A Week or so in the Shoes of a Sprite Leader

By Layell. Art by The XY Sprite Project.

Have you ever had a project where the due date jumped forward almost an entire month? When Project Pokémon began data mining the ORAS demo, thus finding everything we needed for Pokémon Showdown!, I realized that the simulator would be needing sprites, and I had planned for my first update to be maybe a week before the games' release. This was full-on panic mode; I was not ready. For those of you who don't know, I, Layell, am the Sprite Leader of Smogon and am one of the leaders of the XY Sprite Project, along with princessofmusic, who has done the BW sprites for PS!. No, I don't make them all; I just lead it and yell at other people to do more work for free.

They say to really know someone you have to walk a mile in their shoes. Well, I have really wide feet, and sometimes I had to buy specialty shoes as a kid because they were seriously that wide; it was really uncomfortable, but luckily they evened out later in life. OK, this metaphor has done more than enough, so here is a summary of about a week or so of what I did in terms of sprites for Smogon and Pokémon Showdown!, starting with the first update I did for the ORAS sprites.

October 16th

On the first day of ORAS leaks, my true love gave to me: one shiny Groudon!

I should mention one thing I learned while making XY sprites when compared to ORAS ones. Before the XY games came out, we had a sizable amount of sprites done, a few were even animated and I thought that was just fantastic. Unfortunately for me, I found out that all the rules for shiny Pokémon would be tossed out the window, such as Mega Gardevoir randomly getting a black dress. Because I wanted to just do straight palette swaps, I needed multiple shades of the same color for some Pokémon to make shinies work for animated sprites. Not wanting to be burned again, I made the key decision with ORAS sprites to work up to a point where a randomly colored shiny wouldn't put all my work to waste. This was a good plan at the time; I just did not foresee a demo leaking all the information a month before release.

I also sent a PM to Zarel, as I would often do, asking him what he might like as an update. I suggested a simple plan of using the Project Pokémon rips as single frame animated gifs, so that they could be used on PS! with the XY models. Then, if players used the BW sprite option, they would have whatever sprites I finished instead. Project Pokémon had no back sprites at the time, while my BW sprites had a few backs here and there. He agreed to this as the best decision, so let's see what sort of update I sent in for the BW sprites:

If you'd like, go right now into the PS! dex and look to see all the changes I have made since, but I have a bit of explaining to do at the start. Some of these I considered near finished (Audino, Camerupt, Sceptile, and Sharpedo), others were waiting for more references (Swampert, Metagross, Lopunny), and others were whatever I had lying around. At the time, nobody bothered to make a Mega Steelix and that new Hoopa threw everyone for a loop, so I just nabbed the Project Pokémon rips. Salamence was a rough draft, but it was the only pixel art that fit the dimensions on hand (curse those giant wings). Gallade was an edited version, but I knew that this Pokémon was spriter aXl's only favorite mon, and he was going to make a full custom soon enough. I figured I would get that in the coming week, but for now, the edit would suffice.

I also added in whatever mini icons that were made available via the demo. As the XY icons are 40 x 32 pixels and the PS! layout uses the 32 x 24 size of the BW icons, I had to edit most of them to make them fit. This is also why no gen 1-5 Pokémon have their updated sprites. The current layout is fit that tight.

October 18th

This was a small but rather helpful update. Brylark commented that the guy with the Glalie avatar has to do Glalie, and made his own improved Mega Glalie. At the time, his back was in progress with no color, but I made the switch because it was obviously incoming. With the Steelix as well as all released Megas having their own sprite, it's about counting the small victories, folks.

Other changes for Kyogre addressed the abomination of its shiny color, and the fact that the back was edited to be too big. Of course, if some other spriters hadn't edited it to be bigger, despite the fact that the regular sprite is just about at the maximum size, then I wouldn't have had this problem, oh well. Groudon also received split tail spikes as it is supposed to, in addition to the changed markings.

Fun fact: While writing this, I noticed another edit that needed to be made.

October 19th

The Pokémon client is updated so that players have the render rips from Project Pokémon. While it was all uploaded three days before this, there were some complicated matters involved, such as "we forgot to update the client". This wasn't my fault, I swear.

October 21st

Instead of slaving away at sprites, I went downtown and met up with co-leader of the sprite project, princessofmusic. We had bought two Smogon University shirts together and shipped to my place to save on shipping. After some food and photos, we discussed what sprites we wanted to work on for the next two months, because, my friends, I personally believe you can't be insane if your actions are premeditated.

October 22nd

This was a small update for just the BW sprites, I had really only done Sceptile. Part of the "rules" for the BW sprites is that the shiny Pokémon must be a palette swap. All instances of one color will be changed if the shiny demands it. So, being nefarious, I made multiple shades of red. I managed to pull it off perfectly with my 15 color limit.

In addition, as people kept complaining about the fact that the renders faced the player due to the complete lack of back sprites, I turned the backs from this:

Into this:

You're all very welcome, and I hope everyone was less creeped out.

October 24th

I have already gone over a week, but to be fair, I did most of this in my arbitrary time frame.

Here is another small shiny checking update; I did a few changes to make sure that all the shinies would work and look fine. This also resulted in some small and unnoticeable changes to the original colors. In particular, Camerupt and Slowbro both received a slight change of palette. The original shiny Slowbro sprite has the gold teeth and even a darn purple mouth. Thus, for the sake of consistency, I did the same for our Mega, even if that consistency totally sucks and was perfectly capable of being avoided. Camerupt got a small change in that the highlight of the rocks is the same shade of grey as the dark part of its eye.

Conclusion

Getting leaks a month early with all the possible information was fun, but did nothing good for my sanity. I know many of these sprites will have already been changed by the time this issue of The Smog comes out, and in turn, the ORAS games. But really, that is the point: we are always making small edits to get closer to that point of perfection.

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