Keychainblade? Stupid chainsaw...
 

I might have recognized halfway through it looks just like my apartment key...it ought to have more bars sticking off it, and not just kinda extend in both directions. Oh well, at least it animates nicely.

I think it needs to be thicker on the up/down sprites if you ask me. Other than that, it looks great :D

the up and down sprites are viewed from straight up there should be a slight angle in them.

Agreed, the up/down views seem a little thin. If these are graal sprites, they -should- be a little thicker than normal and cartoony :P

I'd also suggest trying to play around with the colors a little more. Right now the red doesn't seem to work well with the gray, and you might change the gray a little as well. They seem like they were quickly taken from ms paint color choices, and the ms paint pallete doesn't typically end with very inspired results.

One other thing you should try and avoid is the outlining shadow/highlight. The best way I can try and explain what I'm pointing out is by terming it as "windows message button shading" It's where we all start out, some get stuck on it, you'll eventually have to learn to avoid it...which it seems like your starting to. The up/down views don't have that blunder.

Actually it wouldn't seem like a blunder at all if you did one thing... try making the inside of the chain a little darker. It will give it more depth and the outlines will become a part of that, instead of being the sole identifier.

Could you post an animated gif of it, please? I'd like to see it in motion.

Pillow-shading is the term :)

I agree on all parts. Desaturate your colors a bit and add some tint to your grays. Pure grays are hardly ever appealing. For metal, you might want to try a blueish tint.

Hoo boy....now THIS is shameful... ive been out of the game so long i forgot the term PILLOW SHADING

Animation's gonna be a pain; I got a gani of it up on Insomnia, but it's in the back.

Took the easy suggestions; here it is with the colors adjusted. You were right, darkening the middle helps a LOT. I'm not 100[percent] sold on the blue, but meh.

And yeah, I see what you mean about how the true-verticals should be slightly angled to the side, so one can see the side of the blade, etc...it would add a good deal of perspective, it's just that it'd also take a lot more time, so I'll leave off that bit for a little while. :-D

The up/down look like a drill.

It also looks too big, but besides that, it's not too bad. Perhaps make it a little less uniform, not so "perfect" looking.

Made an edit. I'm not exactly good with mechanical designs, but I think I gave a bit of an idea of how to fill in shapes without resorting to pillow-shading. I'm gonna assume this is not the kind of thing you're going for, though. But meh, just throwing ideas out there.

Attachment 47449

No, that's beautiful. Much better than the textureless PaintShopPro5 job I did. :-D

The point is, if you're working with a large flat surface, you can't fill it with shading. The shading will always end up being pillow-shaded because there is only a flat surface so you work off the outlines. What you need to do is start filling that flat surface with shapes, designs and details--Blocks, segments, knobs, small text. Anything to fill in the emptyness.

Hey, that is some nice smooth animation :) It doesn't look like it has a lot of speed to the chain but I'm not very worried about that.

I did a quick mock-up of the perspective deal they mentioned. I'll leave it to the masses to decide if I did it justice. I didn't bother with the colors at all i just worried about showing you the bulk of the form.

Yeah, no, I totally agree, perspective view would be awesome. If I wind up having the time I'll totally re-edit the thing to the new specs - closer to 48 than 64 pixel size, perspective view, textures and all. If any of you guys feel like rounding it out I'd appreciate it, but I don't expect it; all I was going for in the first place was a template. I'm working on a Zombie server, you Gotta have a chainsaw...

As for the relatively slow movement, when the teeth are 4 pixels your only options are Smooth Forward, Smooth Back, or Blinking Halfway. Having seen the mock-up I wish I'd gone with Cartoony Big White Jagged Teeth instead of pixelsmashing. :-D

Not necessarily. You could got with a blurred wooshing effect; think of taz from looney tunes spinning, or sprites from any fighting game when they kick or punch. They don't animate it frame by frame showing the body part getting there, they show it blurred for the fast movement of it. A strategy that would probably work well for this is animating it similar to how waterfalls are done. If you need a visual example of what I mean I could turn something up for you.

Maybe; I could redo it so it's one frame of "still" and three frames of "Blur". I might yet, since I'd have to redo a lot of it from scratch at this point. ;-D

one frame of idle and three for when its activated, yeah that would work