Suggestion on Death Poses

[Kilyle]

(I hope this is the right place to post this suggestion...)

I've noticed on some of the sprite requests and post requests that people ask for death poses and quite often get a regular standing character rotated 90 degrees.

I would love to see some more creative death poses!  The person making the request is surely capable of rotating a sprite, even using Microsoft Paint, so I can't see that this is what they are asking/hoping for, only what they end up settling for.

In the interest of giving some inspiration to spriters, I've put together a set of FFIV and FFVI death poses, and the closest regular standing or walking pose(s) that I can find.  (I didn't do all of the FFVI ones.)  I rotated the standing/walking poses into a comparable position, and if you look at the pic (especially zoomed in) you should be able to see that the death pose is usually different from the standing pose.  Sometimes the change is minor; sometimes it's major.

Major changes seem to occur when the character has long hair (as with Celes), or when the pose adds a level of perspective (which makes for a wonderful graphic, and is well worth aiming for).  Showing gravity on the hair and clothes works wonders.

Minor changes include changes that acknowledge the floor (changing any trailing capes or hair, making a general baseline for the pose) and show gravity in shorter hairstyles or firmer clothing (obviously not that necessary in armor).

Another common change is to move the hand up toward the head, obscuring the face (easier if there's already a side pose of waving or cheering to work from).

I hope that this compilation and these notes will help inspire spriters to make some minor--or major--changes to the standing/walking sprite, and really make the character's death look real.  Gambatte!  (Work hard/good luck!)

[DragonBlaze]

Cool, but those can't be used in rm2k3 without editing

I made some rather goary death sprites of some often used sprites. It was all done in ms paint by simple cut and pasting along with some rotating. Then I added some red for blood and it was all good

All I have to say is when making death poses, be creative

[MrMister]

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[Kilyle]

I didn't make the file to be used in RPGMaker.  I made it to show the distinction between a rotated standing pose and a good death pose.  You'll note that no blood is involved (doesn't need to be, if the pose is designed well).  I left the light grey in and made the rest light cyan so that you can easily see the boundaries between sprites.

I do think that the main point is to be creative.  Now, these poses are from professional games, and certainly part of what makes them look professional is that they put a lot of thought into their poses.  Notice that the death poses within a single game are distinct from each other: some characters face up, some down, and some (like Golbez) in a totally different direction.

Keep making good poses!  

[ZeroKirbyX]

And what we're saying is..... RM2K's size restricitions limit us from making them like that anyway.

[Kilyle]

And what we're saying is..... RM2K's size restricitions limit us from making them like that anyway.

Well!  Certainly not something I had thought of.  I did notice while working with RPGMaker sprite sheets that characters tend to be much smaller than the space allowed--I suppose this is to allow for giants who are larger than the main characters.

But let's see if your "size restrictions" argument bears out.  I have added a single character frame to the collection.  Are the single death poses--any of them--too large to fit within that frame?  My data says no; perhaps you'll disagree.  The widest example here is 24 pixels wide, which is exactly what is allowed by RPGMaker.  The rest of the FFVI sprites fit well under the 24x32 pixel limit, and the FFIV sprites are even smaller than that.  Furthermore, in making a death pose like the FFVI ones, the character is not sideways but up-and-down, and size is even less of an issue.

It does come to mind that perhaps you are thinking of characters who are taller (or in general much larger) than the standard RTP set.  Certainly some of the better sprites that I work with are too big to be simply rotated and used as death poses.  But I cannot think of any instance in which a walking/standing sprite rotated 90 degrees would be significantly shorter than an altered form that looked more like the character had collapsed or died.  In fact, given that the better pose usually uses a measure of perspective, it would likely be shorter and thus easier to fit.  Oh, and in a case where it is a bit larger, how difficult is it to create a second object right next to the first?  This should easily overcome any slight size restrictions that may exist.  (If I have overlooked something here, please let me know.)

So, again: Make poses, and don't just rotate the standing pose.