What I'm Doing Now

• Creating Sprites

  June 5, 2026

  And this is what Risky Boots originally looked like in the game. I think I actually managed to out-do this sprite! ... But the effort it took was ridiculous!

  

• Creating Sprites

  June 5, 2026

  Of course the later Shantae games became even better at it, so there is no shortage of inspiration!

  

• Creating Sprites

  June 5, 2026

  So what are my conclusions of this experiment?
  
  It partly works, but you still have to do a lot of manual clean-up afterwards to fix the things that it gets wrong.
  
  I probably could have just animated on a 2x2 grid instead of a 3x3 grid. With RockTheBull's Rouge sprite I was able to scale it up afterwards to 6x6, and then down to 3x3, and then shrink it in half with bilinear anti-aliasing. Animating the in-between frames on a 2x2 grid would have taken a little less time.
  
  This process is NOT a time-saver! Just the opposite. It is the sprite-animation equivalent of doing long-division. You do eventually get useful results, but you're basically brute-forcing it. And in the end you still end up doing a bunch of manual anti-aliasing and adjustments by hand to clean up the messy results.
  
  So you might as well just draw the animation directly at the native size and skip of all this scaling nonsense.

• Creating Sprites

  June 5, 2026

  If I have trouble figuring out the anti-aliasing, my old pixel-counting technique might actually be the better approach, because I can make manual adjustments right away while I'm tracing out the low-resolution version of the sprite.

  

• Creating Sprites

  June 5, 2026

  Incidentally, RockTheBull's Rouge sprite is the same height as my Risky Sprite. It looks like I still have a ways to go before I can create boob-physics like *this!*