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Messages - Drazelic
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11
Pixel Art / Re: Critique Needed - Legendary Character!
« on: September 07, 2015, 06:34:26 pm »
Would you like to tell us anything about this character???

Is he a kid, a teenager, or an adult? Is he bleeding from the eyes constantly or tattooed or wearing weird glasses or what? What is the context of the game in which he'll appear- is it a fantasy world? Horror? Sci-fi? Does he have a name? What distinguishes him as a person? What's his personality? Does he have powers or anything? What are you trying to convey to the player with the character design? What makes him 'legendary'? Why should we care about him?

Like, right now as far as I can tell, your 'legendary character!' is just a random guy in a black tracksuit. His design is literally the most generic everyman ever, with the exception of the red rings around his eyes. Maybe he's a businessman? The red tie would fit with that, I guess?

That's what Decroded means by 'not enough information'.

12
Pixel Art / Re: (C&C) Graveyard in the Night
« on: August 29, 2015, 03:30:23 am »

Your approach to the moon is a bit confusing! Why use a three-color ramp when you've got at least six colors in the area? You use a bunch of colors only for antialiasing and you could do so much more with them to show a gradual burnoff of the light!

The style doesn't fit the simplicity you've got going on, I'm aware, but the principle is there, I think.

13
Pixel Art / Re: [C+C] Title Screen Conundrums
« on: July 29, 2015, 08:14:07 pm »
Your colors are all over the place. Like, it seems like every single robot has its own color palette, and the result is that the image feels more like a collage- or a deviantart-tier sprite comic- than a coherent singular screen. Heck, even your font is made of different configurations clashing with each other. Fire text, cookiedough text, metal text- pick something and stick to it, I'd say.

Work the title screen as a whole, I'd suggest. Rather than focusing on individual robots, layout the palette and shadows and highlights in big general blobs first, and definitely try to unite the palette a bit more.

Instead of thinking of the pile as a bunch of robots, think of it as one big macro-entity composed of robot-shaped granules? Treat it as a painting, rather than a collage.

Most of this advice is mindset-stuff rather than actual design tips, unfortunately, so I understand if you don't find it that helpful.

14
Pixel Art / Re: An evil bandit boss
« on: July 29, 2015, 08:08:55 pm »
Stop using lineart so much. I can tell your process is 'draw lines, then fill in textures as an afterthought'. Your work looks really flat because of that.

Think in terms of volumes foremost and outlines secondary. To render a volume, you have to use value- that is, you have to draw any given object with shades that change more dramatically than what you've got going on here. Your arms and lower body look bad because you're not thinking volumetrically; the horizontal gradient stripes are literally a texture-fill that doesn't take into any account the context into which it was placed. Similarly, your arms are just long stripes, that don't show any anatomy or muscular information. (Bandits are big and muscular, right?)

Also, have you considered the perspective here? What exactly is the camera angle doing? I can't tell if the silhouettes behind our infamous bandit are people wading in a lake or ghosts floating in the air, because you drew the background as if we're looking at it from above, but you've drawn the character as if we're looking at him from below. It's really weird, and it confuses the viewer.

15
General Discussion / Re: Appealing spriting styles
« on: July 08, 2015, 10:07:20 pm »
@Decroded: Why... Why did China come to mind, specifically ??? Why not Japan? Japan appreciates pixelart way more than China.

@OP: I'm pretty much going to try to restate PixelPiledriver's ideas in my own words here, but:

As far as an all-appealing style goes, I recommend you imitate Call of Duty and Skyrim and make your project in 3d high-resolution. Pixelart, by nature, is already niche; if you want a big, undiscriminating target audience, pixels probably aren't what you're looking for.

To paraphrase your words:

"I want an art style that's cheap (pixelart is cheaper than high-res 3d), that I can draw a lot of very quickly (because I have big plans for my game), which I can animate effortlessly (because animating is boring and hard D:), and which is colorful and appeals to everybody (because I want my game to be really popular)!"

Buddy, don't we all. If it were that easy to come up with an aesthetic and style, illustration wouldn't be a job, and neither would animation. There's no one-size-fits-all solution to art, no census will change that. In the end, what you draw has to come from your own preferences and the limitations of your skill. The idea of sacrificing your right to choose your art style in favor of some sort of... democratically-sourced average of all tastes, ought to immediately seem repugnant to anybody who self-identifies as an artist or designer of any kind.

Like, isn't the point of creating something that you can call it your own? Why even make a game if you're not going to individualize it to your own tastes?

16
General Discussion / Re: Pyxel Edit pixel art editor
« on: July 02, 2015, 09:53:47 pm »
I've been using this program tons recently, it's really been super helpful. Thanks for making it!

There are some features I still would love to see though. Is there a way to place multiple tiles at once? Like, say I select a 3x3 tree; I want to place the entire tree with one click, rather than going back and forth between the tileset to place each block of the tree.

Similarly, a feature that'd let you make meta-tiles that would auto-tile would be nice, sort of like what the RPG Maker programs let you do with textures like grass, water, sand, etc. For example, if I were placing grass tiles on dirt, instead of manually placing the border between the grass and dirt in each instance, I'd put the transition-grass tiles in a template and then just draw a blob of grass and let the program automatically place the transitions in the appropriate positions.


17
Pixel Art / Re: Portraits (Erde)
« on: May 02, 2015, 04:14:53 am »


So here's my take on the pencil drawing part of this.

The red and blue point out the arm- namely, how it's way too short. Your arms should come down to halfway down your thigh or so, not right at the buttocks. The exaggeration of her legs makes her torso/arms seem really stubby in comparison.

The green is basically the question of 'how do those legs even work'? Since your legs are equal in length, when you bend one of them at an angle you have to compensate by lifting your foot so that the net height is the same. Otherwise, you end up with a drawing which implies that the character has different clearance for each of their legs.

In my paintover there, I shortened the legs a bit and tried to make them seem more dynamic.

18
Pixel Art / Re: [C+C] [WIP] help with rpg outdoor spriting
« on: April 28, 2015, 03:10:51 am »
Ooh, It looks ambitious! I dearly hope that you bring this project to fruition.

With LoWaS, maybe try to use geometric forms a little more. Don't be afraid to exaggerate the colors for better contrast; you don't have to draw your colors exclusively from the comic, the comic colors are chosen mostly for 2d panoramas rather than 2.5d RPG maps.

Remember, in general things are brightest on their top surface, and their side surfaces are less bright. Value is the best way to distinguish your walkable platform planes very distinct from your unwalkable obstacles like building walls and cliff faces!

Same thing goes for the trees; give them more form by giving them more than one color. Consider outlining the rocks, trees, and huts too?

19
Pixel Art / Re: Managing noise in small soldier sprites
« on: April 19, 2015, 07:06:04 pm »


Avoid hard outlines within the sprites; use selective outlining to reduce the 'hardness' of the sprite's edges and rely on value and color rather than linework to distinguish between individual parts within a sprite.

In a tiny sprite, you've only got like twenty pixels of clearance. If you want to draw an arm in, that's two pixels you have to spend on the lines. If you want to have things like pants and helmets and arms, you have to spend a lot of your pixel clearance on lineart which you could be spending on value blocks instead.

20
Pixel Art / Re: Moar castles, moar clouds!
« on: April 04, 2015, 03:44:46 pm »
I'm not sure the square house in the corner works. It's a bit too perpendicular to the camera and detracts from the three-dimensionality of the piece rather than adding to it. It almost feels like it's floating in front of the camera rather than rooted into the rest of the landscape.

This is already a really amazing piece, though! The high contrast and mood are fantastic.

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