How about having skates as a temporary powerup? With it, the dino would gain better traction and control while on ice. But they would only show up on certain levels. Might be possible to construct other types of puzzles from such a feature.

Once we hit a limit with the current mechanics we'll consider other options, but I was actually surprised at the number of different puzzle types which could be made from the few, simple mechanics we already have. At the moment, it seems like it'll be a while until we've exhausted all the possibilities, but it's still a bit too early in development to be sure. I'll keep any gameplay ideas in mind in case we need them, though.

• I like your rocks and how you put so much detail into the tiles, but you've been doing this style of stone for a while and to me it looks less like natural stone and more like granola. Like a bunch of rocky bits stuck together with something. This might be personal preference since we expect some abstraction with tiles anyway
• That said, the glacier floor looks a lot like stone! Like cobbles, actually.
• Maybe diagonal lines for the icy shine?

Yeah, I see what you mean about the granola-like rock texture and the stony floor.

• The sprite really fills his square but there's not very much liveliness in his motion. I think if you ditched the outline (it's probably unnecessary since you know he'll always be on backgrounds of a certain brightness) you'd gain some pixels to move him around  more and to fit in some more detail.
• I don't know, even though everything is outlined I don't think it improves the readability of the sprite anyway.

Good points. I guess I've been doing enough outlined sprites in previous projects that it felt more natural at the time. Removing the outlines as well as increases the sprite sizes should give him some more room.

• Consider adding a secondary colour (like a differently coloured underbelly or something) to make the character a little more interesting and a little more readable.

Yeah, good idea.

Super quick take on the dino sprite:


Maybe it will give you some ideas. The contrast is probably eye-breaking because I was dealing with bright glare off my laptop screen when I drew this. The main thing I was trying to show was the dinosaur actually having a different posture for the sliding animation, I think it would add a lot.

Yeah, I really like that edit. I'll see what I can do.

Titles: swag water effect , Probably the speed lines would indeed look more natural going horizontally. The jaunty angle of the cube still gives it a bit of a bobbing, floating feel as oppose to sliding though and is also a little smaller than the in-game counterpart.

I'll try to enlarge the ice cube a little. I ended up drawing it as if it's sliding on its edge, since it seemed like the easiest way to edit the last version. I'll give a different angle a try to see if it works better.

Tiles: yeah, something like those others sans divisions would be nice. +1 Lackey; currently, although individually great it is looking just a bit grey and homogeneously sized overall. More icy blues and larger geological features for interest would be my inclination. I got a bit carried away with a doodle swapping out the icey 'cobbles' for straight-up toony snow for contrast/readibility + tried some ice stuff too.

Very nice! I'll see if I can do something more like that when I redo the tiles.

Currently pixeling on my laptop, so I'll have to deal with any palette issues later, but I tried to change the dino sprite a bit according to some of the advice.



I tried to make his look more consistent with the frontal view, reduced the use of outlines, added a little bit of color to his belly and changed the viewing angle a little. I'm not sure the perspective is changed radically enough to go with the top-down perspective of the tiles, but I'll test it later and try to find a way to either get the tiles to go with it or edit it further. In any case, I'll have to figure out how to offset him with the new size or if the drawing order has to be changed so that he doesn't overlap with the tiles in jarring ways.

Hey, guys! I'm done with school for a little while, but I'm moving to another city to continue my studies. In the meantime, I'm making a puzzle game with a friend of mine. The engine is close to finished (mainly just needs a level select screen, I think), so most of the remaining work is puzzle design. I've added most of the graphics we need, but it was thrown together in a few days, and I'd like to hear some suggestions for improvements.

The color restrictions are 5 bits per color channel (color values are multiples of 8 ) and 1 bit alpha.



Title screen so far. Our hero is a dinosaur who wants to save his frozen friends by thawing them over lava.



Here's a screenshot showing the different tile types. The main elements are rocks (stationary), ice blocks (pushable), frozen dino blocks (pushable), top of glacier (floor), water layer (slippery) and lava (goal tile). The floor and slippery tiles need polishing and need to look more like ice and water, I think.



Standing...



Walking...



Sliding...



Thawing dino and cheering.

Things I still want to add are a pushing animation and more tile variations (especially for floor and level border).

What do you think of it so far?

"(the shoulders do move, BTW)" ---> takes out the shoulder movement I was talking about.
Well, whatever. Either way, it's looking much better now, hahah. Good work. =)

Also, I like your original water more than Facet's....even though Facet's looks nice, I think it clashes a bit with the rest of your set. It might be mostly the color...it looks a bit too bright and saturated to me. I pushed the colors in Facet's edit more towards something like you had in your original water:

*Shrug* I dunno, to me, it feels like it fits better with the tile set's atmosphere. I imagined it as kind of a dark bog/forested area, though, so Facet's edit might be closer to what you want, depending on what you're trying to do with the set. I *still* like your original water the best, though, even with the color changes. Your water just looks so muddy and murky! Plus, your stream is being viewed from a pretty high angle, so I don't think it'd be all that reflective. From what I know, the closer you get to viewing water from a 90 degree angle, the more you can see through it. The lower the angle you view it at, the more reflective it looks. I'm no water/math/physics expert, but I always imagined this is because light hitting water head on at a 90 degree angle has a higher chance of piercing the water (thus, hitting the dirt at the bottom of your stream before bouncing back into your eyes) whereas light hitting the water at steeper angles will ricochet off of it more, making the water look more reflective.

I have no idea if my "science" is correct, but that's how it's always seemed to me, heheh!

Yeah, think the purple colored water looks better.

You're right about the reflection in that it'll vary with the viewing angle. It's called the Fresnel effect, and I found a video example which might be helpful. Find the point where the angle matches the angle of the scene and see what amount of reflection is needed from that, maybe? But I think it will be hard to pull off simply because it's hard to factor in all the things that would be reflected in the water with 2D art, since the sprite/tile viewed from below instead of above can drastically change what it looks like.

A solution could be to add some current to the water which obscures and fragments the reflections enough that you can't look at it in combination with the scenery and think something looks off.

I did a little edit of the grass tiles. It's not perfect, but I wanted to try to make it a little more tranquil.



I found the palette a little tricky to work with, since it seems fairly random at the moment. I like a bit of hue variation, but there are such huge leaps. I think it could work if applied more sparsely, or toned down a little, but now it seems like it's added for the sake of style more than function.

I'm basically creating patches of various types of tiles, and then scanning through and blending them/changing single tiles based upon adjacent tiles. I still need to expand upon this and make sure things blend in every situation.

I don't really understand your approach. To me, it seems like you're trying to go for single-tile representations of everything, without transition tiles. Is the idea is that a single tile should function as a kind of universal transition tile between two tiles? I don't see how that's doable. I think this has potential, but while you're trying to go for a realistic style, I think what you need is something much more symbolic and simplified. I've seen this approach work well with two-color tiles, but as it is, I think you're trying to cram too much information into the tiles. I think there has to be more tile clusters (like 2x2 tiles) to convey larger elements, like ferns or whatnot, which are currently struggling to fit within their tile spaces without looking cramped.

What are you using to test and edit the tiles? It kind of seems like each tile is drawn to stand on its own, with little regard for the whole. The grid is also very noticeable in places, especially the grass. When you have such small tiles, I think great care has to be put into each pixel placement.

Overall, it seems like the aesthetics have taken a backseat to a somewhat confused approach. It wants to be small in size and simple to generate, but it also wants to convey complex information in a small space. I think you need to pick one or the other.

Hey, guys, sorry about the delay!

Diary pages have been implemented, but mainly for testing purposes at the moment.



I'm trying to limit the diary pages to six lines per sheet and two sheets max per entry. I think some slightly wider margins would be nice, and I haven't updated the kerning pairs yet, but that should give you an idea of how big they'll be at most, contentwise. Next, we'll have to see what it looks like when displayed in the background.

Edit:



/edit



This is for the dual page entries. I thought I'd try something a little more natural than some kind of indicator icon. Think it reads well enough?

I hope you don't mind, but I took a shot at the skulls you're working on:

The metals were definitely a challenge, gold being the most difficult mainly because of that annoying pink/orange. I think the gold one was the worst.
 On the silver skull, I took out a lot of the blue hues which made it look a lot colder and icier (unless that's what you were going for.)
I also changed the width of the skulls, since I thought they were a bit too chubby.

They might not be excellent, but I hope this helps. good luck  

EDIT: after a few iterations, I managed to get this:

the only downside is dithering, which may take away the smoothness of gold.

Hey, thanks! I used the tiny skulls as bases, and that made them a little too square. Narrower is definitely better, and I agree the silver skull was too blue to look metallic. I also agree that dithering  should be avoided for smooth surfaces.



How's this?

If you ever want to do a flash port of this project, i'd be more than willing to help(i'm a flash developer). Hell I can even help with the pixel art if need be (big EGA fan).

Thanks for the offer, but I think we're pretty far away from even considering ports at this stage. At the moment, the restrictions on the engine make sense since we simply can't do it any other way. If we'd gone with Java, like our initial prototype (or any other, less limited platform), it would have turned into a completely different game. My main concern as far as graphics go, is that it's going to be difficult to combine the EGA palette and realism to get something that doesn't look drab, but at least now the limitations serve a purpose. As far as the engine goes, I imagine we'll be cutting back on features and simplifying a lot to squeeze into the target system specs. I think a flash game with the same restrictions would seem a bit crippled, so I don't really think a port is a good idea, personally.

If you want some graphics to play with, here and here I have some far less limited Creative Commons art you can use, although the tile sets are a little unwieldy. Otherwise, I don't mind if you play around with the stuff in this thread.

Any details about gameplay?

We have a general idea of where we want to take it, but we're still in the planning stage as far as gameplay goes. The trickiest part is going to be meeting the performance requirements, so I don't really know what's feasible at this stage.