Speaker A
[Music] Hello there. My name's Brandon, and I make pictures out of tiny squares. In this video, we're going to attempt to make sprites in the style of Chrono Trigger, which to me is one of the best and best-looking 16-bit RPGs that there is. I've got a few characters that I'd like to recreate in this style, and you can probably already guess who these are going to be. But before that, we should just try to figure out what the main ingredients are that go into the look of a Chrono Trigger sprite. So let's pull up the sprites from the main cast here, just in their neutral standing poses. We can see that they're all around 32 pixels tall. Frog is only 24 pixels, obviously distinctly meant to be a shorter character. But I guess the takeaway here is just that the 32-pixel mark is sort of the average or the default to start from when you're just thinking about, you know, your basic like non-frog human design. Now, the overall height is only one piece of the equation, though, because you could decide on a certain height for your character, like 32 pixels, but that's not necessarily indicative of any particular style on its own. And one thing that really affects the style is the way that that character is proportioned into that space. To demonstrate what I mean, we can break down these characters into a few basic shapes, and we can do that by tracing out circles over the head and the hands and the feet and just trying to ignore things like the hairstyles and the costuming for now. And we'll end up with these sort of blank skeletons that are kind of underneath all of that decoration. So if there's anything characteristic about the Chrono Trigger sprites as opposed to the other styles here, one of the things that stands out to me is how the Chrono sprite has a smaller head-to-body ratio than a lot of the other sprite styles here. It's more toward a realistically proportioned human. And that's not to say that it's accurate in that sense. It's very much still in a kind of hyper-stylized proportion. It's just that it's like less chibi or less deformed compared to some of these other sprites here. Probably the strongest example of that is if you look at the sprite of Omori, you know, you've got a big head, big bubbly head that actually kind of takes up more space than the body does. Whereas if we look at Chrono, you know, smaller head, more room accounted for the body. So the trade-off is that there's less space to work with for things like facial features, I guess, but more space allocated to costuming details and maybe posing of the limbs and that sort of thing. What's cool is that if you continue breaking down the other Chrono Trigger sprites in the same way, you can find essentially this same skeleton repeating itself across the roster, just in different poses. Well, again, you know, for the basic human designs at least. But it is also fun to see the proportioning on other types of builds, like with Robo. So I think what we can gain from this is that when we go to build our own Chrono Trigger style sprites, we can use these sort of formulaic building blocks and pieces, these sort of stick figure mannequins or whatever, to pose around, and we'll end up with something that has approximately the right size and proportion to it. Now, the other component of studying this style is going to be the use of color. From a design standpoint, each character really has their own strong color things going on. You know, Chrono's got like the teal and orange thing going on. Frog's got green and blue as his main colors. So as a cast, each one fills a nice little pocket of color selection. What I also noticed when analyzing these sprites from like the pixel art perspective is that most of them here have a palette of exactly 12 colors that are used. All of them except for Ayla, who has 13, and Frog, who's got 11. Apparently, there's a limit of 16 colors per sprite on the Super Nintendo, so these are just under that limit, which is totally fine. It's just interesting to see that, I guess from an artistic standpoint, there is this consistency of about a 12-color palette that's going on here. So let's try to make our own Chrono Trigger characters, and I'm going to be remaking some Final Fantasy 7 characters in the Chrono Trigger style, starting with Cloud. I've just got his character art there off to the side to use as a reference for what we'll be translating. Obviously, we'll grab that SK framework that was derived from the Chrono sprite and start connecting it up to give us a basic outline for the body, starting with the arms and sort of taking the outer track around those plotted points of the shoulder and elbow and having that meet up with the hand. For the boots, I notice that Chrono Trigger sprites often use a prominent cuff, so we'll put in some line work to shape that cuff around the foot. In between the line work, I've used this structure where it's like three pixels in a row and then the next one is like a single pixel up from that, which I think helps to show it sort of rounding around the leg, right? And with that in place, this only leaves a bit of space to connect up the rest of the legs. In doing that, I'm trying to capture the sort of poofiness or the like angled silhouette of the pants. To help that, I'm going to use some of the black line work as a shadow on the lower part of the leg, and that should help just show a bit of that volume. The final prominent features here on the body are the pauldron and the harness that's over the chest, and those should be easier to define once we get to the coloring stage. But for now, I'm just using the line work and the space available to kind of block those in. Now, moving on to the hair, I'm going to try to do what looks to be what was the approach for the Chrono sprite, which is basically to assemble the hair out of a sort of mosaic of smaller shapes. You know, these are both your typical spiky-haired protagonists, so what I'm trying to do here is use mostly rigid triangle shapes and fit them together into a similar geometry or whatever as the reference art has. This is also where it's nice to have started from that blank head underneath everything because you're really able to visualize where the skull is underneath this and kind of build this framework of hair on top of it and give it that appropriate volume that sits away from the head. All right, let's start adding some color here, and we can do a first pass of just dropping solid colors inside the lines. This first wave of colors is going to be kind of the midtone shades, which means it's just like the base color for that part of the costume. We'll come back around with a second wave of colors to add either a shadow or a highlight or both on top of this and get more of that detailed and polished look. So because we're going to be working with only 12 colors, we do have a fair bit of freedom to a degree, but there's always opportunities to try and be economical with the exact color choices and overlaps. That being said, in our sampling of sprites from Chrono Trigger, I found it was generally the case that the skin used two colors. There's sort of the base tone and then a shade tone for it. For the most part, these two skin shades were only used for the skin. They didn't really show up that much on other parts of the costuming that weren't meant to be skin. For the hair, it's pretty common to step through three or four colors depending on how you want to count what belongs to the hair. For Cloud, I've stepped through yellow and orange, and then there's like a dark red or brown that's used to color the line work within the hair. I've even used that same outline color around the face as some colored line work that's like at the edge of the skin there. By the time we're done rendering, the approach is going to be that we'll have colored over a fair bit of that original black line work using these different darker tones that suit that.
