Sprite design

Concept sprite

Color test

Final 32x64 Idle sprite (small ears, no animation):

Collision mask adjustment

One necessary thing to do is to better adjust the sprite size. As it is now the sprite´s too big and even though the mask is independent and causes no problems in-game, the visuals are a bit off. the player can walk too much into walls, the point for walking off cliffs is not clear...This problem doesn´t happen in any Mario game, so let´s see how they do it.

Mario´s personal space

In SMW, Mario´s sprite is 16x32 px can push 2 or 3 pixels into a wall. This amounts to a bit of his moustache and the hand behind him. However, his belly and feet are perfectly aligned with the wall. This makes sense visually and functionally. When walking over a cliff, Mario will start falling when still 3px of the sprite are overlapping the last block he was standing on. Both distances match, which indicates that the mask is centered.

When standing on the ground, Mario is perfectly aligned with the floor. However when jumping upwards and hitting a block, his head can go some distance into the block. We need to measure this distance, for now we´ll call it Y.

So in conclusion, Mario´s sprite is 16x32 px, while his mask is something like 10xY px.

Kitsune´s personal space

Kitsune´s sprite needs to be even bigger than Mario´s, exactly double: 32x64 px. We can use´s Mario´s relation between sprite and mask size to estimate Kitsune´s: 

	Mario	Kitsune
Sprite width	16	32
Mask width	10	X = 20
Sprite height	32	64
Mask height	Y (probably around 28~30)	2*Y

It becomes evident that Kitsune´s mask will also be double than Mario´s.

In conclusion: * We must make Kitsune´s sprite 32x64. * We must make Kitsune´s mask 20x2Y. * The mask will be centered on X, and bottom aligned. * Kitsune´s belly and front hand must match the mask width to provide nice feedback when walking against walls. * Kitsune´s feet must match the mask width. * Only the tail and ears, as they provide no positional information, can be outside the sprite limits.