Rupees and pots are a slightly unusual place to start! What's the player character(s) like, what's the scenario in a nutshell?

  Started with the first object I though of, more of a self assurance that I could make something of high enough caliber to keep going.  Plus, rupees ("resins" in this case) are always cool looking so I literally got distracted by the shiny objects first. 

As for the character, I'm apprehensive to post anything quite yet because I'm still sketching things in my notepad (almost finalized a design); I have the idea in my head, but I don't want him to be either too cute, too badass, or poorly drawn -- he's supposed to be a mix between the former two -- and so far I haven't found the mix I like.  Main character is the game's namesake, Trio, who wakes up from a dream to realize he's in an high-high-fantasy setting.  Stumbles across village, joins local band of thieves, runs from antagonist who apparently wants something Trio has, Trio needs to escape back home to survive.  Rough 2 synopsis, I could go on further but I'd probs get too descriptive really fast

Setting: really, while I love dragons and castles and all, I'm going for something that's really as far from traditional medieval as possible.  Instead of dropping things like the generic magic stuff, I'm dropping the generic dragons and castles and stuff.  Hard to explain, hoping it will make better sense once I get a main story draft/outdoor tiles/overworld theme song kicking.  For now, again, hard to put in words, unfortunately.

Main Character: I don't want to say naive, quiet, etc., since those are pretty vague, but I'm trying to get him to portray the opposite of a stereotypical rude dipshit 8-10 year old boy.  "cute" in a non-creepy, relatable way.  It's surprisingly hard to make him look like a fighter at the same time.  Perhaps I can post the best sketch I can get tomorrow and ask for C+C to see if I'm going in a good direction.

I don't think the colours are that bad but some of the rupees are oddly desaturated for gems and the lamps aren't lighting themselves up even , could do with a bit more oomph overall I reckon. I usually slop big areas of flat colour over the prospective scene to get a feel for the scheme before actually getting down to working up individual elements.

Ah, the lamps    Yeah, was just testing out a darker-colored variation of the lamp (the purple one), to see how it would look.  I've tested the normal orange-yellow one before, was moderately happy with results:



What doesn't show up is that I'm going to program in a sort of circular purple filter that surrounds the lamp and lights up the area around it, leaving a "glow" without looking like a cheesy 32-bit RGBA transparency overlay.  Still tossing around ideas, might do a bit of a bump-map for all of the indoor tiles and do it with shader, and with areas exposed to light, shift the color towards the next purpler/bluer/greener/etc. (Depending on the torch's color) on a set palette so it still looks like untainted retro even though I'm cheating.  Might be a lot of work, but it would be a very fun thing to add, so I'd be willing to spend a week or more on such a feature.

As for the resins (name for the rupees in-game), yeah, I got so carried away with doing cool hue-shifting that I forgot to really play with the value contrast.    Yeah, I think I should do a revision on them, thanks for mentioning.

Not sure about the dither shadows or 1pix outlines on the titles, LttP had a lot of nice fat black lines and shadows. I might have a fiddle later but it's too late for me here atm.

Great point, now that you mention it I really want to go back and play with some nice thicker, slightly cartoony lines.  As for the dither shadows, in hindsight I agree with you, I think I'm going to go for a deep desaturated purple shadow, which I can try to put together tomorrow morning.

Music sounds authentic, are you using an old Zelda soundtrack soundfont?

Actually, a good number of the samples/instruments were either hand-made or heavily edited   For the flute I studied a couple of completely royalty free flute samples and spliced together some of the waveforms, edited them a bit by hand, added a lot of effects, and exported 16-bit 32kHz audio -- pretty similar with the violin.  (of course, I'm keeping track of the royalty free authors, because even though they sound different from the original, and the four or so specific samples didn't require acknowledgement, I think it's only fair.)  The Contrabass is a far less edited version of a royalty free soundfont, and the spirit-like droning is the (kind of corny) angel-voice sample from the same soundfont, heavily edited, and transposed down 4 octaves.

Also I've been studying the actual scores from LttP/some other SNES games, and I've been seeing what makes them so memorable/dramatic/mood-heavy.  The Frontier Village theme started off sounding like a slightly happier version of the kakariko village theme in mixolydian mode, but shifted more towards what I wanted it to be -- more childish and with more charisma to it.  I'm finding myself writing melodies now and zelda-fying them rather than the other way around, which I hope will add more of my own touch to them.


Anyways I'm tired as all hell, it's super late here as well, but I greatly appreciated the feedback and I'm hoping to have some improvements tomorrow.  Sorry for wall of text, I'm tired and when I'm tired I just tend to spew more.  And, thanks again!

Anyways, nighto

Well, your "Classical Music" example is exactly on-mark with my opinion as well.  What you deem "Classical" refers to mostly European Music that was most prominent from the late 15th century to the early 20th century.  Over time it advanced from simple tonal music to more involved romantic-era music.  But we still had composers in the mid-to-late 20th century like Reich and Cage, and 21st century composers, who took/take ideas from centuries earlier and either emulated them accordingly, or added modern techniques to the style.  Similar to pixel art today, with the new theories on things like pixel clusters being added to an otherwise old style

But also the nostalgia of course.  That's why I make/use pixel art.  It's my number one reason

other than that, it's a good way to fit more detail into a smaller space with more precision at times than uncontrolled digital art, I suppose

Mainly tried to trim Ryu down a shade without robbing him of his original doughiness, as well as to sort out the fabric a bit (although not totally successfully).

EDIT: Those pants were really bugging me and demanded another pass.

I don't have anything technical to say, but I like your edit, overall it's a lot cleaner!  Only thing I really dislike is the new face, the old one had much more personality.  Perhaps try accentuating his old features to be a bit stronger/ more visible?  Might just be me, though.

Most of you have forgotten about me, but I'm back from hiatus!  I'm most of the way through college applications and once they're all in, senior year should be a breeze.  I've done some heavy Music Theory studying, but I would love to get back into visual artistry, perhaps with a good amount of fun pixeling on the side, now that I have nearly a year before I have to worry about classes in college.

That being said, I was a shitty artist before (not the worst in the world, but among the bottom quartile here), and I'm pretty sure that I've lost most of the skill I had gained so quickly before.  I don't have much time to study or practice these days, but I would like to spend some time getting back up to speed, and hopefully gain some completely new skills.  What's the best way to ease back into things?  Should I just ignore pixeling at first and just get back the basics on traditional media?  Should I have a regimented schedule, or just cram in time whenever possible/when I feel like it?  What are the best things to study first (given that I used to have some problems with things like perspective and human anatomy)?  TIA!

EDIT: It might be worth saying that I can spend only an hour a day practicing; I'm just asking to see what things I should make sure to fit into that time period and what things are a little less essential.