Mechanical Maniacs Series 8

I was originally just going to post those big mugshots, plus the smaller ones for comparison, but before I knew it I was just throwing in every bit of spriting I've done in the last few months for the Mechanical Maniacs' epilogues.

First, the mugshots: Rich made the new character designs and it was time to incorporate them into the story. I started with the sprites and realized soon enough that they would all need new facepics too since that's how epilogues work. I made Snakeman's first regular pixel-by-pixel spriting style. Then for Spark Chan's I experimented with drawing at 10x size first and then shrinking it down within an indexed palette and making just minor touch-ups to the shrunk-down version. It made it a bit easier to get the look I wanted right, so I did it for the last four as well, but didn't bother going crazy with the shading like I did with Spark. As a nice bonus, I liked the look of the oversized, uncropped busts enough to set them aside for posting here.

As for the Mechs' sprites, I started with Snakeman's and couldn't decide whether to have a more casual standing pose like his last one, or the crouched action pose like his older ones. So I made them both. The first crouching one had the glowing mask, but Gauntlet didn't like it and asked for a version without the mask. I kept the other one anyway to save specifically for scenes where Snake might be using his Virtual Boy computer interface thing. As I continued with Spark, Gemini, and Shadow I decided to follow the pattern with Snake and make three sprites, with one being just a minor variation on one of the other two. By the time I got to Needle I was willing to make slightly more involved variations with sprite#3, and when I finished with Top I just went ahead and made three completely different poses. I may have gone a bit overboard, considering 99% of the time, only one sprite of each set of three will be used.

The remaining sprites are a mismash of characters we needed images for. The pale guy is Topman's character Hak'hael, who gets his big feature in a story coming soon. Then there's a Pickleman, a Robot Cop à la Ariga, and Scissor Army Starman designed by Gauntlet. The two old people are K.Watson and S.Schwartz, characters mentioned in the text pieces of The Official Guide to Mega Man. I based the appearance of S.Schwartz on Steven Schwartz, the author of that book, as I'm sure was intended. The big ugly blob at the bottom is the END Devil, as it appears in the latest epilogue by me.

All images by me. Mechanical Maniacs TM3 forms designed by :~CutmanEXE:, SA Starman designed by :~Gauntlet101010:, Hak'hael designed by :~TheSpinningDemon:, Robot Cop designed by :~HitoshiAriga:. Based on Capcom's Mega Man series.