Pixelation
Critique => Pixel Art => Topic started by: Hayo on August 01, 2007, 10:06:34 am
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Hello folks,
I am doing gfx for a game I am working on, I think it's starting to look nice but I am sure there's room for improvement.
(http://www.hayovanreek.nl/pics/islandgame01.gif)
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amazing colors and water !
and so cute !
maybe more details on background like clouds no?
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There is absolutely no separation of the character from the background. I actually didn't spot the character until I was looking close. Maybe tone down the saturation on the backdrops a bit to fix that.
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There is absolutely no separation of the character from the background. I actually didn't spot the character until I was looking close. Maybe tone down the saturation on the backdrops a bit to fix that.
I'm not so sure it would be that important. The same kind of shiny character & background can e.g. be found in James Pond series (http://www.bomul.com/data_img/pds/screenshot/James_Pond_3_-_Operation_Starfish_002.jpg). It's not easily readable as a screenshot but the player will have no problem seeing the hero since he'll be virtually doing an "idle dance" while the background stands still...
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This is lookin' sexeh! I agree that you should do more to separate the character from the background. You don't have to overhaul everything, but tinkering might find you a nice improvement.
I really dig the no-outlines style. Except for on the bamboo-like structure, I suggest removing those heavy black lines. I'd also rework the shading on the rocks, that black line of shadow running horizontally on each rock really breaks the form, and to me it reads as the blue bits and the brown bits are 2 separate rocks, if you get me. Also because there's no apparent lightsource for the blue light. Maybe a more dull green light being reflected up from the grass? i dunno, just a suggestion.
I think you could achieve more depth on the hut, it kind of looks a little flat at the moment (at 2x, anyway). Play up the darkness of the receding edges maybe, see what you can achieve. The grass is a little too blue, imo, I'd shift its hue more to the yellow-green side of things, similar to the trees. Maybe play down the extremity of the highlights on the grass, too. All those white highlights kind of muddy things up, if you get me.
With the water, the backdrop is a little nonsensical. I mean, if you look at it, what borders the water in the distance? At the moment its a line of half submerged trees; looks strange.
The sky could benefit from some kind of subtle dynamic, such as a slight gradient to imply planetary curvature/atmosphere density. Maybe some kind of cloud thing going on.
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I must admit i found the waterline to be terribly amusing. I do thnk too that the character needs to help at the moment, and that they whole thing is very early-90's Miyamoto, which may be a hard comparisson to live up to while avoiding the failings of those games (mostly, characters being inseparable from surroundings)
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Wow! This is looking really great! It immediately brought James Pond to mind for me, too, but I think your style is less sloppy and looks cleaner and more deliberate. Great job on the tiles, too, you're getting a lot of visual variety from relatively few tiles.
My biggest gripe for the moment would be that the black areas look a little too black. They're creating breaks where I don't think they belong, especially in the rock/dirt tiles. What's the point of having such a hard line under the grass, for instance? If you were going to use true black on a platform, it should probably be an outline so the player can better tell exactly where the real "surface" of the platform is (all around the outside most top and sides -- although I don't think this would jive with your style, it's more of a Mario thing). It looks like you're trying to use it as a shadow, but with the rest of the image so less saturated, it just looks a little off to me, and the depth it creates for the grass seems excessive.
Really though, I like this a lot and my criticism is minor.
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whole thing is very early-90's Miyamoto
Honestly I think it looks more like SEGA than Nintendo.
Great piece though, if only a bit on the flat side.. background could use a little more details.
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I'm thinking Sega, too. In fact, I'm thinking something more specific than that.
I'm getting enormous Wonder Boy vibes from this. More specifically, a mix of two areas from the only two Wonder Boy games I've ever played. The beach type place (http://img170.imageshack.us/img170/6199/fotowonderboyiiithedraglh1.jpg) from The Dragon's Trap, and the cannibal jungle place (http://img170.imageshack.us/img170/1014/wb41dn5.png) from Monster World.
Looking at those places makes me think you could use a little bit more contrast between foreground and background. Not too much though, because I really like how soft your pic looks now. And most of all, I think the character really needs some sort of outlines or another feature that makes him pop out. Or make the non-interactive objects blend in with the background a little more, perhaps.
Looks really good, though.
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whole thing is very early-90's Miyamoto
Honestly I think it looks more like SEGA than Nintendo.
Totally.
I guess though, that I'm one of the few people who spotted the little dude right off the bat. But still, some separation would be nice.
I'm not really enjoying the highlights on the rocks in either placement or shape. They just seem strange to me...
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I really love this. But add some blue to the water or aqua green or something. The character can be mor eobvious but I did notice him myself.
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Thanks for the feedback guys, it's helping me a lot. Any ideas on how to improve the character?
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well his face is almost gradiented at this point, i would try to get that a bit more like the body. Because he has a lot of contrast, I would try taking it down a notch in the rest of the piece.
My edit though really seems to lose something, so hopefully there is a better way to go than what i could think of :
(http://www.hayovanreek.nl/pics/islandgame01.gif)(http://img176.imageshack.us/img176/667/mhas0.png)
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Wow, I really like the colouring in your edit, looks like I have to change my palette a bit.
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your edit doesn't lose anything. I like it
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hm... Adarias, a doublewide outline shadow on the back of the sprite? I think a single pixel outline over the whole sprite would be enough. No need to make the character into a cardboard cutout. And I think the sky color would do well to retain the purple hue.
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The outline detracts, for me, anyway. You also gave him more of a drop shadow, making the outline thicker on one side, making him look _even more_ like a cutout, but the palette change does hold ground. Perhaps if the outline was maybe lightened, and even... hell, lemme just edit it..
(http://i18.tinypic.com/67s2t7k.gif)
There we go. Same edit'd palette, lightened outline, also, cut off at the bottom to ground him to the tiles, while not making him look so much "above" the rest of the image.
edit: i just realized what this reminds me of! Mallow from Super Mario RPG!
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I wonder if those forgotten old colors inside the bamboo tower construction on the left are going to be left there eternally by you palette-switchers :P color editing by flood-fill? Goodness gracious.
edit: also, small nitpick. I dunno if you're going to let the engine animate a ripple or if you're going to do it by hand, but watch out for that banding you've got going there.
(http://www.locustleaves.com/67s2t7sssk.gif)
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I won't be of much help here, as usual, but why do people feel uncomfortable with characters that don't have a dark outline? In some point and click games (like MI, MI2, Indy, Pop1 and 2, etc), I actually liked it that there were no yoshi island-ish black outlines around them. The bg's were, at times, very detailed--sometimes, even more than the sprites themselves. To me, since the characters will be moving anyway, they won't really merge into the background. Besides, looking at it realistically, we don't have black outlines around us X).
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When you look at it, we don't have a limited color palette for our clothes and skin either. Just sayin'.
I do howver agree that the need for an outline is very little. In this case, it looks more like a workaround rather than proper solution to the characters palette.
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In some point and click games (like MI, MI2, Indy, Pop1 and 2, etc), I actually liked it that there were no yoshi island-ish black outlines around them. The bg's were, at times, very detailed--sometimes, even more than the sprites themselves.
That's okay because adventure games are not action games.
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you don't need a dark outline, you don't need any outline. still, you need the character to be visible against the background. and that means adding color or contrast or something. since the sprite is already rich in color and contrast and *still* gets lost, there aren't too many other places to go.
and yeah you don't need the double black line, i was just experimenting.