Pichuscute's Gen3 map & pixel-art re-imagining

[pichuscute0]

Hey everyone! This thread is where I'm going to dump various Hoenn sprites re-imagined.

Growing up, I always loved Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald, but felt that the art left a lot to be desired. It looked flat. There was a ton of pillow shading all over the place. Perspectives were messed up. There was a lack of detail. As someone with a long background in pixel art, I've decided to slowly try and address these problems and turn the original designs and sprites into more palettable versions of themselves. I will do my best to stay within the relative confines of the GBA, and generally no new colors will be introduced at all. However, I may not follow the exact tile palettes the games used and also may place 16x16 tiles in non-standard locations (offset 8 pixels). The ultimate goal here is: touch and update every sprite and tile used in Gen 3.

I'll continue to update the thread and the first post as I create more art! I'd love to hear any comments on what I've done so far in the meantime!

Location Redesigns

1. Here's the first map I've completed: Littleroot Town. Here, I've done my best to give each building it's own identity, without straying far from their Emerald iterations. That said, nearly every sprite has been touched up or changed to some degree, giving a hopefully more detailed and refined look. I also imagined a small shrine tucked away nearby, hoping to give the town a more lived-in and Japanese feel.

Edit: After doing Oldale Town, I realized I wasn't quite as happy with my Littleroot Town as I thought I was, so I went back and updated it just a bit. Mainly, the placement of buildings just felt too spread out. Now, the original games did that for a reason: the trucks and NPCs needed room in the intro, but I looked into exactly how much space that needs and adjusted things just enough to allow those intro sequences to still work and I think it looks much nicer in the end.

2. Now for somewhere other than a city: Route 101. I chose to add in a creak, to help give this a more woodsy feel without having to make too many new tiles. I did add in these custom edits of wooden bridges, combining the wooden posts and the wooden bridge tiles together. Think it looks pretty nice.

3. Oldale Town! This one was more difficult, since the original town had so little to build off of. I started by getting solid designs for the Pokemon Center and PokeMart, so that I could continue using them moving forward. Those sprites needed a lot of work, because the original shapes made no sense at all, but I still tried to keep the base concepts intact. For the town itself, I chose to double-down on the idea of flowers here, like the ORAS version also does. This helped build out the town nicely. Finally, I moved the locations of buildings around to make it feel a little more cozy, like the small town it's meant to be.

NPCs

1. I started with May, adding details to improve proportions and make lighting much more consistent. The original overworld sprites always felt to me like the back of the character's heads were chopped off or something, because they were so flat. To fix that, I rounded the faces as much as I could within the shape of the sprite, removing the heavy shading on the bottom halves. These changes will carry on through future NPCs. I also added a drop shadow, since, as far as I can tell, there is room for it and not much reason not to?

2. Next, I went after Brendan! Similar changes were done here. I tried to make the hat look more detailed here, as its original shape was always a bit awkward.

3. After this, I started on generic NPCs. The kids were always some of the crappiest looking NPCs in the original game. Imo, they were very square-ish and the colors made little sense. Without changing palettes or shapes, I tried to rectify both problems as much as I possibly could and I think I came up with something that works pretty well. After that, I gave the Pokemon Center nurse a look. The headpiece was always incorrect perspective-wise, in my opinion, so I fix that and relight the hair to the best of my ability. I did slightly change the bowing sprite to be more in line with my version of the standing, which slightly changes the shape from the original (but only subtly).

4. Professor Birch can be found: here!

Combat

1. So far, I've just dealt with May's throwing animation, but I'll get more into this as time goes on. Here, the perspective was originally very wrong, so that the player could see May's face. I fix that, so her hair isn't defying gravity nearly as much and she looks more like herself. I fix the lighting on her body and hair as well, so it all makes more sense.

Pokemon

1. Some Pokemon sprites for Surskit, Shroomish, and Chimecho are: here!
2. 14 new Pokemon sprites can be found updated in the post: here!
3. Added 5 more Pokemon: here!

 

[pichuscute0]

Added a bunch of new stuff in here!

 

[Sapphire Rose]

Oh I really like the redesigns! Have you ever thought about perhaps remaking the games as a ROM of your own with the retouches?

 

[pichuscute0]

Thank you!

I've thought about that, yeah, but I'm not super-interested in the romhacking part myself (or the decomp equivalent). I'd rather be working with someone else who can help with that, so I can focus on the parts I most enjoy (art, design, etc.). I also haven't looked into it much myself, because I plan to (someday, when 3DS romhacking tools more properly exist) make a visual overhaul romhack of ORAS that is a bit more thorough.

If anyone ever comes by interested in that, though, I'd love to work with them!

 

[pichuscute0]

Added a bunch more NPCs and re-organized a bit. Next on my list: Oldale Town and more NPCs!

 

[Timz0r]

The redesigns really do look a lot better then the original work. Especially the May's back sprites when she throws a ball which are a lot more natural looking from that angle. I also learned something new about the term pillow shading. I didn't knew it had a coined term for that.

 

[pichuscute0]

The redesigns really do look a lot better then the original work. Especially the May's back sprites when she throws a ball which are a lot more natural looking from that angle. I also learned something new about the term pillow shading. I didn't knew it had a coined term for that.

Thanks so much! It really is surprising just how much can be improved, even without actually changing shape or colors in any major ways. May's back sprite is probably the largest change I've made so far, but even it still derives as heavily as I could from the original.

Glad I could help show you a new term, too! Pillow shading is a real pet peeve of mine, and Game Freak was unfortunately guilty of it quite a bit during Gen 3, so it gives a lot of room for improvements there.

 

[pichuscute0]

Added Oldale Town! Also updated Littleroot Town to stay consistent with the other maps.

 

[pichuscute0]

Looks like I'm out of space on my initial post (did not realize it works that way, oops). I'll fix the first post to make more sense with multiple posts like this, I guess, at some point. In any case...

4. I took some time to work on Professor Birch. I've really disliked the way he looks in-game, as his proportions always felt especially awkward, especially his hair/head shape. I take some minor liberties updating the shapes of his head to be more in line with the Sugimori art, making the head shape more square and the hair more full looking, in the trainer sprite. For the overworld sprite I focus on just making the hair look less flat, and making the eyes look more like Birch's eyes (not the mean look he had before).

 

[Sapphire Rose]

Looks like I'm out of space on my initial post (did not realize it works that way, oops). I'll fix the first post to make more sense with multiple posts like this, I guess, at some point. In any case...

4. I took some time to work on Professor Birch. I've really disliked the way he looks in-game, as his proportions always felt especially awkward, especially his hair/head shape. I take some minor liberties updating the shapes of his head to be more in line with the Sugimori art, making the head shape more square and the hair more full looking, in the trainer sprite. For the overworld sprite I focus on just making the hair look less flat, and making the eyes look more like Birch's eyes (not the mean look he had before).
View attachment 165458View attachment 165457

Oh hey! This looks a lot more alive already!

 

[pichuscute0]

Hey thanks! Glad you're liking my version of Professor Birch! :)

Started messing around with some of the Pokemon sprites. Honestly, I generally like the Gen 3 Pokemon sprites, so these are going to be more just my takes on them than anything else. I'll probably end up fixing minor lighting stuff and just slight proportion things than anything else. With these, I ended up with sprites that use a little more dithering, which will probably be pretty typical of my sprites vs. the originals anyway.

1. For Surskit, I felt like the positions of the legs were off, so I repositioned them. Their shapes suffered from a lack of detail causing them to look awkward, so I fixed that as much as I could. I did the same for the yellow pointy top, too.


2. For Shroomish, I tried to make it look a little more rounded. The feet looked a little awkwardly positioned, so I repositioned the lifted one to be a bit more in-perspective. I also made the mushroom's top look more like it's Sugimori art.


3. Chimecho in general just needed a bit more detail in shading, so I mainly did that here. It was a bit hard to find the right balance of dithering here, but I think I ended up on something okay. I repositioned the metal top and left hand slightly, to make more sense, at least to my eyes.

 

[pichuscute0]

It's been a bit longer than intended, but I am still working on these things, slowly but surely. I've made some very minor edits to maps since my last posts, but the main things I want to post today are more Pokemon!

1. To start with, I chose Snorunt, just because I'm a big fan. Snorunt's original sprite had proportions that didn't really line up with the original artwork. So, the main thing I did here was fix that. In particular, I did a lot of reshaping of the face, because Snorunt seems to require some pretty specific facial proportions to maintain its cute look. I'm really happy with how this one turned out.


2. Next, I finally went for something much harder: Salamence. This sprite was reeeally rough in the original games, especially in the face. This is also one with a notoriously weird color palette, so I just did what I could. The brunt of the work here was to fix Salamence's face, both in location and in shape. I also brought back Salamence's missing upper tooth, since the original sprite only had one, lol.

3. I chose a slightly simpler Pokemon next, although still one I felt needed a lot of work. Volbeat is a design I'm not super into, so I chose to take a couple liberties here. I made Volbeat's tail a bit larger, I made its eyes look a bit more determined, and I removed its mouth entirely. In my opinion, this, along with improvements to shading, makes for a much better look.

4. In Gen 3, Luvdisc was done dirty. So, I set out to fix that next. The original sprite was awkwardly shaped, so I started with fixing Luvdisc's body first. After that, I went on to improve its eye, as the original's was particularly lifeless and awkward. As we'll continue to see, eyes on many Gen 3 Pokemon sprites were not given quite the attention they needed, resulting in some really strange art. This ended up looking far far cuter than even I expected.

5. We've finally come to a sprite that I really didn't think needed much improving at first glance. So, I focused on small details. I made sure lighting made sense, I fixed the line directions on the wings, I made sure the leg locations made sense - that kind of stuff. The result is a sprite that pops just a bit more than the original.

6. Marshtomp's original sprite was disgusting, I'm not gonna lie. The perspective made no sense, the shapes looked awful, and the smile... it was just hard to look at. I did my best to pretty heavily edit the original in order to fix all that. This included pretty much entirely redoing the face and head fin. I don't think it's perfect even still, but it's a vast improvement over the original sprite at least.

7. After realizing how much of a mess Marshtomp was, I decided to check out Mudkip's sprite too. Thankfully, this one made much more sense. I mainly addressed minor lighting concerns, put some life back in its eyes, and restored Mudkip's more cute looking frown. I will say I understand why the original artists changed it to a smile, though, because it was quite difficult to find the right pixel balance for that frown to come across properly.

8. Seedot was another sprite I didn't know right away what I should improve. Eventually, I decided to just focus on improving its lighting and smoothing out its rounded shape. I feel like the sprite looks much more polished now.

9. Castform is another sprite that originally made absolutely no sense. The proportions were entirely wrong and the outline of its eyes was entirely missing. I got to work reworking the original's face so that it actually resembled Castform. The mouth was a bit difficult at the angle and resolution of the sprite, so took some time to figure out, but I'm happy with how it turned out.

10 & 11. I'm putting Cascoon and Silcoon together here. My main focus on these was just to improve the differences between the two Pokemon. I slightly changed the proportions, especially on Cascoon. I then edited Silcoon's eye to look less mean, because that's Cascoon's thing. Finally, I improved the lighting/dithering here.

12. I looked at Wurmple next. The original was good, but after looking closer at the Sugimori art, I realized it wasn't quite right proportionally. I focused mainly on the head and spikes when fixing that, and I think it looks much more like the Wurmple you would expect now.

13. I decided to work on another favorite next: Lotad. The changes here were done primarily to smooth out the shape and perspective of the lilypad, while making the eyes look more like they are actually underneath it. I had to resize the eyes a bit to get a good look, but I think it still looks correct here.

14. Last but not least, we have Treecko. In the original sprite, Treecko's nose was very small, making it look pretty awkward. My main goal was to fix that here. I ended up fighting against the color palette a bit here, particularly in the stomach and upper leg areas, since they aren't very well suited for dithering. Nonetheless, I think I managed to find a reasonable balance.


And that's all I've got for now!

 

[pichuscute0]

Got some more Pokemon sprites!

1. Continued working on some of the starter Pokemon, first with Grovyle. This one was a bit difficult, as Grovyle's depictions are pretty inconsistent compared to most Pokemon. I decided to just match Sugimori's original art a bit better, which means making the face actually look a little less raptor-ish and a little less "cool". Otherwise, I just adjusted proportions of the body parts a bit and made minor changes to the lighting.


2. Went ahead with Torchic next. This one's original sprite elongated Torchic's head a bit, so my main concern was to fix that. I also made Torchic's eyes less lifeless and adjusted the legs to look more in line with what Sugimori was doing in his original art.


3. Combusken was next, but it was a very minor edit compared to pretty much every other Pokemon so far. Mostly, I just improved shading a bit and very slightly adjusted proportions of the feet and head feathers. This sprite was already pretty well made, though.


4. I chose a hard one after this, Masquerain. Masquerain was a problem because it's original color palette was extremely wonky and didn't look particularly like the Pokemon in question. So, I made the choice to combine colors differently than in the original in order to better match the actual Pokemon's colors. I think it actually worked quite well. After that, the only other major changes were in the locations of the wings and torso, which I moved to look a little more dynamic and similar to Sugimori's art.


5. Finally, I took a look at Skitty. Skitty is another Gen 3 sprite that was just completely wrong originally. I had to pretty heavily edit the proportions here, entirely remove one of the palette colors, and pretty heavily change the shading, including removing most of the original's dithering and nearly entirely re-spriting the tail. I think it looks far better now.