Setting out on a big new pixelin' adventure are we. GLHF
I love the weird Cave Story-esque copper lookin' rocks tiles! Very strange and unexpected. Refreshingly not the norm. The grass is mega cliché though. I get a creepy macabre vibe from the polygonal rocks and skull faces. If the grass (does it even need to be there?) had a similar dead whithered thing going on it could work. What if it was less grass and more kind of a mossy generic bio-growth type thing. Perhaps not even green. Something more alien in appearance.
The angled brick tiles are fine, they just need some shading now. Choose a global light direction and shade one side darker and the other side lighter.
Now onto large unique bg decorative assets huh? Haha you're biting off a lot here. If I were you I might first comprise a more complete level mockup. When you do so you'll suddenly realize what new tiles you need in order to flesh it out. Big bg assets will bog you down, but tiles will go quickly and keep things fun.
Sup. Not bad, overall. It doesn't get any more pixel art-ish than 1-bit. Found this guy's YT channel yet? - Brandon James Greer There's a lot to learn from him.
Look like you have some accidental shades of grey in #2 and #3.
I'm with The Chonky One - try to minimize single isolated pixels unless part of a dither pattern or some other repeating texture that the single pixels belong to. Hard to do with 1-bit, though.
Rather then try to perfect your first attempts at pixel, table them away and do as many new images as you can. That's how you'll learn the most and improve the fastest.
A recommendation to help you get the most of your pixel art practice - focus on your pixel art techniques instead of agonizing over a menu layout for a fictitious game. When you're done with this project what'll matter is how much your pixeling improved; this inventory screen won't get used.
Been pixelin' a while, it was a weird mind switch I had to kind of do to understand graphics on the pixel level. Took me a while. So I get it. Following up on my previous bit about noisy pixeling, here's an edit - be sure to click to zoom in This applies to pretty much your whole thing, but focusing only on just your arrow element, I feel it's trying to do too much, too much detail leading you to create noisy non-descript texturing, and the AA borders on blur. I gave it a shot real quick; tried to fix the overdone inconsistent AA, tossed on a highlight so the shape pops and implies a gold material.
Ohh you're gonna do a displacement thing real-time in Unity, ok gotcha. Two things - keep it nearest neighbor and consider Slym's recent subtle water refraction animation: No shader required for this, just a mask consisting of horizontal bars moving vertically to reveal a different version of the image offset by 1px. Could use a similar trick to animate some of that windblown white caps texture we talked about earlier, too. To add on top.
Also, your wind direction. Do you see a problem? lel
Yo. Yep that title screen site is really cool. Should've linked it sooner. So uhh, my background is in graphic design, and as a graphic designer I'm pretty confused by the current title color choice, making it blend into the sky. You've got a blue sky, then a red stripe, then the same blue again for the type. In my opinion it creates an awkward contradiction - scale of the lettering implies the type element is important, but at the same time the colors are low contrast, blending into the background as if to be less visible. Does your ninja cloak and go transparent mode or something? The lettering shapes are fine. I think the rest is a no-brainer - high contrast/high energy color combination. I would probably tighten up the N and J's kerning.
Should the cloud reflections actually curve/warp? I don't think so. Not unless the surface of the lake itself is curved, right? Otherwise it's basically a flat mirror and your current iteration has it correct. If anything I'd change how the sides of the lake wrap in towards us like the shot was taken with an extreme fisheye lens. Seems to defy normal perspective.
Cool man. You got a lot of work done here. Interesting practice project. A commendable effort for sure.
Just one comment, and it pertains to your pixeling style in general, really - I just think it looks incredibly noisy and over-detailed. Soooo many high-contrast tiny 1 pixel details everywhere.
While I dig the rich decorative nature of your design, the noisy tiny details everywhere seem to want to speak louder than the items and icons, in my opinion.
I play Diablo III and do love the visually rich ui style. Seems like all ARPG's these days are maintaining a highly graphical decorative ui/hud style and they tend to look great, but they're designed in a way that the graphical style adds to the experience without hurting usability (hopefully . . .).
^ Notice how the items and abilities, the important elements, have the most visual priority by being brighter and more saturated than the surrounding menu graphics/decoration.
I'm not suggesting a massive revision pass to this project, overhauling the entire thing. I'm sure you've already learned a ton, and this isn't for a game anyway.
I know you're a beginner. You're doing great so far.
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I think eishiya made a good point about the player gear icons not needing to be in a grid.
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