#sln-001

[stardestroyer81]

This past Saturday marked the five year anniversary of Mega Man Ultimate's conception, and my good friends got to see a slides presentation of my sizeable archive of five years worth of concept art and early sprites dating as far back as late 2017!

One such early sprite was the very first stage select portrait for Zap Man, in which I had drawn him in a front-facing angle rather a 3/4ths angle. My sister @stephysalcido suggested I ought to remaster Zap Man's original stage select portrait, and what I ended up with not only exceeded my expectations but looks wicked cool too! 💙✨

[stardestroyer81]

Last month, after seeing the success of my then-previous attempt to sprite something in 16-Bit, I decided to give it another go many months later by giving Glitch Man a Mega Man 7 styled makeover... with a result that I'm still very much thrilled with!

Very shortly after I showcased my 16-Bit Glitch Man sprite, I knew I wanted to jump straight into SNES-ifying yet another Synth Legion Number, though it was admittedly tough to decide who to choose of the remaining seven. I wanted to focus on choosing a Number that'd be a fair challenge to sprite in 16-Bit, but nothing too extreme.

And who better to choose than the Synth Legion's second in command?

Up next in my ongoing series of doubling the bits of Mega Man Ultimate's robot masters is none other than Zap Man, who proved to be exactly the sort of fun challenge I was looking for!

(Check under the cut for the usual Star Insight, Zap Man’s spriting process and a little bonus!)

This is something I never touched on when first revealing Zap Man and the sprite I'd drawn for him to tumblr, though of the eight Synth Legion Numbers, I would say that Zap Man was probably the second to third hardest to sprite. I'm certain that this is because I stuck within a five color limit, and his hulking size is slightly non-standard when compared to other robot master sprites in canon.

However, it was and still is a sprite I'm proud of nonetheless, and when preparing to go about my method of creating Mega Man 7 styled sprites out of already existing 8-Bit sprites, I had but one goal for Zap Man's SNES iteration— to up the detail to the absolute maximum.

Naturally, with over double the amount of colors I was able to use, it was an easily attainable goal! Since the above sprite is about two or three times bigger than Zap Man's original sprite, this of course meant that I could run wild in squeezing out as much detail as I could, and that was something that I had an absolute blast with.

Zap Man definitely took me much longer than an hour to sprite. If I recall, I think this sprite took me just about a day to draw— not twenty-four consecutive hours, obviously, but as you can probably tell, a sprite with THIS level of detail was no walk in the park to create, as evident by the above sprite process!

With that said, though, I think that Zap Man's 16-Bit sprite may just be one of if not my best SNES styled sprites yet, and I'm thrilled to finally be able to show him off! ✨