Of monsters and sprites

After I found the first video game bead creations, which I had used as a model for my own creations, lacking in accuracy I turned my eye to the game sprites.

And just for clarification, I’m not trying to imply that all the characters people have made from beads are inaccurate. I’m sure that most of them are exactly like the ones in the original games. I just had bad luck picking those that weren’t =)

For those of you who don’t know, a sprite is a two-dimensional image used in computer graphics. That's the gist of it, but if you want to know more check out the fancy description in Wikipedia. Character’s every position has its own sprite. For example see this sprite sheet of Mario from SMB 1 (image from mariomayhem.com). 
 

Google is great help when you’re searching for sprites. Just type the name of the game or the name of the character and sprites and there will be plenty of results. I have come to favour this site spriters-resource.com, when I need a sprite, but I still use google from time to time. It’s good to remember that these aren’t the original sprites, but something that people have ripped from the games by themselves. So the sprites aren’t infallible and if something looks odd it’s good thing to double check it from a different source.

First thing I made using a sprite as a model was Shy Guy from SMB 2. Main reason for choosing it was that I had the colours required to make it.

Second one was Samus from Metroid. It also had so basic colours that I could make it. With Samus I had another problem though: my pegboard was too small for all the standing Samuses. That’s why I had to make sitting Samus, but it actually turned out to be pretty cool.

At this point it was very clear to me that I had to do some shopping. Ikea’s selection wasn’t nearly good enough. They had only ten colours and you couldn’t connect the pegboards. Luckily a local arts and crafts store had some Hama beads and interlocking pegboards. My colour collection grew from ten to about twenty and now the biggest image I could make was 58 x 58 instead of the measly 29 x 29.

With the new colours I made Metroid from the first Metroid game…

…and some characters from Final Fantasy III. The skin tone of the white mage and the red mage isn’t quite right, but at that point I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted to make something.

That’s all for today. In the next episode: Moar colours!