Progress while spriting

[Gespenst]

Have you ever felt that feeling when you are spriting a character at good quality and halfway you make a progress and start spriting at better quality but it cause bad thing because you jump out of frame.
Have you had this thing?
Is it bad or good?
Tell me

I am having this right now. When I try doing simple I just can't, it somehow still ends up being better than simple, no matter what.

[A-Man]

If you were aiming for something of less complexity, then it's definitely a bad thing. A good spriter is one who can can be accustomed to any style when he works. This can be generalized to cover almost any line of work.

Got really used to how LF2 datachanging works, and this is what happens when I come to animate anything outside LF2;

Code:

switch( _current_frame )
        {
            case 0:
                _action=IDLE;
                _on_ground_action=true;
                _img=_current_frame; _delay=1; _centerx=37; _centery=247;  _x_acc=0.; _y_acc=0.; _goto=_current_frame+1;
                break;
            case 1:
                _can_cling = true;
                _action=IDLE;
                _img=_current_frame; _delay=1; _centerx=37; _centery=247;  _x_acc=0.; _y_acc=0.; _goto=_current_frame+1;
                break;
            case 2:
                _action=IDLE;
                _img=_current_frame; _delay=1; _centerx=37; _centery=247;  _x_acc=0.; _y_acc=0.; _goto=_current_frame+1;
                break;
            case 3:
                _action=IDLE;
                _img=_current_frame; _delay=1; _centerx=37; _centery=247;  _x_acc=0.; _y_acc=0.; _goto=_current_frame+1;
                break;
            case 4:
                _action=IDLE;
                _img=_current_frame; _delay=1; _centerx=37; _centery=247;  _x_acc=0.; _y_acc=0.; _goto=_current_frame+1;
                break;

It looks too familiar, doesn't it? This for sure won't be the opinions of other programmers who see this.

[YinYin]

Yeah, it's better when you are able to decide how detailed/polished your work ends up - and probably the hardest thing to achieve. It's natural that your work flow and quality improves/changes over time - training to go back at will can be quite essential to build an array of workflows to choose from and make yourself flexible enough to pick the right thing.

Martis sprites improved a lot too during LF2 development and he even had to redo the earlier ones in some cases (the old versions have them). Just compare the 10 fighters to the last ones like Bat/Julian/Knight.

[Memento]

As long as the spriting style itself isn't too diffirent, I'd say it's a good thing.

I know exactly how it goes though. You sprite a character and at some point, you notice your own flaws. With Goku, I gave him a big overhaul twice! You always want to do better.
Yet, in your case, I think you shouldn't do the same as your sprites are of very high quality already, similar to the original LF2 sprites. Instead of overhauling older designs, I'd finish the character and jump into more difficult designs if you want to be challenged (kinda like you already did recently, comparing the wizard and the general sprite for LF2 extended)

[Silverthorn]

I think that is the beauty of using assets altogether. Not only does it dramatically increase the Sprites-per-time-ratio, it also helps preventing any "negative improvement" because you focus on each part less than 3 times.

That being said, the issue is not only observed while spriting. From my own experience, I have experienced this with two topics: programming and painting. As with first, the more code I pack into a program, the better it usually gets, leaving the first 300-500 lines being a terrible mess of unoptimized code whereas the last bits feel like a masterpiece. For the sake of consistency, I'll have to go back and rewrite the beginning, haha.

As with painting, I've noticed that when painting large, extremely detailed images. Starting off at one area to refine it, slowly working around the image, and ending up in a different corner noticing that suddenly, the detail-level has increased to a sub-pixel level.

It's insofar problematic as it can cause inconsistencies in the long run, making you have to do some work twice. The repetitive work of traditional spriting is insofar especially prone to these issues. One will have to consider time a crucial factor so that things do not go overboard.