[Question] Hand drawn battlers

I don't see any reason why this wouldn't work, and it could look gorgeous (especially if you wound up doing hand drawings for the other art as well so everything matched).

It'd be an extremely huge task though. You'd probably want to limit your Pokedex to 150-250 for it to be feasible.

It would take a long time, and is pretty much pointless, but yes you could do it if you really felt the need to.
Unless you're changing up the battle scene or something, theres really no need to recreate pokemon fronts and backs as they exist is many formats and styles, and are still updating every day. The only really worthwhile choice would be the battle backs, as it doesn't get much attention from the spriting community, and lacks much creativity - meaning, there isnt as much variety among the available backs.

Regardless, the answer is yes, as long as you know what you're doing.

Saving Raven said:

Unless you're changing up the battle scene or something, theres really no need to recreate pokemon fronts and backs as they exist is many formats and styles, and are still updating every day.

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Thanks for answering!
I felt very stupid when I came back today and saw there's a 'design questions' thread above, I totally missed it, so maybe this should be moved there?
Perhaps I should explain this a bit better: in the past month I have hand drawn about 100 or so 'fakemon' in the sugimori style ( and I have another 100 in mind, but haven't drawn them yet ). They are still all in a raw state, but drawing so many didn't take THAT much time, so I figured it'd take less time with something that already existed, such as the original pokemon. As things stand though, I have no past experience with photoshop so I'd still have to learn that, but I already had in mind to do so for other reasons. Of course if I ever decide to use hand drawn battlers, I will have to utilize battle backgrounds with matching art.
In the end, what I really lack is experience with rpg maker and essentials, so I didn't know if this was possible at all...
I'm curious about the existing fronts and backs in many formats and styles that you mentioned, though. Could you point me towards them? Are they open to public? I thought only the ripped backs and fronts from the official games existed as a valuable resource.

griever7x said:

Thanks for answering!
I felt very stupid when I came back today and saw there's a 'design questions' thread above, I totally missed it, so maybe this should be moved there?
Perhaps I should explain this a bit better: in the past month I have hand drawn about 100 or so 'fakemon' in the sugimori style ( and I have another 100 in mind, but haven't drawn them yet ). They are still all in a raw state, but drawing so many didn't take THAT much time, so I figured it'd take less time with something that already existed, such as the original pokemon. As things stand though, I have no past experience with photoshop so I'd still have to learn that, but I already had in mind to do so for other reasons. Of course if I ever decide to use hand drawn battlers, I will have to utilize battle backgrounds with matching art.
In the end, what I really lack is experience with rpg maker and essentials, so I didn't know if this was possible at all...
I'm curious about the existing fronts and backs in many formats and styles that you mentioned, though. Could you point me towards them? Are they open to public? I thought only the ripped backs and fronts from the official games existed as a valuable resource.

Click to expand...

Ah, okay. If you've already got a head start and they're all Fakemon, that's a different story since you have to do all the art for your Fakemon yourself anyway. Photoshop and a similar program, Gimp, do have a bit of a learning curve, but there's plenty of tutorials on Youtube and just around the Internet these days to help you get started. Gimp is officially free. Photoshop generally isn't officially free (though you can occasionally find Photoshop Elements at a good price - I found version 5 for $50 on Black Friday a few years back. Elements does most of the common things (but not everything) that full Photoshop does). I know Sai is another popular program, but I don't know much about it (if I remember correctly, lots of people like to do line art in Sai and then colour with Photoshop). And I heard there's a newer thing that's like the love-child of Photoshop and Sai, but I forget what it is.

The image files for RMXP can be replaced; they're all .png files in the Graphics folders, and just about every art program gives you the option to export as .png. Even MS Paint's default is .png now (it used to be .bmp, although MS Paint STILL doesn't support transparency, which you'll need).

I still think that if you go with hand-drawn Battlers, you should also go with hand-drawn art most everywhere else so everything looks uniform and has a charm to it, but that's where you could get bogged down in everything taking forever. It's also a bit hard to hand-draw 32x32 sprites. The Black/White sprite style might suit your project okay though (but I think the FR/LG sprites that Essentials comes with would clash too much).

For resources, there's tons of places. This forum has a Resources section, lots of people put stuff on Deviant Art, there's a site called "Spriter's Resource," etc. Googling "Pokemon Sprites" will get you far. ^o^

Hmm... I wouldn't mind hand drawing every location, but I was planning on making a huge world...
That's surely going to be an ordeal.