CHARACTER & ANIMATION Top down RPG (Pixel Art Tutorial)

in this video we'll talking about how to pick a perspective we'll also be taking a look at how I make a top-down character and the steps that I take and then I'll also show you how I take my

rough base and make it into different angles and as the last thing I'll show you my process and a few tips on how I animate a top-down character but some of this will apply to any kind of pixel art

that you'll make so let's just get into it and get started so why do we need to think about the perspective well there are seven reasons one the entire backdrop of your game will depend on the

perspective so if we have something like the more front view the game will almost not be top down and actually more like a side-scrolling beat-em-up and though if we take something like forty five a

sixty seven point five degrees it will have more like a pokemon is top-down look to it so if we take the 90-degree one then we have like an old-school GT a

kind of look to it so first of all think about the perspective that you want for a game because it's really going to determine how a lot of things will play

out in the long term so every time I make a character that I know I'll have to animate I usually take this three step approach so what is this three step

approach well first I make this like silhouette of the character and then I color out each limb like you can see I've done here my second step is to

refine some of the details in there if I use an outline I'll put the outline in there get the shape and lines in there that I know that needs to be there that does not mean the clothing just the body

parts of the character and after that my last step is to take that base that I've made with the colored limbs and then shade it up and actually make it to a

clean base the reason I don't give my bases clothing on right away is that I want to make sure that the body part is where they're supposed to be you can always dress it up later it's gonna make it so much easier for you in

the long run so when you make an RPG game it's important that your character can look and walk in every direction and I want to show you my approach to giving

all the angles into a base as well so you just have a clean character that you can work out from and you will make everything in the long run so much more convenient so like when I make the first step at

the base I actually take the entire rotation animation and make it with these like silhouetted shape first because if that looks nice you're almost guaranteed that it's going to look nice

very detailed this is a good way to check if things actually work out and fit well together imagine if you made all the finish frame first and you figure out like the arm is

a little of and you have to edit that a little bit and then realize oh it's maybe the back is a little of or the head is a little of and you keep things moving things around so this is a way of you to make sure that everything just

works right away alright so when I have to take a character from the standard post and detail it up instead of drawing the entire post I take one thing at a time so you can see I started out doing

the eyes for all the angles then now I'm working on the head for all the angles and you can see over on the right side I have a constant playing preview where it spins 360 degree so I can constantly see

if everything flows and look nice so it's important that you take one body part of one feature at the time so like I said start out with something simple like the face then move down and take

the body or something like that and then build your way out don't draw the entire frame completely detailed take one thing on every frame at the time that's a very

very good way to make sure that everything flows and you just have this nice way of checking it while you're working on it so I'm now someone happy with the form

of my 360 degree sprite here and we're going to detail it and finish it up here in a bit but I want to give a tip because you can see my character here is a nine

direction sprite and if you're less experienced this is maybe going to be a little bit difficult so if you are less experienced and new to this I would actually recommend you only making a

four direction sprite it can still move in 9 direction the more angles you make the more sprites you have to make thing if you make 9 direction like here I

would have to animate a running cycle in 9 direction and I would have to like dress it up in 19 so to make things a little less

difficult for yourself if you are less experienced just work with up down left and right but if you want to take the

challenge go nine direction alright let me detail this up and let's make it pretty so like before it's important that you take one step at a time in my

case here I first put out the base color then I shaded the neg and then I started shading the arms just take one thing at a time so I can always on my right side

preview making sure that it looks nice and pretty as I'm making it this is just a really crucial way to make sure that you don't get those Peaks that jumps a little bit around when you see the

animation play out that's something that annoys me so this is a good way to avoid that alright so this is the 360 standing pose now I'm gonna show you how I

approach animating a sprite like this and after that I'll talk a little bit about the reference you can use to make your sprite animation look a lot better who would have thought I take the exact

same approach when I animate yes so when I animate a sprite as well I try to do it this way as well so I make the

decision she makes sure that those flow very well I clean it up again make sure that everything still flows very well and then I clean it even more up and

make a final base and when I have my final base I can start putting things on that base and I want to say one thing about putting clothing on your character

is that like when I when I clean up the sprite you saw how I shaded first an egg and then I started shading the arm and then the other arm take one thing at a

time so first put on like a shirt make sure that the shirt looks nice then if the character has a hat or hair put that on make sure that that works nice so you take one thing at the time and always

keep track of that everything flows very well let's talk a little bit about reference when you're going to animate their characters because I could sit here and show you my approach of animating and character but to be honest

for the most part I'm just following a reference so I want to show you a few places that you can find cool reference that you can work out from that I've been using in the past and I still sometime use so I used this website called sprite

resources quite a lot it's basically a website that's archiving sprites from everything from old to new games new sprite based game basically you may not be able to find every game in here but

you can find a big chunk of good stuff so for example when I look up animation reference I just search up something that I know looks cool for example I really like kirby games that's a huge

inspiration for me so for example I can go up search Kirby and then I get a preview of all the sprites that has something would carry in them here and

let's just take this backdrop curvy sprite and you can see here I can see all the animations for this sprite I want to say one thing don't rip off the

sprite don't download it and just copy things out just look at it use it as a reference because when you use a reference you teach your brain how to do

these things if you just copy it you won't learn anything and when you want to stop using reference you can't really do anything so I would recommend just

have them on the side like opening up in a window or do something where you can look at it and say oh this animation have like this amount of frames I can see that he's kind of like bouncing up a

little bit going down you know you said that's a reference because when you study something you learn it so much more than just by like copy pasting things and then of course a good old

friend googled you can always search up like animation reference so there's a bunch of ways that you can find reference online so I really recommend go out there do a little bit of research

because it's gonna teach you so much by self studying a little bit as well shameless self-promotion time alright so you can check out my Mitch store if you

want to get a cool looking pixel t-shirt currently I'm wearing the mine monster oh you like it I hope you do too or you can check out my Etsy store where I

sell sprite sheets color palette some of it is even for free in there so a great way to support the channel thank you so much for watching everybody if you liked what you saw make sure to give the video a like if you want to see

more content like this make sure to subscribe you can also help me help you by supporting on patreon or be a twitch subscriber and with that said thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video bye

[Music] to be continued