Nuxill wrote: ↑Thu May 11, 2017 11:35 am
I've played around with extremely customizable sprites before, and personally I find going through all of the options can be kind of tiring. I don't have the patience to go through every front hair, back hair, eye style, eybrows, etc... Personally, a sprite that has a few set hairdos, a basic amount of stock emotions and a few alternative outfits is way more appealing than something that's SUPER customizable. Of course, I can draw my own sprites, so you can take my opinion with a grain of salt.
For pose variation, I think having several arm positions for each base would be appreciated by people, even if it would extra work. Though if you were going to make a large pool of sprites to choose from, it might not be as important. There's not a lot of sprite groups out there that go beyond 3-4 characters.
And we need more variety in the types of characters available. High school students are popular, but if you want to make a different type of vn there's a lot less to choose from.
Bascially this. But to actually answer the questions myself:
1. full, pre-made expressions
2. As long as it's kept consistent throughout the set I don't think it matters as much. I rarely see VNs that use sprites below hip level, but full body is nice as it can be cropped or left in depending on what you need.
3.different sprite bases for each body type variation
4. hairstyle on its own layer
5. Options are nice, but if they aren't done as separate sprites but rather something I have to go through and change manually and then resave myself (see above in the quote) then I'd rather have only 1 or 2 variations set up and ready to go than a dozen I have to put together myself.
6. Pose variation is EXTREMELY important, and I think is the biggest thing lacking from free to use sprites as most only have 1 pose. If you look at any commercial quality VN the characters all have several poses; I would provide at least 3 different poses at the bare minimum. I'd rather have 10 expressions and 3 poses than 50 expressions and 1 pose if that helps you get an idea of how much I value them.
7. More teenage to young adult males, or more characters that could be used as parents, teachers, or bosses of characters in said age range. The majority of free sprites are teenage to young adult females which is nice if you want to make a dating sim for guys, but if you want an otome game its extremely hard to find sets with more than 2 males. Adult and young children sprites are hard to find as well, especially in sets. I'd also like more than just you typical "modern day average Joe" as far as sprites go and would love to see more fantasy, Victorian, and medieval sprites as those are genres I've always been interested in. As the same characters in several different age ranges would be nice for a story that spans a lifetime, as well as for flashbacks and time travel VNs.
8. The one thing I wish more sprite packs would include is CGs (the unlockable gallery pictures with the characters used in special scenes). I know it's hard to predict what kind of game people want to make so making so making CGs likely to please the majority of users is difficult, but every good game has them, and those using sprite packs likely lack drawing skills and so obviously don't have the talents to make them ourselves. If there could just be a halfway decent sprite pack out there that included these as well as multiple poses, I may actually be able to get a game done that looks to be commercial quality as opposed to an extreme budget VN.