Animation and sprite color upgrade complete for Ray McDougal. Several improvements were required, as this sprite set is being used as a generic thug. It is imperative to have quality color, animation, and attack technique variety since it will be seen repeatedly.

1. Sprite set was procured from second game, Fighters History Dynamite. This sequel was missing several animations and had lower quality animation in general then the already sub-par original.
   • Solution: Missing animations and frames ripped from original Fighter’s History via MAME and Photoshop batching techniques.
2. Sprite set featured almost no color separation. Identical shades of blue used for shirt, gloves, pants and shoes. This combined with other shortcuts by original artists such as liberal application of #ffffff and #000000 made alternate palette creation nearly impossible.
   • Solution: Hand color entire sprite set (approximately 270 units) with individually dedicated colors for each portion of the sprite:

     

3. Even with all animations combined from both games, animation was still lacking overall. In particular, attack recoils are simply the strike frames played in reverse. This is very jarring when seen next to more painstakingly created sets from other sources.
   • Solution: Combine hand drawing and franken-sprite techniques to create new frames for attack sequences. Most non attack sequences have satisfactory animation.

In addition to the above improvements, Ray also received a “rounding out” of available techniques. Effectively he is now a complete player character with weaker statistics. This is really somewhat overboard given the large number of basic moves available to players, but again as Ray will be seen quite often, I believe he should have a wide array of abilities and tactics to avoid repetition.

Owing to most of the work requiring hand drawing, the total time needed was just over a month. I am pleased with the results however. This should make an effective generic thug to oppose the players without boring them.