Wanted to tackle fur tufts.

http://www.houseofwacks.org/ogre/Images/DetailedMaps/map08.gif ?

If it's just a world map with some moderately advanced edges and a few landmarks, I'd ballpark it to a week's worth of work (8*5 hrs) (excluding later returns to polish and tweak and add new types of tiles). This is assuming that you don't change plans and have to redo a bunch of stuff because you went about tiling/layers the wrong way or changed the game engine mid through... which will probably happen.

So, ballpark, if working with a professional, certainly more than 10 hours, probably less than 100. Lower end if you're happy with whatever comes out of the artist and adapt to work with it. Higher end if I'm underestimating the level of detail that you're shooting for. A thousand to few thousand bucks if you're paying a professional.

Stuff like dungeons and towns, if SNES RPG large, would take much, much longer. Then animated characters on top of that.

Nice! That was quite different from my version. Bit of a muscle-baby... all grown up, isn't he

And I'm happy for whatever comes my way actually.

With my internet down the whole day, I actually got some work done on my pixel art tutorial! In one segment I talk about common "doesn't look so good"s, and then tried to include some of the more blatant ones in one image.

  ( @1x)

I've made my own "fixed" version of this and written about the process in detailed steps, but before I post that I think it would be interesting to see what other people would do to it (should be a quick edit since it's just a few tiles and a character). I'd like to feature the "guest edits" people do just to give this particular segment of the tutorial a bit more... range. So, if you have the time, I'd like to see your edit and perhaps a few (<5) sentences (nothing too lengthy) about some choice that you made which is of particular interest.

The original shows some kind of 16px front+top-down RPG with no particular color or tile count restriction. Do keep the dimensions for comparison's sake. I left the grass field 2x2 to demonstrate simple grass tiling. We have the typical cliffs/mountains and trees/forest and a lake/ocean. The character is a bit taller than a tile, and there's some sort of gem drop/treasure (feel free to nudge). The assumption here is that the author just wants his pixel graphics to look "good" but whatever edit that you make will be fine and probably ponderworthy to the reader.

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Unrelated random Garius ZOID




Something from the line art thread. Wasn't quite happy with it so I didn't want to bump. Probably needs minor... enhancing saturation points.




I started editing Megaman (girl?), but felt that it became too noisy.

Yeah, my edit is exactly the same size, except maybe a pixel extra here and there on the silhouette (skirt and the leg behind).

"Gradient" or "Shading" is not something that's easy to figure out at all. There are so many situations which give rise to different looks. It's however generally effective to decide on a shadow color and a light color, then render the figure mostly with those two, and minor extra dark and extra light regions where needed. However, metal is different since it's gloss so the values (dark to light) can really go crazy.

Some old explainustrations that I did for some other threads at some point: