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Messages - questseeker
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31
General Discussion / Re: How does scaling work in a game with Pixel sprites?
« on: September 18, 2015, 07:38:01 am »
Quote from: Kepler4 on September 17, 2015, 08:09:07 pm
Quote from: Gil on September 06, 2015, 09:44:32 am
OS resolution scaling can blur certain things. I don't think it's a problem for drawing tools, but I'm not sure. It's usually UI fonts that suffer most.
Let's say I like the look of GBA pixel art which is 240x160. Does that mean I should make everything at 240x160 and have the game scale to screen size? 
As usual, things aren't so simple: game art is meant to look "good", whatever your intent is, only at a certain resolution (on any modern device, vastly higher than on the GBA), in a certain range of viewing distances (comparable to the GBA on a similarly handheld smartphone, larger on a computer screen, much larger in a TV and couch console setup), and with specific technology (current LCD displays are likely to have better contrast and brightness than the GBA). Anything else means your art won't look as intended: confusingly small at excessive distance, jagged and noisy if the display is too sharp and/or close, possibly too dark or too bright or with strange colours.

GBA art was as detailed as the small and close GBA screen allowed; assuming you have GBA-like sprites to adapt, if you want a similarly detailed appearance you have to scale everything up with adequate antialiasing and retouch anything that was simplified (redrawing from scratch using the original as a reference might be a better idea), while if you want a blocky retro appearance many combinations and compromises of nearest-neighbour scaling, palette-respecting interpolation tricks like HQ2x and hand-retouched antialiasing are possible.

32
Devlogs & Projects / Re: D-Pixel (my paint program)
« on: August 19, 2015, 10:11:35 am »
I think the dither pattern icons would look better if you displayed the repeating units exactly instead of extending them to symmetrical rosettes, which confuses both dot density and dither pattern size:



You would allow dithering patterns of sizes other than 4 by 4 to be displayed without confusion about their size:



Different alignments of the "same" pattern would be clearly distinct:



A generalized display of dither patterns would allow loading them from a library of tiny image files and/or grabbing them from the canvas instead of providing a fixed and very limited set.

33
Pixel Art / Re: Shmup background animation.
« on: March 29, 2015, 01:17:49 pm »
Beware of contrast problems. The "water" ranges from almost black to almost white: what foreground enemies and objects are going to be easily distinguishable in both cases? You might try limiting the use of bright colours (for example, small specular highlights in moving waves and ripples rather than large blobs) to optimize for bright foreground objects.

34
Pixel Art / Re: Some sprites I'd appreciate some criticism on
« on: September 03, 2014, 07:32:24 am »
One thing that you inherited from Megaman the wrong way is the posture of the character: he should lean forward a little when walking, and even more importantly when jumping forward.

In Megaman the character normally stands upright, or leans back, in preparation for an upwards jump and/or for the iconic slide forward with raised legs which is important enough to deserve some anticipation in other animation states.

In your game jumping up is uncommon and the slide forward is a marginal move at best: the level mockups are mostly based on precise forward jumps, and therefore forward jumps are the animation that must look as best as possible, at the expense of the others if necessary.

35
Pixel Art / Re: Questions about pixel art for my game
« on: August 22, 2014, 10:24:38 am »
  • Reflection? The white pixels in the shoes can be white shoelaces or white socks or white ornaments; 2 or even 3 pixels might be better. At this size, suggesting a glossy material is quite impossible, regardless of your wishes.
  • The blue tint is good; the solid red areas without shading or details are less good.
  • Despite the good colour choices, the 45 degrees line in the middle is ugly. The shadow terminator should be located more or less there, but it should be rounded.
  • What are the stray pixels around the edges of the head? Thick hair?

36
General Discussion / Re: Hexagonal tile woes
« on: August 06, 2014, 10:15:45 am »
The choice between tiles with one land type or one land type per corner or edge is an issue of pure game design, not graphics:
  • 1 land type per tile vs up to 6: you could need rules for land type combinations, partial coverage, etc.
  • interfaces between land types across different tiles or within a tile.
  • 1 tile type per land type vs a subset of several hundred possible land type assignments to vertices or edges.


Graphically, the Wang tile style used in Carcassonne is simple (4 edge types: city, grass, grass with river, grass with road) but the constraint of generic corners has a detrimental effect on land feature shapes (particularly cities). A corner tile system like the one you link to has more edge types (n corner types -> n^2 edge types, minus forbidden ones, plus different edge types with the same corners) but each of these edge types can be customized to look good .

37
2D & 3D / Re: First time in Blender
« on: July 28, 2014, 09:59:25 am »
Why do you have the ring of edges in the middle? 6 edges, 6 vertices and 6 faces could be better spent on removing the black bars of void around wheels.

38
Pixel Art / Re: Young pixel artist looking for critique!
« on: July 02, 2014, 07:34:29 am »
I cannot help thinking that the yellow ring pokémon you are editing and reediting as an exercise is too small. Too small for decorations like the rings (Manupix already observed that they are a complication and an obstacle, but they are also too small to look good) and too small for the short of shading you are trying to do. Look at the foreleg of the last iteration: 3 pixels wide, with bands reducing to 1 pixel columns. You seem to be attempting a bad middle ground between large sprites that allow outlines and shading and small sprites that allow simple shapes.
Maybe you could try redrawing at the same size with only two shades of blue-gray, simplifying shading and shapes where you don't have enough pixels (e.g. jaw and legs), and/or scaling the same picture to double size with similar shading but better pixel clusters (e.g. more eye-shaped eyes, asymmetrical right ear, smaller left ear).

39
General Discussion / Re: Pixel Art?! Why not Call it Rather a Grid Art
« on: June 11, 2014, 10:47:44 am »
There are many varieties of "grid art", and both defining aspects (discrete elements, arranged on a grid) are flexible:  not all constituent elements are as simple as "a minimal patch of color" inside each grid cell, and not all elements are arranged in perfect square or rectangular grids (or regular grids at all); pixel art happens to be maximally constrained in both aspects, but it is only a special case of a large spectrum.
Types of "grid art", roughly in order of appearance, include:
  • Repetitive arrangements of similar objects, from a pyramid of skulls to surplus magnets on a whiteboard.
  • Tapestries, macramé, leather braids and other regular arrangements of knots with the same shape.
  • Combinations of knots with objects such as beads, pearls and seashells, including one-dimensional arrangements like necklaces and bracelets.
  • Knitting, where the knots have variable shapes and the grid is deformed and/or exotic.
  • Chains (one-dimensional) and chain mail, including popular kinds of jewelry.
  • Mosaics, often with inexact grids.
  • Larger scale arrangements of bricks, stone blocks, tiles and the like, often monochrome, on arbitrary rectangular grids (for floor tiles, on arbitrary grids and grid combinations), constrained by the need to stagger adjacent blocks, and rarely figurative.
  • Cloth, except for the marginal case of very fine threads of the same color that don't produce any visible texture.
  • All types of embroidery, which are strictly aligned to a grid even if not consisting of dot-like elements. Even the varieties that are most similar to pixel art (e.g. cross-stitching) feature elements with complex shapes and grid outlines in addition to cell interiors.
  • Pegboard toys, which aren't necessarily constrained to a regular grid and usually include a variety of "elementary" peg head sizes and shapes that occlude many board holes.
  • Patterns of nails etc. on an object, with regular large units but no practical constraint to following a grid.
  • Pointillist painting is structurally very similar, except for allowing dot overlap.
  • Pixel art, born for CRT screens, adapted to newer kinds of electronic screens, and increasingly inappropriate for the historical application of videogame graphics given the trend towards very high resolutions.
  • Building stuff in Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress and similar grid-based videogames, an interesting example of natural re-emergence of low resolution from the same technical progress that is "killing" pixel art.
  • Melding together Perler Beads; since they are round, an hexagonal grid is more natural than a square one, and the elementary unit includes an interior hole and a a quota of a concave exterior hole.

40
Pixel Art / Re: Could i trick you saying this is pixel art?
« on: May 11, 2014, 12:48:57 pm »
3D rendering is unlikely to look more similar to pixel art than this, but it looks obviously not hand-drawn because of wrong shading (the left and right outer edges are mirrored images of each other) and sloppy antialiasing (countless shades of grey, without making a deliberate choice of palette and patterns).

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