Fighting game wrestler

Okay, here's way, WAY too much information about a simple fighting game sprite. It all started with an "art jam" (boy do I hate that term) in the Indy Cred All Stars comic book self-publishing community, where we were tasked with designing video game characters based on ourselves. This was like two years ago or something. Here's what I came up with:

There's a much larger version of this guy in the Illustration section. I decided to go the Street Fighter route, and I wanted to try to go with a fighting style that hadn't yet been used in any of the Street Fighter games. I came up with a concept for a hardcore/ garbage wrestler, and made him look like me, only about five times bigger and meaner and scarier. He's got all of my piercings, and my hair was green and spiky at the time, and I actually do have vinyl pants and lame goth platform boots and stuff like that. Anyway.

A while later I got into pixel art, and wanted to try my hand at creating some fighting game sprites. I also got an idea for an art project that's still in the works, that being to design eight new Street Fighter characters, using all new (or at least mostly new) fighting styles and origins and costumes and stuff. I wanted to design the eight characters as hand-drawn, full-color portraits, and then do an animated sprite or two for each of them. And I decided to start with this guy. So far, I just have this guy, and an African soldier character, who you can see in both the Illustration and Pixel Art sections of the site. When/if I get all eight done, I'll make a new section to house all of 'em together.

So, following some advice I got on some pixel art tutorial sites, I started with a very simplified sketch of the wrestler guy, scanned it in kind of big, and applied flat, solid colors to it. Here's what that looked like:

Then, I reduced it to the actual size I wanted to work at, and fussed with the color levels a little, and started to add a little bit of an outline:

This about 90 pixels tall, which makes him a little shorter than the average Street Fighter guy, like, say, Ryu. But he's pretty hunched over, so I figure he's actually about Ryu's height. Part of this whole project is to try to create fighting game sprites that could theoretically be interjected right into a Street Fighter game, and have them match the style and size and everything of the existing characters. I doubt I'll ever be able to pull it off completely seamlessly, but it's good practice just to try to get as close as possible.

Next, I spent a long time fleshing out the character, introducing more colors to smooth things out, and adding some more details, like the spike bracelets, and the facial features, and the colored seam on the pants. I remember specifically wanting to make his pants look shiny and contrasty, like vinyl, but I just couldn't figure it out back then. Believe me, I tried, and it all looked like crap. I even went and looked for sprite rips of Lord Raptor, from Dark Stalkers, 'cause in my Capcom Illustration book, he's always wearing shiny leather/vinyl pants. But in the sprite rips I found, I discovered that his pants are colored in totally flat! So if those genius Capcom guys are gonna wuss out on trying to do the plasticky highlights, then why should I even bother, right? So I just left it alone. Again, this was about a year and a half ago, and I was pretty new to pixel art. I decided I was satisfied with the thing as-is, for a first attempt, and called it a day, even though the pants look more like black jeans or something. Here's the "finished" product:

Okay, chapter two, fast-forwarding about a year and a half or so. Over the last few weeks, I've been putting together this new Pixel Art section on my site, and in doing so, I've had to pore through my harddrive and dig up all these old sprites, and format them for the website and everything. I'm still pretty happy with the animated soldier guy, who I created a long time after this wrestler sprite, but the wrestler guy himself started looking really crappy to me. I started messing with it a little, and tried doing the highlights on the pants again. I've learned a whole lot more about this pixel art stuff since my first go at this thing, and I actually kind of got the shiny pants thing working, I think. Check it out:

If you've got any good examples of fighter sprites with shiny, leather/vinyl-looking clothing, with a lot of high-contrast highlights, I'd love to see 'em. E-mail me or something. I'm sure there are other, probably better ways to do this than what I came up with. But I definitely like this look a whole lot better than the old version.

So, I was so happy with the new look of the pants, I decided to overhaul the entire sprite, and see what I could do to improve the other parts of the body as well. I didn't want to start from scratch; I specifically wanted to take this old mediocre sprite and make it a lot better. My next step was to stetch the legs a little bit, and add some dithered texture to the platforms on the boots.

Next, I redid the musculature on the stomach and chest, and made it look a lot less flat and geometric. I rounded out the line of the back a little better, and made the waist a pixel smaller in the back, to exaggerate his body type a little more. Also, in my first shot at this thing, way back when, I tried really hard to put nipple rings on the guy, but just couldn't get it to work. So I tried again, and managed to make it work pretty well this time. And here's all of that stuff:

Next step, ugh, this part was really tough. The only large area of the body that I was really unhappy with was the arms. I didn't like the pose; it was supposed to be a sort of grappling "ready" position, but it looked more like Chun-Li's fireball stance. I didn't like how the bracelets looked so flat and rectangular, and I didn't like that he was holding both of his arms the same exact way. And the hands really sucked; they were way too thick and cartoony and undefined. So I redid the arms and hands totally from scratch, with no sketch to use as a foundation. It was rough, but I think it's a huge improvement:

Those bracelets were amazingly difficult, and I don't think I'll ever be completely happy with them. They'll have to do as-is. And I'm really proud of those hands. I tried putting black fingernails on the hands, but couldn't seem to get it right. The scale just felt too small; it kept looking like his whole fingertips were black, so I left 'em alone... for a little while.

Next, I redid the face and the shape of the forehead. His face went from looking pretty neutral to pretty mean. The longer, slanted eyebrow helped. I brought his forehead out a bit, to match my enormous forehead, and also added a mouth. Even though the mouth is a straight horizontal line, the forward tilt of the head makes the straight line into a frown, in relation to the whole head. So, awesome, that's a bonus. I made the sideburns a little more subtle, and also made the hair a little pointier here and there:

Getting there! And then I went and added a whole bunch more detail to the guy. I think I might've kind of overdone it, but I was trying to be as true to my original drawing of the character as possible. So maybe I overdesigned the guy; most of these Capcom fighting game characters are designed really simply and elegently, without a lot of little details. But anyway, I wanted to challenge myself with all of the small stuff, so I tried to work it all in. The earring's fine, but the labret spike might be a little too weird-looking. I'm not sure if you'd know what that was, without seeing the drawing of the character on the game cabinet or something. The nosering proved to be completely impossible, and that kind of sucks. That's the one thing from the drawing that I had to just leave out. Um, well, that and the tape on the nose, which is just too small and close to the skin color for anyone to even know if I included it or not. I didn't. Oh yeah, also, the necklace was in the original version of the sprite, but it got obscured when I made new arms and moved them up a little higher on the body. No big deal; it'd still be visible in other frames of his animation, if this were a fully fleshed-out animated fighting game character. Anyway, I got the tape on the fingers to work out okay, but the fingers are taped individually, rather than in pairs. I think that's fine. And I made myself try the black nail polish again, and I think I kind of got it! The bright highlight is really what made it work. The fingernails ended up looking a little bigger than I wanted, but that's pretty much how it always goes with small details in sprites, like the piercings and stuff. You always have to exaggerate the size of that stuff to make it visible and recognizable. If people think he has claws or something, I think that's okay.

Speaking of overkill on the design... I went to save this thing as a gif, and was surprised to see it was only 15 colors! I could've sworn I was working with 16 colors there (the standard number of colors for fighting games sprites), with all the shading and whatnot. I must've dropped one somewhere, at some point. So that suddenly opened up an opportunity to add a detail that I didn't think would be possible, since it was way outside the palette I'd been using: Blood! In the original drawing, the guy's all scraped up, from wrestling in barbed wire rings, and taking razor blades to the forehead and stuff. So I picked a desaturated red tone for my 16th color, and threw some cuts and scratches in there. Now he gets to join the ranks of Street Fighters Who're Already Injured When the Match Starts, along with Zangief and Sagat and, um, Cammy and... Alex... and probably some other guys. Here's the finished thing:

Not bad, eh? And here's an animation I put together of the whole thing, step by step. Remember, there's a space of about a year and a half between steps two and three, and then the rest were all done in the space of a couple days:

Whew, that was a ton of work for 90-some pixels of hardcore wrestler guy. I learned so freaking much from doing this thing, I think any other fighter sprite I do in the future will take about one-quarter as long. I hope. Anyway, if you read all of this, give yourself a goddamn medal. Seriously. Don't you have work to do or something?

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