Anyway i assume that you go with the first design if you want it to be a TF2 type action. the only problem is that the other character is a bit bland and requires a bit more designs to make him look more unique. The second design is good too, but it will require more work in order for animations to look cooler, as well as making them awe instilling. if anyone has played iji (the award winning freeware game), it demonstrates the possibility that large sprites can still preform advanced animations and movements.

The shapes and volumes for the taller trench-coat are quite visually pleasing, for me; all you would need to do is perhaps make individual details stand out more.

…This makes me want to do some concepts of my own; but I have my exams in less than a week and I need to revise. Curse you!

Edited your post to embed the images, hope you don’t mind.

The one on the left is very useful – I’d been wondering if shading would work well, and it turns out it does. I have a police lieutenant character planned who I always pictured in a grey trenchcoat – what you’ve got there is very close.

Second guy reassures me that the cutesiness of the style won’t necessarily preclude people who look villainous.

Cheers!

With this one, aimed for a more smooth, suited assassin, with a pinstriped suit of course.

“Warden, you’re late”. Boss McCruger, chewing Warden’s ass out as usual as he stepped into the office.

“What isn’t these days?” Warden growled back, changing from his detective coat to his hi-vis reflective yellow safety vest. The burden it carried was close to a physical weight, the responsibility to help the poor smuchs and brods out there in the night. Holstering his reflective red and green paddles he turned to the chief once more. “What have we got?”

“It’s not a pretty sight Warden. Accident on 5th and 43rd, no-one saw how it happened. And the jam it’s caused…stomach yourself, it ain’t a pretty sight”

“I’m used to ugly sights every time I look in the mirror. It’s why you called me after all”. He took out a cigar and lit it. The flare of the match revealed for a moment the troubled soul in his eyes, eyes normally shaded from the world by the brim of his traffic cap. “I take the jobs no-one else will touch”. Blowing out a pang of bitter smoke, he turned to leave the office.

“Put that out, you’re not allowed to smoke on the job Warden”.

He paused before exiting the room, taking a stiff drag on his devil’s temptation. “Tell that to my ex-wife”.

EGTF: Nice. Does he fight crime by day, direct traffic by night?

Ninja: Paint Shop Pro 9. The nineties are back, and they want to know what’s wrong with mousewheel zooming.

I’ve never used photoshop, but I know that paint is pretty good for making sprites.

Spriting is one of the few game designing aspects I feel I understand and have experience enough with to comment.

I used to make sprites for forum things (usually games that people claimed they would make, but most of the time they never really took off, and were more for looking at cool ideas) and in particular back in the ruby/sapphire age of pokemon I made a few sprites with paint.

I think your second design is better in every way, it’s more stylized, easier to animate and edit, and requires less work if you want to make another main character (I don’t know if you are going in the direction of making EVERY character important, but it’s common video game practice as I’m sure you know to have a number of “standard” models that are just there to add a sense of population to a game.) you won’t have to make major edits. If you used the two more realistically proportioned sprites, making main characters might mean you’d have to alter the height significantly to get a feeling of realism, and the proportions would have to be altered to make them seem realistic.

But from a character standpoint, I think the two you have are a great start. Make a female “template” and you’ll be good to go as far as character sprites go.

File these under fanart or something – http://snipurl.com/notprivatedick

Would it be okay I post my alterations to your design, I worked on your themes but added detail and altered the poses. (Yeah, I was bored and this made a nice distraction between working).

First, just the nature of interactivity and the more direct relation the player has to the game can, I would argue, produce higher art than would be produced through other methods. How can making something more passive in nature make it automatically more artistic?

Second, there are all manner of things you can build in that can use interactivity artistically that would not even be possible in any other medium. Particularly, the ability to construct a complete working system (as part of a game, or as a complete game, or whatever) that anyone can have a copy of and explore freely and fiddle with, contains artistic potential that is found nowhere else.

Third, to make the same thing as you would have in a film, but to make it interactive and let the player tinker with it, you can build in far more art than you would otherwise. With film you can show a guy walk into a room, look around, maybe seeing the expression on his face and hearing some of his thoughts, then see him go to bed. With games you could see all the same stuff but be able to explore his thoughts at will with any presentation that you could possibly imagine. Of course the potential is far larger than this but this way even on its own increases expressiveness even over that of books.

The Characters look right , not realistic, but how Id imagine them, trenchcoat, hands in pockets, hat. Basic details exemplified. Im sort of reminded a little of the characters in Blood Money.

Sorry, Dick.

I don’t mean to be the “That Guy” to pick out select words in the comments, but I have to say I don’t think those two statements are related in the least. Rather, I’m not trying to start anything – I just don’t understand your logic. Games aren’t art, therefore games can’t have an art style?

Conway’s actually a lot more believable than you give him credit for, by the way. Sure, in another context you might expect someone who looks like him to hang around elementary school playgrounds wearing nothing under the trenchcoat, but you’ve clearly presented him as a private eye; in a noir setting he fits right in as a plausible and distinctive main character. So actually, just forget I said anything about playgrounds.