Well after working on an edit in this thread, I got a CRAZY itch to work on a gameboy-esque Advance Wars clone of my own. Here's what I've got so far:





I call it Super Daimyo. It's like a kind of cross between Shogun Total War and Advance Wars.

The tiles are:

1st column:
Open ground - favourable to cavalry, low cover
Open ground variant
Cherry Blossoms - favourable to Samurai-rank troops (the poetry of the place is a force multiplier!), medium cover
Bamboo Forest - favourable to Shinobi (gain increased movement and combat advantage), high cover
Bamboo Forest variant
Mountains - difficult for all troop types to travel over, provides very high cover
Mountains variant

2nd/3rd/4th columns:
Village - provides income, heals garrisoned friendly units, medium cover
Dojo - trains standard military units, medium cover
Shrine - trains special agents like Monks and Shinobi, medium cover
Rice Paddy - dunno what this would do I just wanted to make a rice paddy tile  , low cover
Castle (2 tiles) - your headquarters, if its captured, you lose, provides highest cover of any tile type
Dock - trains boats, medium cover

Below those are the road and bridge tiles, across are the shore, shoal, water and reef tiles, all are very low cover except for the reef, which is low cover.

Below the water tiles is just some junk. You can see I want to have classic Japanese-movie-style blood in the combat scenes.

Units can be hired at varying ranks, the higher the rank, the more expensive. Lower rank units can gain rank through winning in combat or achieving special actions (such as a Shinobi sabotaging a Dojo, or a Monk capturing a village).

That's the basic gist of it so far. I was forced to introduce some colours just to indicate what team buildings and units belonged to. To that end I followed a kind of Super Game Boy style, where tones can be replaced with colours, maintaining a 4-colour per sprite/tile restriction.

No sprites yet. They will be coming...

C&C, if you please! 

Hello, my name is Ryan Wheeler.

I'm 24 years old and have been creating pixel art for about 10 years. Most of my experience lies in creating tilesets, but I can do sprites and animations. Looking for paid work.

You can contact me by email or on MSN messenger via biax666 (at) hotmail . com, or PM me on this site.



I have a broader body of work, but it's currently inaccessible to me. Will add it when I can.

Thank you for your consideration.

Attention Pixellers! Muster your collective thinking caps and nestle them upon your noodles: it's time for some thought with Natsume's Shatterhand.

Game: Shatterhand
Platform: NES
Developer: Natsume
Publisher: Jaleco

Shatterhand is an action game for the NES that has great graphics, gameplay and a pretty amusing premise: punch everything.

I grabbed some screens this afternoon and found myself exclaiming "woah!" numerous times as I reached new areas and was smacked with some real eye candy:











The game is playable with NES emulation, or you could resign yourself to watching videos of it. 

The purpose of this activity is to analyse the game's graphics, working out techniques that are effective and ones that could have been better. Once your dissection and meditation is complete, jump over to the activity thread and try your hand at some new graphics for the game!

Feel free to add more screenshots to the discussion. I think I need to play a little more before I can get some of the later areas.

Let's get cracking!

Current:






Previous:

I had a dream that I was playing this crazy old-school real time strategy game the other night. I woke up and knew I had to pixel it!

Using Arne's 16 colour palette for the fun of it. Was curious to see how well the palette could handle this kind of game. Cheated a little using semi-transparent shadows... but oh well   There's going to be semi-transparency used for the build-progress overlays in the HUD, anyway.



Interested to hear your thoughts. I'm mainly concerned with keeping everything distinct and readable.

Trying to keep the tiles using the darker colours and the sprites get the whole spectrum to enforce pop. It only gets so far, which pressed me to put the shadows in.

The game has 3 races; Mutants (green dudes), Humans (brown, pinky dudes), and Machines (blue grey guys (not pictured yet)). I'm trying to keep each race being recognisable by using consistent colours for them. There's already some of it going on with the human troops and buildings being mainly brown.

Then there's the matter of having sufficient team colour on each sprite. I've only been able to work out 4 decent team colours, blue, yellow, white and pink. The rest are either too dark or clash too much with the race colours.

The little buildings are bunkers, defensive structures; the big building is a Barracks, which allows the production of infantry; and the building half off-screen is the comm center, which increases the production rate of power tokens (the blue buttons). I won't bother to go into the details of the gameplay because I am so... so tired.  

I doubt anyone will remember, but ages ago I did a little work on a swamp tileset to be used in a little death match game (which died). I got a fair bit done, but since the team had pretty much disbanded the tileset sat on my hard drive, forgotten. Well I decided to dust it off and give it another look, since it simply seemed a waste to leave it half finished. First off, here's what I had done up to where the project fizzled out:


Player sprite. Yech... EDIT: Oh I remember, the ultra-red was designed to be replaceable by any colour the player selected.


(EDIT: WIP Updated tileset on right) The chunks of tree trunk below the trees are lazy collision masks for trees. The tall grass is broken up into layers so when you walk through it it actually comes up around legs. Bridges supposed to be ramshackle, assembled out of spare pieces of metal pipe and sheets of metal lashed together. Bit of a mess. I started fiddling with it, lowered contrast on some ground stuff, dressed the grass tiles a little, started adding some things to do with gameplay, got something like this:


Little shadows added at runtime.

Converted over to using [pretty lazy] global 256 colour palette I made quite a while ago:


So now, this is basically where I am:


New tiles in progress. Supposed to be under-maintained bitumen pavement beginning to crumble, and sandbag walls... insane amount of colours...


Enemy sprite, 4 directions, no animation. Basically evil corporation henchmen that only mildly resemble SS officers (ssh!)


Reapproaching tree, considering readability and lighting.

It's a pretty big task going back over it all, and my eye is likely to skim some things. I was hoping you guys might have some c&c