Zento Sprite Remade
Posted: 1-25-18
Now that I’d finally found a good style for our background artwork, I turned my attention back to the Zento sprite again. While the background art would have been fine for a pixel sprite, I still felt we needed something larger.
So I started to do some research and looking through available Spriter Pro assets. I wanted to find something to use as a foundation that was larger and had better animation.
There’s actually quite a number of these out there to choose from. But if you look at that page, you’ll see that the number of 4-directional assets is much lower.
It’s far easier to create animations for sprites that run only in two directions – left to right. If you want something that moves up, down, left and right, it’s much more involved.
In the end, I chose the Witch assets. This turned out to be a good move in several ways. Not only did this pack include two differently animated characters (witch and skeleton), but the witch actually has animations for casting spells and swinging a weapon that I can build upon.
While the style is a bit more cutsey and minimal than I’d like, the assets included full Spriter animations as well as vector graphics I could alter in Illustrator.
So I got to work modifying the base files, and after working on a few of the pieces, had something like this:
I showed this to Syn and she felt like the head was too large. She didn’t know I’d already shrunk it down significantly from what it originally was. XD
Anyhow, I really wanted to keep this sprite as the base, so I edited it down some more. I think she’s okay with how the sprite came out.
There are a few things I’d like to fix on this, but overall, it’s a good sprite to start with. Keep in mind, this is only the front-facing sprite. I haven’t started on the sides yet! That’s going to be at least another weekend of work.
Some animations:
