Character design: Milca

During breaks from work on my floating-point math library, I'm working on designing a character who hires grandmas to bake squillions of cookies. This is what I have so far. Feel free to tell me what I screwed up

The only thing I don't like is the color palette looking a bit monochromatic, but I don't know if your stuck with the palette you have. I would've chose pink in replacement of orange.

like it Goes well with the theme I think

You screwed up. Well, not really =) She looks good, I'd only suggest a few tweaks to the side view:

- The hand looks unnaturally curved. Pinkies shouldn't be as high as thumbs if the hand is relaxed. In fact, the arm is unnaturally straight, while the other angles suggest it could be slightly bent forward.
- The forehead looks protruded, because it's outlined with the hair color. Since she has bangs, the hair should appear to be covering the forehead a bit.
- As an improvement, you could show her ear to add some detail to the otherwise flat area that is her hair.

As a matter of fact, if these colors are constant (i.e. you don't change them to different hues to recolor the character) you could definitely add some highlights to the hair and at least put a little shadow where her nose should be in the front view, since that feature is so prominent in the side view and completely absent in the front view. A little bit of shading on the skin would definitely add some volume too (like shadow cast on her arms by her sleeves). If colors can change, I second psycopathicteen's suggestion of making the sprite less monochrome.

I really liked to cookie on her chest! =)

Thanks for the feedback. I'll explain a couple of the design decisions:

• Coloring: I didn't go with pink because I thought it would be too stereotypical, and I didn't want to have to use overlay for the cookie emblem covering the capelet's buttons the way Harvest Moon GBC draws Pete's scarf. The orange color may change during holidays.
• Forehead: I was trying to suggest a slight unevenness in the center of the bangs.

I made some changes in the second version below:

• All: Added shadow to arms below capelet
• Front: Rounded bangs somewhat to make them less uneven
• Side: Moved hand forward to suggest a bent arm; removed finger divisions because they're indistinct at scales like this with 25-mm-wide pixels
• Side: Bangs have more thickness when covering the forehead
• Side: Slight suggestion of an ear; I might have done it wrong

Still confused as to how to do these:

• Add highlights without confusing them with hair decs
• Indicate the nose in front without crowding the face
• Get the hands just right

And I may end up needing these:

• Older and younger versions for the cut scene where she retires and gives the business to her daughter. (No, I don't consider this a spoiler. Wikis and forums for the original version of the game have detailed discussions of strategy of how much to do before you reset/retire/prestige/New Game+, and there are online calculators that analyze an exported save file and tell the user whether to retire and pass on the experience for a production boost.) I know older is more lines on the face and graying hair, and younger is simplified shapes, hair decs, and a shorter body and arms.

My largely failed attempt. I didn't like how spindly the arm looks in the side-view, so I fattened it up a bit. Nose == meh. But I *think* the idea can be achieved with the right application of the dress color to the facial features. Most striking was the difference when I removed the outline from the front of the face in the side view. Not sure what that'd look like on the real thing.

Here are a few changes I'd make to the side view:

+1! Very nice shading!

Here are some of my ideas, use and/or discard them as you wish:

I cleaned up her hands, and added the nose on the front view. I also gave her dress a ruffled texture at the bottom because it looked a little flat/strange otherwise. I gave her some new shoes and shortened her foot on the sideview (Not a huge change, just enough to make them less boot-like). I altered the cookie on her chest to give it some better detailing, and on the sideview, I've interpreted it as a brooch and gave it some more depth. I also tried out a lighter eye because the completely darkened eye was kinda creeping me out, and I puffed out her bangs because the front view makes them look like they'd puff out more instead of just drape. I also tried out having her apron's tie be asymmetric.

I tried my best to add some kind of highlight to her hair, but I couldn't make it work; I'd ordinarily use a lighter shade of the hair color, but the only available color is the orange of her dress, with looked too bright and stood out too much like it was a decoration instead of a highlight. Given the graphical limitations in play here, I think it's best to just keep the hair simple.

All in all, this was a fun sprite to work with, you did a good job making her cute.

I also made this version, just in case you're planning on making a Japanese localization too. クッキークリッカー！

Another try. There are practical problems with asymmetric highlighting on a sprite that's going to be flipped. Cookie-as-brooch is interesting, so long as it's not too heavy.

But after making the above, I realized what one of Drag's changes was supposed to be doing: the protruding forehead might be interfering with the side view's femininity, as a brow ridge is normally more pronounced in XY and absent in Asians.

I took one look at cpow's "largely failed attempt" and thought "whats the craps?" It reminds me of a character from Selkie. Here it is with two different NTSC artifact simulation methods. Watch how the different $2x colors ($22 for sky and $27 for nose) interfere.

Yes I did think the side view looked rather skull-like or zombie-ish. That's why I said I failed...

Nice edits so far!


You can still add some highlights and keep graphics mostly symmetrical if the light comes from above:


This is just a quick edit, and can probably be improved.

I don't think highlights are going to look good on the hair when the colour will be the same as the skin.

It's looking good but I just have a couple suggestions:
- The outlines are looking a little jagged, try making the outline one pixel wide.
- The side view of the capelet looks too symmetrical, perhaps flatten the front a little.

I did a quick edit to show what I mean. I also made a few small changes to the design, just to give you more ideas.

The side-view hands look amputated or like mittens...

At scales like this (1px = 25mm), mitten hands are unavoidable because you can't fit four distinct fingers into four pixels. But at least make a suggestion of a thumb.

I'll need some time to look over these pics and see what details to change, as well as expected width of a head side-to-side vs. front-to-back. I might have to strip her down and refine the underlying "doll base", as some pixel artists call it.

I realize that. I just didn't want that knowledge to quelch my initial reaction since my initial reaction was "amputee" -- but I dumbed down my response to "mittens" and then decided that wasn't helpful so edited my response to include "amputated". I believe the appearance of amputation is not what you're after...

Haha, the thought hadn't even crossed my mind, but it does look a little bulky.
I thought I'd try to fix it quickly but it still looks a little stubby.

You'd be correct. Though characters in some of my works resemble high leg amputees, this is not one of them. And I don't really feel like writing about hand amputees because fine manipulators (especially the opposable thumb) are a big part of what distinguishes human-type characters from more "animal" characters. One might justify a mitten hand as an oven mitt, but then the flipped version (the character's other hand that doesn't have a mitt on it) would need a hand.

tl;dr: Mind the thumb.

Tokumaru's edit is superior, IMO.
Also, "Milca" sounds awfully familiar(but it is a nice touch, if was intended).

User "Conejo Pescador" in a Discord server for Cyanide & Happiness fans (of all places) made fan art

I kind of feel like this is placing too much importance on something that people won't notice (or care about) and sacrificing something that does make a noticeable visual difference on account of it.

I've gone through this thought process before, and decided that at the end of the day, nobody but me is ever going to care that the highlight might reverse sides. It's like when a character faces the other way, their handedness changes. How many NES games use the space, and the artist manhours, to create a version of the sprite tiles, and all animations, which face the opposite direction and have the weapon in the correct hand?

I feel like NES gamers can forgive limitations of the system. Or limitations that come along with keeping your work in a feasible scope.

To me, avoiding highlights because they will reverse sides would be almost like deciding not to let SMB3 levels scroll vertically because doing so is going to cause attribute glitches on the side of the screen. For those of use who did notice, we didn't really even care.

I think the highlights help a lot, but you could always put them at the top anyway to avoid the issue. Even that doesn't technically make sense though when your character's position in relation to a light source would change. But again, it's not going to matter to the audience.

BTW, I do like the character, in particular her costume design. Is that a cookie?

Yes, it's a cookie. She's supposed to represent the player character in the idle game Cookie Clicker.

I'm inclined to agree with not caring about highlights and horizontal flips with respect to Milca. But I know Kitty from Hello Kitty World has separate sprites for facing left and right to keep the bow in the right place. So do characters wearing black shirts and hats with a yellow "P" emblem in another game; it takes care not to turn them into "Q".

As for vertical flips in another character design of mine, I'll have a reply in another topic.

I discovered that the hard way trying to add said character to Super Homebrew War. I vowed never to make a character with a letter or words on their clothes for that very reason.

Dee Jay cheated death in this regard:

"MANTIS" was tried first, but Capcom didn't want to spend CHR ROM on storing both "MANTIS" and "MAИTIƧ" versions of Dee Jay's costume.