On January 24th, 2025, I began project: design a sprite version of Donkey Kong in the M&L-style that properly conveys his size and proportions. This project would eventually take me nearly 11 months, involved two major redesigns, and took two hiatuses. While I originally intended to release this sheet closer to Bananza's release back in the Summer, life ended up getting really busy and I was forced to postpone that release.
Now here we are, December 5th, 2025, and I am finally ready to release this project to the world! This sprite sheet ended up posing some pretty big challenges, as Donkey Kong is a tricky character to capture accurately in 2D. On top of that, once Bananza was revealed I ended up experimenting with his redesign for a solid month trying to get things just right.
I have to give some major shoutouts for the help I've received with this project. First, my partner, Beansprout, helped tremendously while I was attempting to capture DK's face redesign. They also helped with general art direction and quality control. You can find more of Beansprout's work at their website, Sproutdone: https://www.sproutdone.com/
Next, the wonderful Discord spriting community: Super Spriters Hub. So many wonderful and experienced pixel artists helped with additional edits, suggestions, and support. I honestly would have listed every server member in the credit tag if I could!
Finally, special shoutout to Pixel9Bit - his sprite work has always served as an inspiration to me. I remember being blown away by his original DK sprites back when he first started releasing them.
These sprites are free to use, but I ask that you please give credit to myself (TheCynicalPoet), Sproutdone, and The Super Spriters Hub if you do. I also highly encourage anyone to make edits or expansions of the sheet as they see fit, as I did not have the time or energy to include every pose/animation that I originally intended to make!
Now with these finally published, I have no idea what my next sprite project will be. Only time will tell what comes next!
|
![[W]](./template/2/images/home.gif "TheCynicalPoet's DeviantArt")
![[+]](./template/2/images/fav_add.png)
![[!]](./template/2/images/report.gif)
![[O]](./template/images/time.png)
![[O]](./template/images/disk.gif)
![[O]](./template/images/gray_arrow.gif){kind=icon}
![[O]](./template/images/green_arrow.gif){kind=icon}
![[O]](./template/images/favs.png)