Mighty the Armadillo

Now that I got SRB2 2.1.1 working on Linux, it's about time I did some re-releasing of a few characters. =P

Say hello to Mighty the Armadillo's new update, everybody! He's back and as slow as ever underwater. Good thing he can double jump and breach most shallow water levels.

Don't really know what else to say, had fun working on him years back. He's still the only character skin I made that I'm proud of, honestly, so I hope you guys enjoy him too!

I do quite like how all of the character wads released so far play very differently from Sonic, Tails & Knuckles and thanks to his slow acceleration balanced out with a double jump this is no exception. Nicely done.

Conceptually the character design is sound, but Mighty feels a bit underpowered in practice. Max top speed is nice, but with low acceleration and a weakness to water sections, there isn't a lot of incentive to use him over Sonic or Knuckles. Mighty could use a slight buff; perhaps a bonus effect to counter his underwater vulnerability, or a higher top speed if at all possible.

There's room for improvement aesthetically. Spritework suffers from light shading and no outline. The individual frames themselves are passable but not very inspired, and the sign just looks mashed together.

Heh, to think the slower acceleration was your idea years ago. =P I'm a bit stuck for ways to improve his existing stats, so I don't know what I'd do besides toss out the current ability and replace it with a custom Lua one, then he could be rebalanced from there.

Blue Warrior said:

There's room for improvement aesthetically. Spritework suffers from light shading and no outline. The individual frames themselves are passable but not very inspired, and the sign just looks mashed together.

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Yeah, the sign literally pastes a cut out of his diagonal sprite into place. It's terrible, but I don't have any time for editing anything in this game anymore, so it might stay that way unless someone else offers to fix it.

Also, he is outlined, but I was no master with contrast all those years ago, so it's no surprise you missed it. I wouldn't mind giving him a fresh coat of paint in GIMP, SSN style, but that'd turn my art queue into a trainwreck from putting all that on the backburner. Here's what I almost did for Tiara Boobowski a couple of years ago, until I chickened out of cleaning up my sketched animations. (90 frames is still a lot!)



Shrink down for in-game :

Whackjood said:

I do quite like how all of the character wads released so far play very differently from Sonic, Tails & Knuckles and thanks to his slow acceleration balanced out with a double jump this is no exception. Nicely done.

Click to expand...

Thanks! I'd like to take Blue Warrior's critique into account eventually, but as he is now, it'd probably pose a greater challenge for experienced players because of that.

If you're drawing at that high resolution, SRB2 has (or had, I don't think it's been removed for 2.1 but...) a HIRES flag. The character would look better in-game if you used it. Just go to 4x what the normal sprite resolution is.

Rob said:

If you're drawing at that high resolution, SRB2 has (or had, I don't think it's been removed for 2.1 but...) a HIRES flag. The character would look better in-game if you used it. Just go to 4x what the normal sprite resolution is.

Click to expand...

The intention is to match the pixelly low-resolution look of the rest of the cast.

.Luke said:

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Although the shrinking technique worked out perfectly in terms of style, the sprite itself doesn't fit itself next to anyone as her body is extremely tiny and should probably just outright be redrawn, even for a Sonic character. She's also shrunk a bit more than she needs to be.

EDIT: Oh I forgot what topic I even stumbled into through a link, this is about Mighty... :V

Yeah, it'd probably be better to redraw it all outright. I sketched out her frames on paper at least two or three years ago, and I was having a nasty problem getting hand and foot sizes right on Sonic characters. (Still do to some extent.) So the anatomy in this doesn't represent what I could do now.

My tablet would make this pretty easy nowadays, but it'd still take a lot of time I need for personal art projects. (Plan on using my art skills to start a web comic or two.) Maybe someday when I'm better at juggling multiple projects at a time, original works come first.

Rob said:

If you're drawing at that high resolution, SRB2 has (or had, I don't think it's been removed for 2.1 but...) a HIRES flag. The character would look better in-game if you used it. Just go to 4x what the normal sprite resolution is.

Click to expand...

I'd hope it still has that HIRES flag, it looked like a really appealing option in 1.09x.

The S_SKIN needs further updates for 2.1's new attributes.
Please see https://wiki.srb2.org/wiki/Character_WAD_tutorial

Things to look out for:

• The "facename" parameter no longer exists and its functionality has been replaced by "hudname".
• "realname" has been added.
• "ability" now takes an enumeration ("CA_DOUBLEJUMP") rather than a number
• Several other flags have been compacted into a single "flags" attribute.
• The character select pic has been added to S_SKIN and removed from the SOC.

So the Character tutorial on the Wiki's finally up to date? I'll keep these points in mind if I need to update this character again, thanks JTE! A lot more has changed in 2.1 than I discovered from poking around with the S_SKIN on release day.