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My 2D pixel art character asset

A topic by pottlund created Feb 05, 2023 Views: 337 Replies: 4
Viewing posts 1 to 5

Hello Community, I have recently released a 2 D pixel art asset. It is a 2D character for platformer games. I'm getting hardly any views and downloads, are the graphics too bad or do I have too little visibility? Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

https://pottlund.itch.io/2d-platform-character

The sprite sheet is arranged haphazardly. A 4 frame walk cycle looks jerky. The character looks like a bobblehead with bread loaves for appendages. The character sheet returns 75 colors. However, each image of the character has a count around 38, so some color cleanup is needed. I use at most 32 colors for an entire project.

There are a ton of free character animations on itch. You'll have to be outstanding to make money from assets. I'm in a similar position. My game with original assets is free, and nobody wants it.

(1 edit) (+1)

I think you need to promote your asset more. I knew about it when I read this thread so if you didn't post this maybe I and many others won't know.

I don't know the market of free character assets here on itch.io but character animations such as hurt, death and fall are important so missing them makes some people, at least me, has doubt to download it. Moreover, the hurt and death animation in premium version aren't convincing, giving even more doubt to buy the premium version. The death animation is like "I'm getting sleepy, let me rest for a bit" while the hurt is "Eh? what's that?".

That being said, maybe I could download the free version so I could edit some sprites to create hurt, death and fall sprites myself.

So my suggestions are: 

1. As mentioned above, you need to be outstanding. Specifically, make the sprites look great and add more frames for each animation. Especially in this case, make hurt and death animation more convincing. Add facial expression etc.

2. Make basic animations such as hurt, fall and death be available in free version. In premium version, have some of these animations: punch, kick, spellcast, run, jump punch, jump kick, running punch, running kick, cheer, block and dodge. Each punch, kick and spellcast could have more than one version.

3. Team up with game developer to create game with your character assets in it. Maybe you'd need to compromise by creating assets that they needed. Either way, ask them to credit you in game's page. People playing the game would know about the dev and might know about you too.

The #3 suggestion will really depend on game's popularity but IMO character assets being used in a game have better chance to be known than assets not used at all.

ok, thank you for your feedback

The actual content aside, there are two problems with the presentation:

  • You have set the project as free with a minimum price on one file.  This makes it impossible to put the asset pack on sale, and it attracts people looking for freebies instead of people willing to pay.  It is better to set a price for the whole project and then mark the file you want to give away for free as a free demo.
  • You don't have any demonstration for how the animations will actually look when animated.  You should put some animated gifs on your page.