/vr/ - Retro Games

As a followup to the coloring thing from the OP: Something that Akiman has stated off the record is that the entire cel-shading idea possibly came from higher-ups seeing unfinished sprites during the development of previous games (like pic related) and liking the way they looked.

The switch to a line-based cel-shaded sprite style for Darkstalkers happened because during the older, gradient-shaded sprite era higher ups saw WIP sprites similar to this and said "These look fine! Why don't you just make the sprites like this? It would save tons of time and money!" Lead spriter Akiman replied "Well, that guy's WIP sprites look okay because he's just a really good artist." The older sprite style didn't require as much skill, as you could sort of cheat your way into something that looked half-decent. So when the higher-ups officially demanded "You're going to do cel-shaded sprites for the next project," Akiman faced a dilemma because suddenly all the spriters had to really up their figure drawing skills. The new style also actually ended up taking more time and effort than the old one, because the focus on lineart required lots of fine detail work to make things look smooth. Also in order to not make the sudden loss of shading not just look like a massive downgrade, the amount of animation had to be greatly increased.

So in short what was supposed to be some cost-cutting executive meddling actually spurred great advancement in Capcom's spriters' craft and led to all the memorable spritework seen in everything from Street Fighter Alpha to Marvel and finally culminating in Street Fighter 3.