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Messages - eliddell
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1
Pixel Art / Re: Sprites and tiles and UI bits, oh my!
« on: June 02, 2021, 11:20:26 am »
As I've said before, images on imgur often just don't show up for me, and I'm not sure why.  That makes me reluctant to use it.

Time for me to unmothball that webspace, I guess.

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Pixel Art / Re: Sprites and tiles and UI bits, oh my!
« on: June 02, 2021, 02:11:59 am »
Ugh, back after what I know only feels like forever.

@Voidfyre, thanks for your kind words.  I hope the game doesn't end up disappointing you when and if I finally manage to get something playable out of it.  As for the original sprite, there are a lot of other problems with it, but I'll think about the expression on the current one.  I was trying for "a bit irritated, but not vicious".

Anyway, I have a few new tiles to show.  First, some dirt:



I went ahead and added transitions to the tiles I showed before.  At least it isn't pixel noise.

Second, some lava:



These aren't quite the final tiles—there are still some issues with the bottom edges and tiling—but it no longer looks like orange water.  It helped that I realized that, unlike the water and the ice, there's no gameplay reason for the lava to be translucent:  any object that falls in ain't gonna be fished out again.

3
Pixel Art / Re: Ophelia - Need Advice on Foliage
« on: May 04, 2021, 09:04:45 pm »
I'd say it's working.  In addition to drawing the background together better, mixing the browns and the blue-greys has made her sleeve stop blending into the far bank, and yes, I would say the additional contrast improves the hair.

4
Pixel Art / Re: PD Tactics Collab Character
« on: May 04, 2021, 01:55:46 am »
Maybe rather than making the dress itself more fancy, add a sash with really long trailing ends?  There are lots of things you could do with that.  Or ribbons on her legs, for that matter.

As for the axe . . .  If she's hovering, which seems to be the case here, holding an axe that size with its head in that position should make her lose her balance.  She'd have to be in the process of swinging it for the pose to make sense.  Hmmm.  Get it more centered?  Or across her shoulders?  Or extend the handle into something polearm-like so she can at least grip it with both hands?  (I suppose you could also claim the head is made of super-light magic-infused unobtainium . . .)

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Pixel Art / Re: Ophelia - Need Advice on Foliage
« on: May 04, 2021, 01:42:52 am »
Very nice.

I agree with cels that the browns and the grey-blues in the background should mix together more.  The distinction between the stuff near the stream bank and the stuff further in the background feels too abrupt.

Also, I keep on getting the feeling that there should be some deeper shadow in and around the girl's hair, but that might just be me.  Or maybe it's the brown shirt against the brown bank that isn't drawing enough attention to her.  :shrug:

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Pixel Art / Re: Sprites and tiles and UI bits, oh my!
« on: May 04, 2021, 01:18:31 am »
Thanks for the edit, fskn!  I'm afraid it's going to be another week or more before I have more time to work on this, though.  Currently involved in coding stuff on a different project.

@SeinRuhe:  The catch is, I'm familiar with a lot of old 2D console RPGs, but not so much with more modern games.  Graveyard Keeper is one of the few that I have knocking around that has good-quality graphics of the right type.  Anyway, I'm hoping to run off a copy of https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3990489 before I get back to the goblin, which ought to help with pose consistency even if the limb lengths are off.

7
Pixel Art / Re: Sprites and tiles and UI bits, oh my!
« on: April 23, 2021, 01:53:12 am »
Finally caught up with myself again.  First, some rear and side goblin views:



I'm not sure whether the side view with the flexed legs (matches the front view better, but not really the rear one) or the side view with the straight legs (probably makes more visual sense) is the better one to go with.  I'm not thrilled with the legs of the rear view, either.

Items:  yes, these are 32x32 (same size as the tiles), no margins required.  These are representations for viewing on the map, to indicate "there's a rusty knife on this square" (or whatever)—the items menu has a space reserved for larger pictures, but I'm not looking at those again until I have the items menu coded.  I don't intend to make armour/helms/shields visible on the sprite or in animations for version 1.0, and I'm undecided about how to handle weapons during the attack animations.  The cop-out would be to use an early-Final-Fantasy-style "shake the weapon in the direction of the enemy" animation and sub a weapon sprite in, but realistically there should be different animations for stabby and cutting/bashing weapons.

I'm not sure about using only parts of the items.  I don't think it's quite the right thing to do here.  I'm aware that this is going to mean that some items aren't quite to scale (but then some of them would be nearly invisible if I drew them to scale, so . . .)

The format of the amulets was a (likely bad) worldbuilding thing.  The goblins are still stone-age and have almost no access to wood (only small quantities of driftwood), so most of the items they have are made of rock or bone.  Hence, simple bone amulets, with carved surface grooves filled with earth pigments.  However, 1. the goblins could easily have access to clay (and do have fire), making crude ceramic objects possible, and 2. some of the amulets could have been dropped by human adventurers.  So I hadn't thought that through as thoroughly as I maybe should have.

cels, I like your axe and knife with the "very bone" handles.  They convey the materials better even if they're not strictly realistic (judging from all the time I spent staring at stone knives courtesy of Google Image Search, although I think a lot of those were actually antler handles).  I'll see what I can do with that idea at some point.

fskn, thanks for the tut links!  There's some there that I haven't seen before.

Okay, now back to the dirt tiles.

The truth is, back before XMas, I was already struggling with the damned dirt tiles (although this wasn't the project they were intended for).  Among other things, I looked at a whole bunch of dirt tiles from commercial games (granted, mostly older ones).  Nearly all of them consisted of pixel noise.  Those that didn't, tended to be a single solid colour.  The best I was able to come up with was this, which I located today in a file containing a mixture of stuff-I-didn't-use:



Tile + variation loosely based on a tile from one of the SNES-era Breath of Fire games.  Anyway, definitely not pixel noise, but it didn't work with the grass tiles I was also working on at the time, so I shelved it.  Now I'm trying to figure out how to create useful transitional tiles from this.

And finally, image hosts.  I don't use imgur because I not-infrequently run into situations where something hosted there just won't display for me.  For instance, in the currently running "Barbarian sprite with NES specs [C+C]" thread on this board, I can't see the image in the opening post (or any other pics except the one in cels' most recent post).  I don't know whether imgur hates Pale Moon, or Linux, or my ISP, or my high-security no-Javascript-or-cookies-unless-specifically-permitted setup, or what, but there's obviously  something not quite right.  Postimages is obnoxious in a number of ways, but I've never seen them completely flake out that way.

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Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Bisected Corpse of an Elder God
« on: April 21, 2021, 12:11:54 pm »
I think I see an attempt at god-rays indicating a light source from above there, but they're so faint it's difficult to make out.  Punch up the contrast on those, I guess?

9
Pixel Art / Re: Sprites and tiles and UI bits, oh my!
« on: April 20, 2021, 01:32:43 pm »
(I've been working on code-related rather than art-related stuff for the past couple of days with respect to this project, so nothing to show yet.)

Several of the items are going to need to be redone to account for the shift in light source.  The wands (second row), amulets (third row), and most of the weapons (fifth row) other than the rock and the bone club that needs to be redone from scratch are fair game for crit in their current forms.

The tiles are a bit complicated, because a lot of them are not meant to be shown on their own, but stacked one on top of the other—frex, take the first tile in the second row, stack the first tile in the seventh row on top of that, and then the second tile of the third row on top of *that*, and you've got a hole full of water.  Omit the topmost tile in the stack, and you have a dry ditch.  Replace it with the second tile from the fifth row, and you have a ditch full of lava.  The engine also does some recombining of quarter- and half-tiles to make things fit together smoothly.

The truth is that most of the tiles aren't the greatest.  The dirt tile was a reject from a different project and consists of brown pixel noise, and I need to break up some of the darker clusters near the top.  I've never been able to draw a water tile I liked, so I went as simple as possible here in order to get something that at least wouldn't result in violent revulsion.  The lava tiles are duplicates of the water tiles, which is a bad idea for gameplay reasons (a colourblind player might not be able to tell them apart).  The ice tiles (that's the fourth row) are just lazy.  The floor tiles have the same problem as the water—I just cannot get one that I like.

The only ones I'm okay with are the wall, stair, and ditch tiles, and I'm aware that those are grainy, but I don't think it's worth the effort to re-work them again (other than fixing the light source thing) and then having to fix the edges and quarter-tiles until everything joins smoothly again.

So if anyone has any advice on those damnable floor tiles, it would be appreciated.  :'(

10
Okay, so my first question is, where's your light source?  Some of your ship appears to be lit from forward-right, some of it from behind, and there's some bits around the tail and wings that I can't make heads nor tails of.  That may be part of why it's difficult to make out the form of the ship.

If you're trying to depict two light sources (like a general light source plus a rocket flame), my advice would be . . . don't do it if you can avoid it, and if you absoutely must, make one light dimmer (so that it casts fewer highlights) and, if possible, of a different colour than the other, so the highlights can be differentiated.

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