Topic: December 2014 Castlevania Dungeon Sprite Contest

[Shiroi Koumori]

Contest Details

Duration: From now until December 31st
Deadline for submissions: December 28th (11:59 PM PST)
Judgement: by tribunal from December 29th to December 31st at midnight and Winners announced on the morning of January 1st (or earlier if the judges are already done)

Volunteer Judges: Dracula9, uzo, Lelygax

Theme: Design FOODS! (free for all, can be themed or not)
Prizes: Award medals for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners.

Guidelines for Participants:
-Provide your sprite in 1x and 2x zoom at least.
-Use only 16 colors per food item (any color of your choice)
-Size is restricted to 32x32 pixels per food item
-Contestants may submit up to 5 entries and each one will be evaluated individually.
-Must have a write-up of the description of each food item submitted (can be funny/punny or just plain ol' serious)
-Contestants may update their entries freely before the submission deadline.
-You may withdraw any entry at any time before the judgement begins.

Guidelines for Judges:
-Judgement will use a point system.
-4 points awarded for your first place choice.
-2 points awarded for your second place choice.
-1 point for your third place choice.
-When posting your scores write up an explanation/critique of your judgement.
-Additional rounds of judgement will be used for tie breakers.
-Judges cannot participate in the contest.

Entries:

First Place Winner
Blood Pack - Jop

Second Place Winner
Bat Sandwich - kaonstantine

Third Place Winner
Chocolate Swirl Cheesecake - theANdROId

Shiroi Koumori

Christmas Pudding Cupcake
A traditional English pudding now in a easy to eat package.

theANdROId


Chocolate Swirl Cheesecake
A rich and delicious dessert.  A small slice is plenty!



Take a moment to have some Cold Ones with Homestar and the guys.



Enjoy some Spiced Egg Nog as you celebrate the Holidays!



A celebration cake for the celebration that should have been!

darkmanx_429
Big Mac, heart attack special
Large Mcdonald's french fries
Soda Elixir
X2


kaonstantine


Bat sandwich
Exploring Dracula's Castle could be an exhausting task even for the strongest hero. Recharge your energy with this extra crunchy roasted bat sandwich.

ZeroSaberGreen

Giant pot roast: Mutated Castlevania pot roast, good for the heart
Brick-Grown mushroom: Gives the illusion of increased height, favored by plumbers.

Jop

(click to show/hide)

Left to Right:
Blood Pack:
For a Vampire this is the better way to restore the afflection in the body, its heal a lot, for a human its only to replinish the blood losed, its Universal 0.

Soup Demon Teeths:
this teeths have special powers that some people think can cure mental illness, if its prepared well it can restored from fatal wounds.

Demon Bones:
Its hard to kill a demon in special this kind, for a werewolf its the best bone he can chew, it have special effects for them (heal a lot), some people use the teeths for make a soup that cure mental illness but the bones dont have anything special for a human.

Soul Bottle:
This special bottle it was made to trap souls inside, with this souls it can restore the life of creatures that where made by magic or alchemy.

Crazy Chef Master Work:
After many yers of fail in cooking this chef start mixing all type of foods to make something good, when he die he left in his journal this food and in the journal he called the Master Work.
 In the Journal he say that use Human Blood, Demons Bones, Soup of the Demon Teeths to mix and the souls of the Souls Bottle to keep energy from the others foods, only someone with a powerfull stomach can eat this and fell the secret power that this food have.

The Demons Bones was made for Cornell and the Soul Bottle is for Pumpkin, Crazy Chef Master Work only some belmont can eat that.

If i have some errors gramal im sorry.

The main idea was to make the food for not human characters, still there is food for humans, 2 ideas came from my friend but let me use the ideas.

Soul Bottle animated


VladCT

Gingerbread Man: That's an awfully big smile for someone who's about to be eaten.

And here's something to go with it:

Milk: Can't go wrong with a glass of milk... Unless you're lactose intolerant, that is.

[theANdROId]

The 16 color thing...just to clarify...it's fine to pick my own set of 16 colors, out of anything on the spectrum, for one item?  There aren't certain set colors we can or can't use?

[Dracula9]

The only restrictions of color are those that you choose yourself (such as spriting your entry in NES fashion). There's no rule for it, though.

[theANdROId]

So...I was messing around on Paint to see how this works...I have a few questions, if I can ask.
-- My version of paint has a little counter in the bottom left that seems to change based on where the mouse is...for example it might read 40, 29 px...I can only assume this is like a pixel position?  Anyone know?
-- In relation to the last question, and the 32x32 pixel limit...I could use the number thing (if it is pixels) to be sure I'm within the limit?
-- I saved my first attempt as a JPEG, and I noticed that it "blurred" the colors of what I'd done...I made a pizza box (just because I thought it'd be simple to do, it's not gonna be an entry), and where I'd written "Pizza" in red now has pink blurred around it.  Is this normal?  Why'd it do this?  Is this fine or will I need to recolor to adjust for this?
-- How do you do the 1x and 2x sizes?

If I can't be asking this stuff, I apologize...just let me know that I can't ask this and I'll just do and figure out what I can.

[Shiroi Koumori]

That counter is the pixel location. Yes the number thing is the pixel count.
Dont save as jpeg. It always makes things blurry to compensate of the low compresssion rate. Use gif or png.
Copy paste the sprite and drag until it reaches 64x64.

[Dracula9]

1x and 2x are scale. The regular sprite size is 1x. To make it 2x, just hold your Control key and press the + on the numpad. Voila!

[theplottwist]

So...I was messing around on Paint to see how this works...I have a few questions, if I can ask.
-- My version of paint has a little counter in the bottom left that seems to change based on where the mouse is...for example it might read 40, 29 px...I can only assume this is like a pixel position?  Anyone know?

What is your version of Paint? And as Shiroi pointed out, yep this is the pixel position.

-- In relation to the last question, and the 32x32 pixel limit...I could use the number thing (if it is pixels) to be sure I'm within the limit?

I don't know what Paint you're using, but there should be a "Resize canvas" or "Resize" or "Redimension" somewhere there. If a prompt pops up, select "Pixels" if it's available, and put in 32 for horizontal and vertical. More reliable than doing it by eye.

-- I saved my first attempt as a JPEG, and I noticed that it "blurred" the colors of what I'd done...I made a pizza box (just because I thought it'd be simple to do, it's not gonna be an entry), and where I'd written "Pizza" in red now has pink blurred around it.  Is this normal?  Why'd it do this?  Is this fine or will I need to recolor to adjust for this?

Again as Shiroi pointed out, GIF or PNG are the optimal format for pixel art. However, you can still lose information with GIF formats. If you ever have any doubt, go always for PNG unless GIF is strictly necessary.

-- How do you do the 1x and 2x sizes?

How I do on my Paint: Select the "Selection" tool. Right-Click on the screen (no need to select anything), and "Resize". On the prompt, select "Percentage" and fill in for horizontal and vertical with 200. This will resize the whole thing accordingly. If you need to resize specific parts, then you can select them independently with the "Selection" tool.

EDIT: Seeing D9's answer, I might have interpreted it wrong. If you're talking about zooming in to work with the pixels, you can always use the "Magnifier" tool. D9 ponted out you can use CTRL and +, but I couldn't get this to work with me.

If I can't be asking this stuff, I apologize...just let me know that I can't ask this and I'll just do and figure out what I can.

Dude, by me you can ask whatever the hell you want. Only can only learn by asking and doing research, and the contest doesn't hinder you from learning 

[theplottwist]

1x and 2x are scale. The regular sprite size is 1x. To make it 2x, just hold your Control key and press the + on the numpad. Voila!

Dude, I'm pretty sure it doesn't work on MS Paint. I mean, I have two versions here (XP and Win7) and in neither this worked :O

Is not Android asking how he can resize his art?

[Shiroi Koumori]

I'm sure he's asking how to resize his art.
The zooming on ms paint is easy since it is right there at the toolbar. I prefer to work on the max zoom size. Lol i' m just blind.

[Dracula9]

They removed it on Paint7. It works on XP provided you have the keypad turned on, as the + next to Backspace doesn't do it.

I know all the Paint tricks. You're not gonna tell me you don't know about the fourth zoom level next, are you? 

[theplottwist]

They removed it on Paint7. It works on XP provided you have the keypad turned on, as the + next to Backspace doesn't do it.

I know all the Paint tricks. You're not gonna tell me you don't know about the fourth zoom level next, are you? 

Oh so that's why it didn't work for me, as my tool is a laptop without keypad.
 
What, I know about the secret 10x zoom. Now, do YOU know how to color over specific pixels using the Eraser? And what about the extra copy-paste that keeps one copied element intact on the clipboard, while you paste something completelly unrelated? 

[Dracula9]

If I didn't know the eraser trick that dragon would have never been finished.

Ctrl-copy also made that dragon possible, since development of him resulted in a giant sheet with about eight unfinished versions of each limb floating around.

Don't make me Shift-drag you out back for a whippin'.

[Shiroi Koumori]

Sheesh guys, no need to 1up each other on paint tricks. Everyone has their own way of using paint.

[theplottwist]

Sheesh guys, no need to 1up each other on paint tricks. Everyone has their own way of using paint.

Haha we're just having fun, bat girl! 

Might aswell teach the tricks:

Painting with the Eraser: Use the Eyedropper and use left-click to pick the color you want to replace. Select it again, and right-click on the color you want to replace the previous color with (or simply choose it from the color table using right-click). Next, select the Eraser and hold right-click to replace the undesirable color with the new one. The Eraser will ignore everything but that specific color selected with the left-click.
This is EXTREMELLY useful when you want to deal with stray-pixels that are a pain to find either because their color is *almost* like the color you want to replace them with, or because the Paint Bucket can't reach that tiny annoying pixel without accidentally coloring the neighboring ones.

Phantom Copy-Paste (As I like to call it): Use the Selection tool to select de desired area, but instead of using CTRL+C and CTRL+V to duplicate it, just hold CTRL as you drag that area around. This will create a copy of that area, but not place it on the clipboard, allowing you to copypaste without overriding what you have on the clipboard. This is also great when you want to have multiple copies of the same thing: All you have to to is drag that area around, release CTRL when it's on the place you want, and hold it again to create another copy!

[Dracula9]

Whaddaya mean there's no need for 1upping?

I've only got one life left!