioning from your lightest color directly to the outline, so you draw all the half-tones in between. This makes the outline look really thick and blurry, emphasizes the fact that the back itself is mostly a straight line, and generally obscures the three-dimensional form of the creature. Try instead to draw the back as if it were an ellipsoid. You can also add some shading to separate the back from the rump. I can do some example edits if you think this would be helpful. Compare to Sevarihk's rat and shiba, for example. Also there is something up with the lioness' face in the east-/west-facing directions.
Thanks again for your contribution! I hope you take the feedback not as criticism but really as an appreciation of your work and effort and an invitation to continue honing your craft.
I really should redraw that bear, haha. Drew the lion (badly), then the bear, then the deer (quality jump), then went back and fixed the lion's legs so it's arguably better than the bear (at least the body shape is fine), but by then I had too many frames with the bears since I did attack and die already. Finished the fox for another quality jump...I was actually reviewing all the animations along the way after finding this tool: Sprite Sheet Anim, which I recommend. Well I guess that's what happens when you go from 0 to 60mph on a style you haven't drawn for an actual decade :p
I think I knew most of the points about the lion and bear, but the deer has some new feedback for sure. Missed both the shadow flicker issue and the eyes looking slanted that you mentioned. Anyway thanks for the critique, I'll probably do some of them and update this resource. Not sure if I want to fix the bear, though. Lots of rework
Great!
Don't feel too pressured to revisit right away---personally, I often find it more productive to come back to something after a while with fresh eyes; I feel better about both the original and the improvements that way :p
A great thing about OGA is that someone else might pick these up in the meantime and improve them. For instance, I posted this horse in 2014, https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-horse , expanded and updated it in 2016 https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-horses , then it was further expanded and improved by BenCreating in 2018 https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-horse-extended .
Nice!
Added the underwater tiles in LPC colors to preview, fixed the deer eyes and shadow walking south. (Preview gif not updated for deer.)
I don't think I'll be doing any of the other suggestions, but please feel free to make any edits you want. The outline requirement of LPC is pretty unfortunate given limited space to work with and I have no projects goading me to do anything else, so I probably won't be contributing much more in this vein. I'm just glad anyone finds this useful.
Here's a recolor of the shark, modified to fit LPC. If you want to add it to your post. No need to credit me, as all I did was add an outline and some shading.
Yeah, it's probably good to have along with the stingray since there are some underwater tiles now, for when water is see-through. Added it (but not in the ZIP file) and added a revision log. It'd be better imo if it was padded to 160x160 like the other.
Yeah, I'm planning on doing the stingray too, but the tail is presenting some problems, as it's to skinny to add a proper outline. I can pad the shark if you aren't planning to.
I like the mushroom dude.
Thanks, or rather thank Sevarihk for that one. The shark is now 160x160, FiveBrosStopMosyt
I've been tinkering with the deer a bit. I'd like to use it, but the way it is now, it feels a bit out of place with some of the other sprites.
I think the "issue" is that the colour palette and the perspective are a bit off. I did a quick hack: I recoloured the deer into the LPC base palette (which messes up the colour ramps; I should really have used Eliza's palette) and modified the south facing frame by modifying the horse. This mainly has the effect of making the view more top-down rather than from the front. I don't know that it's better per se, but it's more consistent.
I'm probably going to do the other frames and see how that works out.
Oh, interesting. Is the perspective truly that far off? Hmm that's unfortunate, but if so that'd explain some stuff. I based the perspective off what the goat looked like in the LPC farm assets -- guess I should've gone back and checked the LPC style guide again. I know it mentioned the perspective and I know it wasn't an obvious angle -- I hope you do finish and rework these sprites. I would love to see them get use even if they're not considered good enough at the moment. I lost interest in this style though (however popular), but I'll be contributing other random things to the site as I make them
tapatilorenzo, sadly, I think this is disqualified. Sevarihk's art already existed, contrary to the rule for this challenge, "no existing art".
"ANY art (in the LPC style) that hasn't already been submitted to OGA qualifies for the challenge!"
Quote from ZomBCool.
Unless all this stuff was already on OGA, it qualifies. There are new derivatives in this submission, right?
Sevarihk had posted the rat. tapatilorenzo just added animations.
So some of it is new, some not.
The bears, deer, small rats, and lions are completely his.
All the others were Sevarihk's and FiveBrosStopMosYT's.
When I ported the rat over, it did not exist on OGA. If it's on here now, it's probably in Sevarihk's recently submitted dungeon art stuff. Everything is colored in the LPC palette, outlined, and I have new animations to everything. If you're going to count the ports as Sevarihk's, you must count FiveBrosStopMosYT's as Sevarihk's; that's just logical. So then you could say it's my work & Sevarihk's work.
Either way, disqualify me I don't care lol. But be fair about what is derivative or not.
(Also the fox is original too)
There is no question this qualifies. Any added value would count, but the list of additions here are beyond sufficient.
End of discussion.
Good grief... this is predominantly original, and the derivative parts are a substantial contribution beyond Sevarihk's original. Plus this is a FOSS website---we're happy to have derivative works here... it's kind of the point. Finally, gatekeeping entries to a "contest" with no prize and like 4 entries... my mind boggles.
tapatilorenzo, I really hope you stick around; I'd love for you to keep contributing, whether in the LPC style or otherwise. As I said above, this is an excellent submission and I'm grateful for it!
I've reworked the female deer by analogy with the horse.
Not that the horse should be some gold standard that all animals should follow, but as an arbitrary starting point, it's not a bad one I think. Plus, I was hoping that it would be possible to adapt the riding animations for the horse to the deer (riding deer is cool, if unrealistic; as far as I know their back wouldn't hold the weight of a human), but I suspect that's overly optimistic.
What I did:
Still left to do:
It's true that the goat (and llama) have a more extreme south facing frame than the horse and cow, which I'm more familiar with myself. So I guess there is no definite answer as to which is more correct.
Let me know if you want to include my edits into this submission, or whether I should make my own.
Thanks bluecarrot! If I make a return to LPC style, I'll look again at the style guide for angles and contribute it back here.
Thanks for editing the deer Evert. Good idea to add CC0 and CC-BY edits people make to this, since it keeps the versions together and I can pick the best ones for the "main" download. I think it's great you're working on the deer; I'll add that and any other edits sometime end of next week.