Sprite Discovery Discussion

First off, sorry for taking a while with this post. Saturday was DnD, Sunday was Easter, and Tuesday was my Niece's (who's living with us) birthday, and I received some bad news yesterday. Won't go into details, but it's been a busy past few days! That said.. I'm going to be blunt - art staff constantly read what's being said here and try to take things on board. We've always listened to feedback and tried to make amends and improve sprites so the community stays happy, but when we're told our own rules don't make sense... I have to be honest - you're the ones here who don't know what you're talking about. I don't mean to come off as rude, but it's the truth - We, the artists, do. Its been explained time and time again how we do things, though I'm starting to think that words don't really cut it. Perhaps an art stream showing these things visually and not through text will go over better. Probably stream the process of one or two recolors using sprites made just for the stream so you can share in our headaches in trying to make colors work. Would you guys be interested in that? I've been wanting to do an art stream for a while if anything. I'm going to make a big post responding to everyone who posted here - separated into accordion sections for specific users, but I would highly encourage that people read everything, even if you don't have your own section - I will be as thorough as I can be, using lots of visual supplements and I will call back to previous posts made. It being separated like this is done to cut down on post size and to organize everything - if it wasn't put into accordions this post would be 2384752839458 miles long and no one wants their eyes to be assaulted by great walls of text. Note that this is organized by user, not by post order. It was easier this way, lol. So for the sake of my sanity and yours... in the words of Mario, here we go! Now that all that is out of the way, there's a few things I would like to address that doesn't apply to any one specific user. Seeing things like "stop updating Kanto, it's finished!" "You're inconveniencing users" "you're making things worse with every update" "These look like literal trash" "I should have never hunted this thing if it was going to get updated" .... This is exactly the kind of behaviour that we said to cut out - wording like the above examples - which I HAVE seen - come off as nothing but rude - not constructive at all and is not conducive to a positive discussion or outcome. This is not the way anyone should talk about our work or ANYONE's work for that matter. Remarks like this lead to damaging team morale, and it's part of my job to keep that up. I'm normally extremely mild mannered and chipper, but I'm putting my foot down - if anyone is going to talk this way again, here, in a public space, I'm telling you now - don't. Don't post this sort of thing. I will continue to call out people who think wording things like this is okay and not expect any kind of response, and in some extreme cases, outright remove posts. Users are allowed to criticise, but they're absolutely not allowed to tell us to stop doing things because "everyone hates what we do" and we should "just stop". All that being said, we're never going to stop improving these sprites and listening to what you all have to say. Sure, it might take a few days for me to respond, but I like being thorough and responding as best I can. Hopefully some things have been cleared up, and I'm well aware that many more questions will come of this or I might be laughed at and criticised in private circles, but I'm fine with that. If a person is not willing to say such things to us in a reasonable and amicable manner, whether that's in public, DMs through discord or PMs on this site, then they simply prove that their words are nothing but vitriol and are not worth listening to. Let me make this simple - If you cannot give feedback without being rude then do not post here. If you are rude then you will be dealt with as per Rule 6 which may lead to possible eviction from the premises. In the end, people are free to think what they want and voice their opinions to one another publicly, whether they're flattering or not. We don't mind people disliking things and telling us why - that's what helps us to improve, after all. What I am not fine with is users trying to tell me what we can and cannot do with something that we are working on. Your feedback is appreciated but we are absolutely not your servants or your work-horses, you do not get to order us to do what you want us to do. Tell us your wants and desires, express what you like and dislike - give us that feedback - but when the message we receive is "do what I want or you're trash", you're not the person we're ever going to listen to. I will be locking this thread temporarily to ensure that this post has been read in full. As mentioned, the text in the accordion should be read by everyone, evern though specific users are addressed - the contents are relevant to more than just the person listed in the header. To everyone who hasn't done anything mentioned above, I would like to thank you for remaining civil and partaking in being part of a working feedback system. This thread will be unlocked at reset. EDIT: Thread has been unlocked. Please keep in mind what was said. Thank you.

Read the past few (several...) pages to see what the hubbub was about. My main question after reading through ^that post and its accordions is: Why the need for color math? Like, in a genuinely curious sense; I'm not asking "why" as in "why do you do it that way; it's dumb" but just strictly "why". Is it just easier on the art staff to kind of fit things into a process of sorts?

Ok, first thing first, I wanted to say that locking a thread for almost 24hs is not ok after a post like this. If a "regular" user did the same, I'm pretty sure the thread would have been already unlocked by a mod way before the reset. I understand that you may be upset, but that's still not a reason to remove our rights to reply for that long or even for any given moment of time. If you needed a break, please, and I dont say it in a sarcastic tone, if you feel like we ask for too much, take a break. Our way of quoting us but not quite answering our concern didn't reassure us with a message this. We are all humans being with feelings. While it may have been trashy reponse, I'm pretty sure it's not at all the case in any of the quotes you answer to. We don't want the consistency things if it don't look good. Is that simple. Dirty white won't work on all pokémons. It work on darumaka, but it just don't work on galarian ponyta. But if you feel like it does work, please, share your thought on why these color looks good on the pokémon we say it was bad. We are concern about the future of the sprites we learn to love. I don't think it's hard to understand that. Before you quote me on this, no I'm not saying that sprite who obviously need correction doesn't need to be corrected. But the art team can cut some work. Johto and Kanto colors are already perfect. But if art team feel like some pixel need to be reajusted, they need to change these pixels not all the sprites altogether. Not if it takes them that amount of times. I do sprite edits in the sake of winning some credits, if I needed to spends 3hs on only one sprite, I would have quit long time ago. Don't let art team inflict that to themself. It's sprite, pokemon sprite. Dont spend more time on it that you need to.

A. Sei locked the thread so everyone could read their post, instead of letting people rush in with some rude remark. It gives you time to think, rather than blow up like a nuke- B. Yes, I agree the consistancy doesn't always give the best results, and I still am of the opinion the rules can be broken in some cases to avoid cases like G. Ponyta. Bashing it, however, is not ok. I am sure there are some people who are totus fine with this method. C. Kanto colors are fine, sure, but that doesn't mean they do not need fixing. D. Spritework- especially Custom Sprites can take a long time to make. If you say you can do it in less then an hour, why not try and get hired by art staff? Edit: My point is- getting mad at art staff is exactly why this lock happend. I honestly felt bad and went to apologize to Sei in person, tbh. Art staff is just as human as we are. Treat them like you want to be treated.

Wanted to react on these point in particular I was speaking about recolor in general, I dont see how spending more than an hour on it is necessery to make it looks good. Especially with hue shifting, you can just select all the color and let the software shift it. If you need to actually change pixel per pixel, find a better art software. I'm not mad at art staff, but at their excuses. In sense that it has been an issue for years: the consistency may be important, but not if its detrimental to the sprite itself. The consistency should be breaked to make the color still fits the spirit of the pokemon general concept. If it has one, I understand thar not all pokemon have a deep lore and stuff. We are all humans, and we live in a society all together. So we need to comunnicate pour thoughts. Obviously, it can be frustrating to us that the conversation get close like that. Even if it was only for a day. I just want to clear things up as I dont like when my posts are misunderstood. Edit: oh and also "Kanto colors are fine, sure, but that doesn't mean they do not need fixing." I litterally says that they doesn't need to get all their colors change, not that they dont need fixing. Sure, if white pixels on k. ponyta seems weird, change the white pixels. It like back when a pokemon had a transparent pixel where they didn't need too. It was only needed to color this spot, not to redo all the sprite.

both frezgle and nightmon have good points imo, if this process takes so long to complete in the first place it sounds like a miserable process. spending hours on a single sprite is (pardon lack of better phrasing) unecessary. the art team has full control of this situation, the way these sprite recolours are going is obviously not very optimal for the artists working on them. i dont think anyones holding you guys back telling you that X sprite needs to have the correct shade of yellow-green or everything will explode. forcing yourselves to work in this uncomfortably strict and time consuming method leaves little room for creativity. if you spend hours on something and get it live on site, only for people to nitpick the heck out of it... of course you're gonna be upset! but this is seemingly not a rare occurence. the rules of consistency are making you folk waste your time (again pardon lack of better words) trying over and over again to make things look right. even if the people who played and hunted these sprite recolours loved every single one of these sprite recolours, spending this long on them is still tiresome and probably very boring. i highly suggest you guys loosen the rules of consistency, if not for the sake of the people who actually hunt these sprites then do it for yourselves. also. i dont want to sound rude by saying this, but the rules of consistency (from what was described recently) sound like you are doing tone correction the hard way. which is like hue/luminosity/contrast/ect edits that you can have the coputer do for you (versus manually) btw for those reading this again, not trying to be rude or degrade your work but im pretty sure i could recreate the melan sprites in 2-3 mins with the shiny sprite and pure tonal correction. or atleast get it so close that only sall edits would need to be made. not saying your method is stupid or lazy but if the end product is almost identical to what it would be with tonal correction then why not just do that and get the sprite done in significantly less time? then if people dont like the sprite, you dont have to undo hours of work, only a couple minutes. it seems like a win/win situation to me. perhaps thats the lazy way out, but like i've said... spending hours on a single sprite people wont think mor ethan twice about is just unethical and (personally) reads as poor time management. i know that probably sounds harsh but thats just looking at it from a logical standpoint. i don't play anymore so please don't mistake me for someone who's just salty about my fave getting revamped or something similar. this is digital art, no one's gonna bash your head for using the tools that are given to you. a lot of artists alter the colours on their work. if you want to stick to a strict consistency pattern then i really think it would be better if you let the computer do it. not because you guys pick bad colours or cuz the computer does it better, but because its so much faster/will allow for quicker edits AND will help the situation were no one's insulting someone else's actual choices. the computer doesn't care what's pleasing to the eye, and neither does the rules of consistency. regardless of what the art team chooses to do, i strongly agree that something needs to change

I'm glad the thread is open again! :D Replying to Sei's post, or at least some of it, because as you said, nobody likes walls of text. I hope everything's okay for you!! Sending all my wellwishes <3 To be fair, saying things like "you don't know what you're talking about" is always gonna sound a little bit rude, especially when I know lots of folks on the farm are freelance artists or otherwise working in art, but I understand what you mean and there's not really a lot you can do about it to make it sound nicer, so I don't blame you!! Also I'd love to see a sprite/art stream, timezones withstanding, very interested in seeing the process behind the colours and such~ all those headaches you have to deal with, omg, rip in pepperoni pizza-- And as for the part that's addressed to me (...should I be honoured that I came first?) - once again, glad to hear that you're listening to us and that you're keeping the thread open!! <3 Gonna be honest, not sure what I'm meant to be looking at in the Larvitar line pic - the official games went a bit crazy there, didn't they? And about other sprites - for Paras, I think the dull eyes are part of its charm, especially for melan Parasect; for Skuntank, yeah, I saw Shazi's post, thanks for the clarification! And there's also something you addressed to Nightmon that kind of caught my eye - you said "they're albinos and melans first" and I'm glad that you're keeping that in mind because a lot of my least favourite melans are the ones that look too close to the normal/albino. (Litten probably suffered the most from this, but I understand that colour artsy maths is hard, and you guys did yer best <333)

I'm just gonna toss my two cents in here as well as a few of the responses are bothering me and I've been in a agreement with Sei's reasons - at least to some extent - this entire time and understand why, though I'm in an eh mood right now already so I'm probably not gonna respond henceforth (might also come off a bit strong, apologies if it does and I can revise later if so) x A. Reason for "consistency": Sei has already answered this, for those of you that missed it here it is. The reason for not just doing what looks good and going through so much effort making them "consistent" is to keep the sprites from being chaos - as in you have wacky potato-patterned Pikachu and suddenly a soccer ball Voltorb, then a regular Ditto. Bit of an extreme case, but gets the point across a bit. It's just crazy and unreasonable and doesn't look good in the grand scheme of things. Might make for nice variants in some people's opinions, but I think a lot of you are forgetting that all game makers have an idea, an aspiration, a game they wish to make. Niet wishes for the sprites to be consistent and not wacky and out of the spirit of the original games, and so do art staff at least to the extent they'll work hard to do just that. Just because we want wacky, good-looking chaos doesn't necessarily mean it goes in hand with what the game is designed to be. If I wanted Skyrim to have thunderbolt-summoning, terrain-destroying, cataclysmic dragons and got a backing for it, doesn't mean they'd add it? Because that's not what the game they spent years upon years of their life funding, coding, and well, bringing it to life was meant to be. I understand the wish for good-looking sprites, I really do, but there's such a thing as compromise, discussion, constructive criticism..If you can do better, apply for art staff, they can always use some help. Make a suggestion, show your "better" sprites as an example to show them what they could be doing. Art staff are spending so much time because they want to make them look good, fall in line with their need for consistency - whether we think it is necessary or not it has been explained why many times before - and please as many people as possible. It's not really as simple as color shifting. Color shifting brings about poorly contrasting shades, I've tried this, other areas need fixing afterwards, might make details hard to make out, et cetera. They do need to be shifted, then adjusted even if pixel by pixel. That's just how it is, I'm sure Sei or Shazi could whip up a "just shifted" and a "shifted and tweaked" version for people if it was requested, if they have the time for it but ^^; not to mention they create the sprites themselves from scratch, they can't just take the original, unedited sprites after all. B. The reason for the lock: Restating this now (as VyrusVoyd mentioned it), but the reason for locking it wasn't because they were upset - which maybe they are and maybe they aren't - but rather because Sei wanted everyone to have a chance to read it before it got buried. Same reason I'm restating the reason for consistency even though it got mentioned many times - it got buried behind other posts. C. What is this "constructive criticism" thing Sei mentioned?: Constructive criticism is taking apart a piece of work, analyzing it for positive points and negative points, then relaying both to the creator of the piece of work in as non-biased and informational a way as you can. So they can learn what they did good and should keep doing, what they did bad and should be fixed, how you think it can be fixed, et cetera. Rather than just criticizing something which by definition is simply pointing out the flaws and expressing disapproval towards it. That doesn't help to fix it x We should put as much work into constructive criticizing the sprites as they put into making them if we wish for things to change.

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It's understandable why people don't want this "consistency", Sei and Niet probably also understand why players don't want it, but unfortunately we weren't the ones who spent 11+ years coding this site nearly every day and paying for the servers to host us all to enjoy the game, or years and years of working on the site's art and sprites, on top of having normal lives to lead. Yes we pay to play this game, we pay for other games as well that don't let us have such a strong input into further development, we pay to play because we enjoy playing, and if you don't enjoy it then..It's as simple as that ;w;' but if you're not enjoying it for a fixable reason and normally would, then put together an actual, well thought out reason - cough suggestion forum cough - and gather backing, get others' input as well, get it known by staff, have them analyze your idea and see if it aligns with their goals and is doable and they'll add it. If it doesn't, readjust it, get input, ask why and how it could align with the goals. Suggestions are currently being pushed for to an extent by Niet because he does want us to enjoy the game. But saying, "I don't like this for X reason" doesn't help fix any issues unfortunately, why don't you like it, how can it be fixed, is it reasonable, put some effort into this and make it an actual discussion rather than a slug-fest of criticism all the time. We'll get some answers, Sei does read through all this, and Niet and Garthic do read the suggestions (the more upvotes, more likely it'll be seen). That's all from me though ^^; Edit: Meant to add this in as well @art staff, but there is a compromise between consistency and chaos, it's called organized chaos. You can have what looks like a giant mess all over the place, when in reality there's substance to it - you have certain things in one corner and other things in another, it's just not space-efficient really, yet it's still organized enough to know where everything is. It would take some work to figure out this sweet medium, but I'm sure if people wish to expand upon this..Well, discussion ^^

I don't think anyone is asking for this level of wacky? Most of the complaints I see are from when the consistency formula produces something that just isn't as appealing as it could be (e.g. Galarian Ponyta's melan which I've thought would be a great time to break the "no more neon melans rule" but). Consistency is good to an extent; honestly some of the non-updated albinos and melans aren't great to look at next to each other. But there's solid palettes in there and people get upset when consistency demands those be totally changed. There's a cry for some kind of a balance, not chaos :v

I pointed it out as being an extreme case to get the point across, you can still have chaos on a minuscule level. When you make exceptions for one thing, you have to for another, and then another, then things get out of hand..They're doing their best to keep things in line. And yes, we complained..Not constructively criticized, what could they do better and how, and not just "make it look good", what colors could they use that mesh in with the consistency that has been well explained by Shazi in a previous post - we can align our criticism to fix the issue based on their consistency. It'll just take some actual work rather than looking at it and saying it looks bad and shouldn't be consistent to fix it.