Golden Sun: An Observation on NPC Sprites

[Salanewt]

Hey there. I've been in the spriting mood lately (no idea how long that will last), and decided to scour my files for a sprite sheet I made a while back. The difference between a normal sprite sheet and this one is that this is meant to be more of a comparative aid for creating custom sprites. What is this sprite sheet? Pictures often speak louder than words, so I'll lead with that. Well, sprites in this case.



In short, I'm sharing it with everyone who wants something like this! Now, if you take a good look at these sprites, you should be able to see some things that many of them have in common with one another. I grouped them together to make it easier, but they certainly aren't perfect;

a) Young men; two rows (I know the first two are supposed to be female characters, but still)
b) Middle-aged women; one row
c) Young women; one row
d) Maidens; one row
e) Aunts; subsection lined up with d)
f) Children; two rows (the bottom also has more stuff in their hair)
g) Guards; two rows
h) Middle-aged men; one row
i) Uncles; one row
j) Seniors; two rows
k) Elders; one row
l) Misc.; whatever is not a humanoid sprite that could potentially walk on two feet

These very rough categories can help define how a character's sprites should look based on a number of criteria. For example, are they frail and slender? Senior shape, or maybe Young Man. Very short? Child/Dwarf. These are obviously flexible given that some sprites can fit in multiple groups while others are hard to place, but I imagine they could help someone who is interested in spriting characters for either of the first two games.

On the right are compass pads, designed to help orient a character. Generally, PCs use the red, blue, and purple directions, while NPCs use red and green. The very light blue, while not really used for character sprites, can be combined with the rest for 16-directional rotation. If that makes sense. A character will look like it is facing a certain direction if its body is positioned to follow a line, like Jenna, Kraden, and the archery target do in the provided examples.

Oh, and the Starry Night is there just to fill some empty space. It only uses the default sprite palette. Hope you guys like it, and I hope this helps!