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Messages - Stickman
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11
Pixel Art / Re: Creating tilesets for beat em up.
« on: February 15, 2011, 05:54:04 pm »
Here's the latest update. Haven't a clue how I'm going to optimize those crack tiles yet, but I feel that this is working.



I'm going to get working on the next scene of this level. Still have tiles space for lamposts, doors, extra windows etc. Just 7 more to do!

12
Pixel Art / Re: Creating tilesets for beat em up.
« on: February 14, 2011, 11:19:55 am »
Actually I think even simpler. Why have wet highlights on everything?



Think of it as an inked oldschool comic background panel. Save the higher value range for the sprites. I'd do it even darker if I had more palette control, but I went with the colors that were in the mockup already.


This is perfect and far more atmospheric than what I achieved. I'm glad that you removed all those highlights! It's also made me understand what look I need to be going for(background wise) as I was struggling with a theme for the game. ;D
All the dark colours are already in this mock up and I'm just going to add some wall damage bricks and cracks on top of what you've done as well as some darker bits between the bricks. I had started another brick texture which was just overly complicated and getting to the point where it was far too busy looking. I really appreciate what you've done here Helm and will follow this theme through out the game. Nice and simple!

13
Pixel Art / Re: Creating tilesets for beat em up.
« on: February 14, 2011, 12:44:40 am »
Will go for the blue version and do the connecting bits like ptoing said. Hopefully will have something to show by the end of this week.

14
Pixel Art / Re: Creating tilesets for beat em up.
« on: February 13, 2011, 11:37:30 am »
Sure, they 'pop' but I think it's easy enough to do that without forcing the background to use such a terribly ugly color scheme.  The washed out lack of contrast in the backdrop too almost make it seem not really there like it's far too seperate from the characters who are supposed to exist in the same place (just woke up so no idea if any of that makes sense).

..as you've just woken up - get yourself some breakfast and do me an edit ;)



Playing around with another version. Changed the brick work and I'm partial to the mellow version on the right

Edit: And before I touch this anymore, I need to get the correct pallete colour sorted out. The CPC pallete I downloaded is slightly off for some reason, but I managed to source out the correct RGB numbers.

15
Pixel Art / Re: Creating tilesets for beat em up.
« on: February 13, 2011, 12:56:50 am »
At this point you probably also could copy paste bits you already have in this screen around and then do edits and connecting bits.

Okay. I'll need to rough out some windows, doors, lampost, posters as well. (also the pavement could do with a kerb too)

I don't normally post here but a friend linked me saying 'hey someones doing some cpc stuff' and I knew it would be stickman. 

Anyways I like the sprites a lot and the re-using legs is a pretty neat idea to save memory.  I didn't even notice they were using the same leg sprite until it was pointed out as I was more focused on the top half of the sprite which is always the part with most character.

The tiles though just don't work for me at all due to those colors chosen.  It's a pretty putrid scheme for the walls mainly due to the dark yellow and it all looks washed out and bland.  The main reason I love the CPC so much is for vivid colors with a lot of boldness and depth.  I'd probably use the dark brown and orange with a bit of red and yellow in the brick tiles to various degrees or if I was trying to go for a atmospheric night level, the purple, dark blue, light blue and a bit of the magenta and have some parts lit up by lights.   I don't think you have to worry about the sprites being too hard to see against the backdrop since you can keep the road relatively simple (maybe with white lines along through the road for a nice detail) and that's the area they'd mostly be on anyways.  And besides when at proper size and with sprites moving about I've never had any problems with CPC game sprites getting lost in the background.

I'm really keen to see how the animations look as that's pretty much what you excell in more than most pixellers do.

Hi Carnivac. Interesting points on the palette. I was trying to make the sprites really pop out from the background and avoid using to bold a colours. Your mentioning of the orange, brown, red and yellow seems like it would be very strong for this type of level where eveything is quite walled in. However it does work on the other renegade games which are heavy with bold colours. There going to be 6 levels and the character sprites will be dictating the colours of the background and there is going to be the classic night scene battle, where the blues and purples will be used. (I think the amstrad pallete is slightly off in these stills by a few numbers, but nothing enough to impact the difference.)

Your bold colour choices do sound interesting though and I'll give a bold look a try as it's still early days, but I do like how the sprites are reading at the moment.

16
Pixel Art / Re: Creating tilesets for beat em up.
« on: February 12, 2011, 10:57:48 pm »
Nitpicks:
I think the highlights on the garage shutter stand out too much and the dude with the grey pants looks like he kinda has ghost legs, due to the ground colour.

Otherwise this looks very nice.

I agree about the highlights and will either tone them down with another colour and if not, I'll get rid of the light blue.
The grey jeans - When zoomed in and not shown at this small scale, is a lot more visible. It would be played 3 times the size. However - I do have a mellow purple jeans version just in case :)

Edit: I need 8 screens worth or tiles for the scrolling. I take it that it would be best for me to rough out the whole level 8 screens wide?

17
Pixel Art / Re: Creating tilesets for beat em up.
« on: February 12, 2011, 09:42:44 pm »


Unfinished rough layout background of what I'm aiming for. I still need to add stuff to the alleyway, but I think that the sprites will be readable with these colours. I very much doubt if any of this is tile friendly! There are obvious mistakes I would need to sort out like the pavement lines, shutter details, cracks and wear and tear on the wall etc. (Pretty much the whole thing!)
As a test, I cut out only the brick work on the front of the building (8 pixels wide, 16 pixels down) and looks like I would end up with over 30 tiles! I'm going to have to do some serious research and whole lot of learning on how to do tiles.

18
Pixel Art / Re: Creating tilesets for beat em up.
« on: February 12, 2011, 02:17:47 am »
Attractive sprites. Wide-pixel isn't the easiest.

All those sprites share the same legs, I find that a tad odd. Especially the far feet with the cyan details, really jump out and creates an odd repeating effect. At the least, I'd recommend a palette swap to differentiate player char from enemies.


It's true, but I have to see what the programmer can do. It's a 2 player game and the second character has different coloured jeans. Studying the renegade games share thye same legs due to RAM space. The sprites have to be composited together as well as other things such as music, weapons and just generally the whole game engine on a 4mhz cpu with no hardware sprites and limited scrolling capabilities and 128kb of rAM that can't be accessed all at once. This all has to be processed in real time along with a conversion array to mirror the sprites. Adding palette changes would also be have to be coded, so I haven't done much variation colours on the legs as yet. It's a tricky battle between RAM vs CPU with these 8 bit machines.

But yeah....I think when it comes to the animation demo, I'll do one palette change of legs for one of the enemy groups and I'll have a look at that cyan on the feet.

19
Pixel Art / Re: Creating tilesets for beat em up.
« on: February 11, 2011, 11:10:45 pm »
Thanks for the replies.

@ptoing: I indeed have started to do a layout of the background. It looks like I will be creating tiles that are 8x16 because of the wide pixels. I noticed that on the CPC version of Renegade it flicks 5 creens, and on Target Renegade it flicks 14 screens. They dont flick "whole" screens - just a quater(or something like that). So what your saying is for me to put a grid on the layout that I'm roughing out where the squares are 8x16?
Yes - the background will be that perspective style of the old beat em ups.

@Helm. Yes your right. This has been one of the things that I need to be extremely careful of. There are a few easy on the eye tones on the CPC palette but only 1 grey unfortunately. There is a very easy green that also works well and isn't very harsh. The current picture I posted has 12 colours, so I have another 4 to play with. Looking at the CPC renegade stuff, they do a really nice job of making sure that the characters standout as they seem to keep all the busy areas at the top of the screen, with the ground area a peppered texture of only 2 colours.

20
Pixel Art / Creating tilesets for beat em up.
« on: February 11, 2011, 09:38:13 pm »
Hi guys! I've been creating animations for a target renegade style beat em up for the Amstrad CPC 128k. The main character (on the right), all his moves have been animated along with splitting the legs and torso's so they can be reused on other characters along with other technical bits and pieces(there's a programmer who is interested in taking this on). Definitely the most difficult of the sprites with over 30 moves (whoooo!)



Anyway - I'm looking to create an animated demo/mock up of the first level of the game and just need to animate the enemy character moves which should not toake too long as they have few moves. What I need to create are the background tiles which I haven't done before. What is the best way of doing these? Would I draw the whole background first then cut them up?
The game is in wide pixels and I have a sheet of 160x200 for the background tiles.

Thanks

Edit: With creating 8x16 tiles on a 160x200 I can have around 125 tiles/bytes which will be 16kb uncompressed. So I'll only be needing one sheet.

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