Pixelation
Critique => Pixel Art => Topic started by: Mathias on January 17, 2009, 07:35:11 am
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You might get more replies if your images were actually visible, eh? They certainly aren't to me (they show as a bit of text saying "[image]")
Viewing the source and pasting their URLs allows me to see them, so I guess the server is just saying 'Bad Mathias! No hotlink for you!' :)
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You might get more replies if your images were actually visible, eh? They certainly aren't to me (they show as a bit of text saying "[image]")
Viewing the source and pasting their URLs allows me to see them, so I guess the server is just saying 'Bad Mathias! No hotlink for you!' :)
I can see them, and I could see them yesterday as well.
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Hehe Ai, I'm hosting them on my own domain so I hope not! Server must've crapped out for a moment. Can you see 'em now?
Ha, ok; Yes, I can see them now. (maybe I should have tried reloading)
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Hopefully Eyecraft's asteroid can give you some ideas.
(http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/3784/spaceastl29rt.png)
Right now yours looks kind of like swiss cheese.
(http://www.phys.ncku.edu.tw/~astrolab/mirrors/nineplanets/gif/Asteroid460.jpg)
Also they're like a rock then spirally and round.
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Errr.
You're going the broken english way, eh?
Are you aiming for broken japanese also?
Otherwise you should maybe consider this:
Right now you've got 星状子供, seijou kodomo, which as far as I know more or less means "star-form child"
星状体, seijoutai, means asteroid according to a source I found (jisho.org), but my japanese input refuses to write it without tinkering with it, so that seems like a bad bet also.
Kodomo means child, and doesn't give the cool somethingsomething-boy feeling that you want, it feels a lot weaker and childish, and also doesn't really mean a certain gender.
I'd reccommend that you use these ones instead:
Ryuusei Shounen
流星少年
ryuusei means meteor in the romantic METEOR way, like zoom through sky and glittering flaming and all that. Hear it a lot in macross songs, heh!
shounen means BOY in a much more young-hero kind of way (if you put it in that context) and is also sometimes used in the 'somethingsomething-boy' context, like for example the title of the manga 20th century boys (２０世紀少年)
Also the biggest boy manga magazine in japan is called Shounen JUMP! so I'd say it's a much closer bet than kodomo!
Hope I didn't completely state a lot of obvious things here! : D Also sorry for real lack of pixel-art critique, I'm too tired right now to activate the right part of my brain, so mindless info rambling it is.
Good night!
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Nice, the meteors seem a little to repetitive, though, and the character kinda gets lost in all of the similar colors.
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Wow my art popped up :o
I tried two different ways to convert Eyecraft's meteor to C64 colors, while attempting to maintain his level of detail, both are just palette swaps, not selectively re-colored:
(http://www.sharpshade.com/downloads/images/forumz/pixelation/mb/eyecraft_met_to_c64.png)
Eyecraft, if yer reading this, I apologize, haha!
(http://i188.photobucket.com/albums/z212/gastrop0d/spaceastl29rt_c64.png) (http://i188.photobucket.com/albums/z212/gastrop0d/spaceastl29rt_c64_2.png)
That's my best shot ;) EDIT: Tried again (right image)
Hopefully, the above pic helps those that haven't attempted using the C64 palette for dynamic richly detailed sprites, like this meteor, to understand my challenge. Eyecraft used 12 colors. The C64 palette only has 16. It's impossible to make something like this look good.
Yeah I had to eat some colours with my effort there. But it's not a huge issue. It doesn't matter so much how many colours there are, just what value ranges the colours that you have can cover. Space is a slightly difficult subject for c64 since you don't really have the near-blacks to work with. You basically have to make your game deal more with lighter areas than a tonne of shadow. That's what I think, anyway.
In regards to your mockup, McClaneGames is right, you need to make your character pop out more. Try using warm colours for the character to contrast with the cool colours of the asteroids. Your asteroids are also very square and flat. Try giving more volume to them if you want to add more depth to the graphics. Also if you're going to have a grid-based level like that, why not make larger asteroids that occupy 2x2 grids? Just to help break it up a bit. Or even start working with tiles. This is assuming the asteroids stay fixed in place, anyway.
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Your comment about the character getting lost in the surrounding similarly colored objects, and also Eyecraft's similar comment, are spot on, but it's the C64 palette presenting these challenges. 16 total colors is proving painful! Next pixel project, I'm making my own palette! (I'll probably just steal Arne's and expand it!)
I wouldn't despair at this point. There's plenty of room in the C64 palette for warm ramps:
(http://i188.photobucket.com/albums/z212/gastrop0d/edits/mb_screeny01_ed.png)
Remember that for every value level in the palette there's a warmer/cooler equivalent (depending on if colour is cool or warm). ie:
(http://i188.photobucket.com/albums/z212/gastrop0d/edits/c64pal.png)
Look at greyscale of palette, you can see the value pairs.
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Have you considered making the meteors/other objects warm whilst keeping the hero cool?
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Well, I mean as opposed to vice-versa. (Warm Hero, cool objects).
But, yeah.
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After hours of falling down trying to climb walls in the creation of Meteor Boy's art I suddenly realize that using the 16 color C64 palette for such a large res game is foolish. Large by old skool standards anyway.
Even the Amiga, with it's richer palette, was only 320 X 256. Meteor Boy is 800 X 600, which is about 250% greater! Earlier I posted I had a feeling it may not make sense to use the C64 palette but not it's other restrictions.
640x256/240/200 was also a standard resolution for Amiga (used by some pinball games, aside from the desktop)
Anyway, the 4096-color master palette of Amiga OCS/ECS is pretty much ideal for creating palettes, it prevents you from making too-similar colors while still offering all the colors you could meaningfully choose between. I used it to build the new OHRRPGCE master palette (http://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=60), with a little smoothing out of color ramps in full 24bit after the basic color selection. If you're making your own palette, I really recommend that kind of simplification, it saves quite a bit of meaningless agonizing.
Now I feel that the C64's palette complements it's res and display restrictions. With 800 X 600 you lose that low res charm and you're only left with the odd, often ugly, color combinations. Too many pixels to fill with too few colors. Creating detailed sprites with those 16 colors doesn't feel or look right. I need more colors for this project.
I am officially abandoning the C64 palette right now. Meteor Boy will get totally redone with a new larger palette.
Screw you, Commodore64!! Yet I am the one that's defeated . . . oh well, this is one of those learn the hard way things. So be it. Oh well, I don't care, because now I'm really ready to roll! Hopefully I don't underestimate pixel art restrictions again. If you feel you'd like to dispute my point of view in the c64 palette thing, let's hear it.
One thing about the C64's (and CPC's) charm is widepixels. There is just something cute about widepixels. You could try running at 400x600 (== 800x600 square pixels), I think it would work quite well with the motifs of this game.
EDIT: Yeah, sort of like your new post says.
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Double-size looks nice, Double-wide IMO is just plain fugly, and I'm hoping you can get that C64 palette working!
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It looks great, but why the change of theme? As far as I can tell, the previous screenshots had nothing to do with the theme the title is implying. But ah, if you have changed something or didn't show us something important, then ignore this post. It looks great anyway. :crazy:
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Just in case you didn't notice, it seems you forgot to change the japanese text. :x
Been watching this thread for a while, I'm really excited to see how it all turns out! ;D
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A logo should be readable very fast, this one is not. Id make the little "holes" in the letters darker, or at least put a selectively black outline throughout them or something. Also the O in Boy looks more like an A. That said the actual rendering of the letters and simple handling of the technical look worked out very well.
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A logo should be readable very fast, this one is not.
A logo should be. I agree, but have you ever seen any scene logos? Most of them are not legible to me. Even after staring for what seems like hours I just can't read them. The same with graffiti. I think's it's pretty readable to my standards. Much more than others. Style comes into play more so.
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Scene as in demoscene? then yes. But from what I see of those the entire logo is a piece of art itself and then must more importantly deal with focus and composition more so than being readable. Graffiti is the similar for the most part. A logo for a video game that might be on the screen for 2 seconds before the player presses the start button is a different story. I stressed the readability part of the logo because the artistic part is already well done.
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everything's stinkin' grey
You could try adding some warm colors to the astronaut. It would work better as a costume design because uh lol where is the light being reflected from in the cold desolate asteroid field. Or even if his design doesn't change I'm sure you could fit a red in the fire. If that fails then you could make the jet REALLY BRIGHT so the player knows where his dude is at.
demo: (http://www.lolipopsicle.com/linky/help/astro.png) (non C64 colors)
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I would use more green on the guy, maybe replace the grey by green, as well as adding red. I'd look back at Eyecraft's chart (it's very handy, in fact I used it for a C64 piece... in fact I'll say THANK YOU! Eyecraft for such a constructive sheet)
Anyway, this is turning out well :)
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Whoah! Good to see you didn't give up this one, it's coming along pretty nicely! I like the new HUD, these Japanese marks make it feel even more oldschool! You could utilize them, though -- maybe make some power-ups, four types of them, and if the player gathers them all you're rewarded with an 1UP. The marks (e.g. glowing) would then signalize how many you have right now.
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Looking good. Are you going to keep this single pixel or do you intend to remake it widepixel?
I had problems working out the scene, and had problems identifying the turquoise/green stuff as thrust, and that he wasn't hovering for example. Try and convey speed more through perspective or blur. I think the thunder should be more geometric and thinner (it looks like an explosion).
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Okay!
How about using lines to convey speed, like in manga? A quick example. (http://www.onemanga.com/Naruto/288/10/)
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(http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/8303/mbstory801.png)
How about you tilt this character slightly (legs and body more inclined)? It'll make it look a bit like footage from the support frame when rockets take off, if you see what I mean...
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I don't think the character in 7 is working at the moment.
He's not readable as a guy in a space suit - look more like a cute space rocket.
I think you need to do more to make the arms and legs visible. Also I think you need to reassess the shading on the space man - its far too uniform and uninteresting - not conveying form particularly well.
Maybe try to up the exposure on him. A side effect of the jet stream - a super bright light source?
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Hey! Glad you liked the power-ups idea! I really love the new story board pieces and actually can't wait to play this game! It will kick ass!
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Hey, thanks for stopping by my thread, you gave me a lot of useful words. I don't really have to say much for you, you definitely have your head on straighter than I do in terms of your video game! ( also btw in your comment you assumed I will be programming it myself NOPE. The hope is to create lots of beautiful pixels and lure a programmer to me!) The storyboard art is great, especially the latest: I love pixel pieces like that.
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I noticed some hokusai creeping into your theatrical screens ::) :y:
lookin good.
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Hm...I really like how this is progressing, and as for the large character image and title screen..well I just love those.
Anywhoo
I believe the meteors are a huge problem for your game, right now. Enviornmental interest is one of the things which allows a player to stay interested. While it is a game based on meteors, I think that you seriously need some variation. If your character is inside of a meteor field, you would think that he would have to use more evasive styles to move about. The way you have the area set up, there are a whole lot of uniform, stationary, floating blocks in a linear fashion. If you made it so that you had to move through the middle of larger meteors (i.e. 300x300) it would give a more exploritory feeling, while the other smaller meteors moved around as obsticles more than 'walls', maybe had some 64x64 meteors as larger obstacles...just to spice things up, it would greatly improve the general atmosphere. No pun intended. When I look at the screen right now, I see lots of unexplored potential.
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