[llamabeast]

Looks very nice - I'm looking forward to it.

Some small comments on the sprites (which mostly look really good):

The commander holding a bow seems to switch which hand is holding in when she fires. Also generally archer attack sprites have the bow higher (looks a bit like she's firing into the ground). However I wouldn't spend much time on this as attack sprites are only seen briefly. Some of the base-game ones are quite nasty!

The girl with the bats looks awesome!

For all the soldiers with shields, the change from shield to tunic is hard to see, making the sprite slightly confusing. This can be partly fixed by changing the tunic colours a little. However, the main fix is to do shading on the tunic. The bit of tunic near the shield will be slightly shadowed, so you can have the tunic getting steadily darker as you get near the shield. Then the shield will be suddenly lighter and the transition will be clearly visible. I find that sprites look very pleasing when you have a *lot* of this kind of shading - much more than you'd expect you'd need.

Generally my shading procedure goes like this:

- Select a load of pixels extending some distance from the source of the shadow. Make them slightly darker (e.g. in Gimp go to Brightness/contrast and reduce the brightness).
- Select a smaller set of pixels. All of them should be ones you selected before, but don't go so far from the shadow source. Make them darker.
- Repeat with an even smaller set.

Although this looks involved it doesn't take long and gives excellent effects. Of course with smaller areas it is probably easier to just draw the shadow pixel by pixel. This is quite possibly a case where it's small enough to do that in fact. But I hate keep on changing the colour I'm drawing with, so I often do the method described above even for tiny shadows.

I like the colouring on the soldiers a lot. I think you could do with darkening the orangey bits on the shoulders just slightly, particularly for the fourth one down. Is he wearing gold? I've found gold has to be much less bright than you'd expect. It's virtually brown. Similarly the gold band on the horse's foreleg is just slightly too bright I think.

The top summon has a slightly odd pose with his arms. Or rather, I think his right arm (left of the sprite) looks like he's holding his shoulder very high. The left arm seems to have some kind of long grey bit on it?

The second summon down is quite confusing to look at - but maybe it's deliberate? I think the white bits could be a bit less bright.

The third one looks very cool. I think you could increase the contrast on his tunic. In GIMP, just select the pixels of his tunic and increase the contrast (in Brightness/contrast - you will probably have to change the brightness too as it tends to make things overall brighter or darker when you change the contrast). However this will also have the effect of increasing the saturation of the colours, which you'll then need to separately decrease.


Some unnecessarily detailed comments there - I am quite a perfectionist on these things I think. But as they stand these are very good sprites, and exceptionally good for a first mod. Very much looking forward to release!