After ages of being distracted (and a little bit of thinking) I eventually settled on my brother's idea of using my flimsy lego robot as the base for the boss. I've drawn out a frame, and once i've decided on a good way to make the frame look, I'll go onto the others. My main concern is making the colours and stuff look alright, but considering how to do the shading... and make it look interesting, as lego is rather flat (especially this robot), and as a result the lack of shading for most of it may entice me into a new idea for this one. A mix of shading (for parts with curves) and smooth surfaces with little bumps on them... the end result of course being that the sprite looks bloody weird, although as my sprite works thus far has hardly been all that amazing, a weird looking sprite set is not unexpected.
Oh, and of course giving the colour black some shades is going to be a case of making lighter parts
I might try and get a picture of the lego model and stick that up on here, just so people see what I'm working from... I'll look into that tomorrow. Dunno how long the spriting will take now, but it's only this left to do before I do the extra graphics, so whilst there was never a good deadline, a month or two isn't too unreasonable a guess (I'd hope)... especially as my new laptop will be helping me out with time to mod (all those free periods at school... now some can be useful!)