If you’ll recall, CommandoMan is my fictional MMBN character. He’s a powerful Navi who resembles a hacker in the Matrix, in a way - he has a few hacks and edits available that he can use against his enemies (one of my favorites being a “lock”, which prevents Navis and programs from leaving a certain area of the internet. Using this, he can force a target into fighting. Fear the Agents who get ahold of such a weapon!).

CommandoMan’s specialty is versatility, adaptability, the ability to have no weakness. He has changed as I’ve gotten older. The first few versions of CM were before I learned how to sprite; the shape was the same as the first few sprites I’ll show you, but his weaponry was a little off. He’s always had the sky-blue sword, but his other arm was a vulcannon (the MMBN name for a machine gun). He had a variety of other weapons/attacks that focused mostly on swords and artillery attacks. He was also mostly heartless in my mind.

As I got older (and better at MMBN), his weaponry changed. An awesome-looking stick I found in a friend’s backyard was responsible for the vulcannon edit below. His “folder” (a collection of once-per-battle special attacks) evolved to include various elements, so that he could counter any other elements.

Oldest sprite

From that, though, he’s changed to a more futuristic style. His weapon switches back and forth between a sword, a vulcannon and (as yet, unsprited) a spear. So far I only have sprites for sword and vulcannon, as I said; here’s the sheet. There is a lot of white space below it, that’s for the future sprites. Notice the difference between the shot angles. The sprites to the right are “battle sprites”; they’re looking at the Navi in question during the battle phase of the game, a shot from the side, closer than the “overworld” sprites featured above. Overworld sprites are the sprites you see while you’re just wandering around the Internet/real world, exploring. Overworld sprites are considered to be harder.From now on, if and when I ever examine a sheet closely, I’ll use a coordinate system. [3,4] refers to the third row, the fourth frame. The rest of this table, I believe, will just be a review of my techniques, so if you’re not interested, I don’t really blame you, skip ahead to below the sprite image.The third row of sprites features several “custom” frames (frames where major themes are drawn mostly from scratch, rather than editing another frame or section thereof). Actually, they only look custom. [3,1] is a minor edit of the ready pose on the first row (you’ll notice it’s not really proportional, but in this case, it looks better like that). The next two frames are edits of the first; the sword’s blur is totally custom. Look carefully at [3,4] and [2,2]; you’ll notice that the arm blur is the same, only flipped on the third row so it’s pointing down. Likewise with the sword’s blur, although it does have an edit to make it look continuous. The last two frames are stances with arms flipped upside-down and pasted on.Row three’s animation earned major respect points among some experienced spriters I know. It’s not hard, but it was creative and it took a little expertise; to the experienced spriters it’s a decent custom edit, and to those without much knowledge it’s a very cool-looking custom slash.Row four and five are sprites of “Weapon Change”, where he changes weapon. The fade is slow, but the actual animation (when I make it) will be quick. This creates a smooth-looking fade effect, looking like a morph. The colors were generated automatically by Fireworks’ brightness options, so there isn’t much to be said there.

I’d like to give a minor rant about how hard it is to align a Vulcannon sprite - the professional vulcannon sprite made by Capcom, MMBN’s creators, only faces horizontally, as shown on row 7. (It’s also got four barrels and it’s colored orange. Editing is rather fun.) You can’t use any image editor’s “transform” or “rotate” options; those badly blur the sprites, making it look incredibly fuzzy and undetailed; that happens when you rotate things, but large images don’t suffer so much. Sprites are too small for that treatment, however.

[2,7] is his ‘crest’, ’seal’ or ’symbol’. There’s no official name for it. The ring on the outside is official. The inside was full custom.

 Battle sheet

His personality has changed a bit as my writing expertise has increased, too. [See “Stories are like algebra”, coming soon!] As a character, he’s gotten a bit deeper; he isn’t emotionless, he’s simply staunch, hard to influence. He has a strong sense of honor, but a chaotic sense of good. He is excellent at making decisions but hates to do it alone - he wants someone with a motive of some kind to guide him, because he has no motive. Alone, all he would ever do is train and become stronger, because he has nothing else to strive for. There are some certain beings he holds in high regard, and woe be upon you if you attack - emotionally or physically - these beings, because CommandoMan’s tongue can be quite sharp. In a debate he is stubborn and entirely against emotions or gut feelings - the logical way will always work, to him. If you wish to persuade him, you must prove to him your way is at least as logical (or more so) than his. If you give him orders (and are in a position to do so) that he doesn’t believe are entirely logical, he will question them long enough to figure out what you mean.

He has a rather oddly realistic view of everything, and a strange lack of limits. What I mean when I say that is that he will stop at nothing to accomplish his goal. He is willing to work with emotions - his own or someone else’s - if he believes he can curb them to his will. Nothing that can be changed will escape his consideration; he looks at all the variables and considers what effect each will have on his environment, then makes a decision accordingly.

You might be thinking I’m going on about his battle statistics, but that’s not true. This is his mentality all the time. In a conversation he is constantly wondering what saying different things will do, what different motions will mean, what little changes in appearance might imply. Since he usually has no motive, he almost never acts upon these considerations, but when he wants something out of a conversation he’ll flip all the switches in his favor. This is true walking down the road, escaping an area, fighting, writing code, building programs, anything at all.

More coming eventually, when I have time to sprite more…