Pikaaaa-Pika PIIIIIIIII (Patreon)

Last week Inuki, who has been working ahead on Mega Animations, sent me this: 

so he's looking at 10m Thunderbolt right, and I figure it's always going to be a pikachu and that'll be extra special for it, so why not go ahead and do it. I make some plans.

A few days ago I actualized those plans into what you see above. It was pretty simple, first I just caught a wild Pikachu from the anime. After poking around a little on google I settled with this decent quality image:

Then I just drew a lightning shape over its face (so that it could easily be moved horizontally across the screen in animation), cut out the outside, added a gradient border to it and drew in the rest of the image. 

If you compare the tips of the lightning bolt to the base image you'll see the lighting pattern is different-- since it didn't exist behind the Pikachu, and I cut it out in front to match, I just redrew it myself. Smear some green, lighten parts, then draw vague lightning shapes on a lighting overlay and blur them. I think that much came out flawlessly. 

Then I just had to size it for the game. GG takes care of this well enough with an in-game screen as a reference. Sizing it down and taking it down to 8 bit colors so that it doesn't outshine the rest of the game, we arrive at the following:

Not bad. Strictly speaking, this is still cheating compared to our usual animation rules since although it holds to 8-bit colors, the pixels on the side of the image have transparency for smoothness. I tried it without that anti-aliasing and it just looks weird, so I've decided to make an exception for our probably singular cut-in.

I show it to Inuki:

,,,,, he wasn't serious about me making this

'-'