Project 12: The Chrono Trigger Sprites Live - Marle

Once again, I've made some progress on my Chrono Trigger Perler Sprites. This time I got Marle done.

It's been a long, long time since I started working on these. In that time I've moved at least 3 times trucking an unfused sprite around with me. A little while back I finally fused the Marle sprite, and now that I have a little time and space, I'm going to try to push on. I'd like to finish the 1-to-1 sprites before September and then I'll see if I still want to do the double sized sprites.

The Marle Sprite

Similar to the Crono Sprite, I started by determining all of the colours in the sprite and which sprite colour of Perler bead I would use to match them.

The colours in the Marle sprite and Perler Beads colours

Thanks to the lessons learned on the Chrono Sprite, I produced a map for each bead colour in the form of a separate sprite image (and included the bead colour in the file name, which I really appreciate returning to these two years later). The table of those colours are below.

Sprite Part	Hex Colour	Perler Colour	Notes
	---	---	The Original
	#381838	Purple	Again I chose to outline the sprite in purple which gives a good definition to the outside. Might look a little better with the top and bottom filled in as well.
	#f8a838	Butterscotch	Highlights in Marle's hair.
	#584848	Dark Grey	Darkest shadows on the crossbow.
	#807060	Light Grey	"Metal" in the crossbow.
	#f86810	Orange	Low lights in the hair, belt and shoes.
	#488878 and #205040	Parrot Green	Two sprite colours into one perler colour. Largely shadows.
	#f8a8a0	Peach	Pinker skin tone.
	#80f8b8	Pearl Blue	Pants.
	#801800	Rust	Shadows and Crossbow Body
	#f8d8d0	Sand	Skin tone highlights, a little more beige than the true colour.
	#a0a8a8	Silver Perl	Crossbow highlights.
	#f8f848	Yellow	Hair highlights.
	#ffffff	White	Highlight pixels and filler for the crossbow.

Success of the Sprite

I made sure that the full bottom of the sprite was level all thew ay across. This allowed me to avoid the problems I had with Crono where he tips over if not propped up on the edge. Possibly not a problem in some applications, but if you want your sprites standing, then they need a consistent bottom row. I think here I added in a little extra purple on the bottom to make it stand (although looking at the purple pixels, I can't really see). I hope that me!from-3-years-ago knew what he was doing.

The other change I made was filling in the crossbow. It's technically empty in the real sprite, but for structural integrity I opted to fill it in so that the sprite would be much more rigid and robust. In terms of looking at the sprite in the real world, you barely notice and I think it still looks good.

I'm quite happy with the sprite. I have it sitting next to the Crono sprite in my office window and they look very good together. I am especially enjoying being able to see them from the garden outside.

The process of putting everything together was a bit rough. This project fell way down my priority list, so the couple of times I jumped back in there was a long figuring out what was going on period. On the plus side, I was much more organized about generating the sprite-part sheets, so building the sprite and putting together this post was fairly straight forward.

My next sprite is Lucca. I haven't started yet, but I'd like to have the sprite finished and the next blog post in the series made by August 23, 2019.