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Messages - setz
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11
Pixel Art / Re: Too Poor To Survive art
« on: February 03, 2011, 02:12:47 am »
Quote from: Dusty on February 02, 2011, 12:40:19 am
Hmm, the gradient of light(though normally this reflects an atmosphere) is coming from space instead of Earth?

I would love to say "Its the sun!" or somehow explain that theres some light-giving-off body above the screen, but to be honest, this was just done because I thought it looked good, with no thought given to why.  :-[

12
Pixel Art / Pirate animation
« on: February 03, 2011, 02:10:35 am »

Started with this: it was the character concept


This was the first step of my animation: blocking out how everything would move


This was the finished cycle, I detailed each frame one by one after blocking everything out as seen above.


Then I added an item to show how it would be held.

This was done for a weird game idea I had and am currently queuing up on my list of ideas I probably won't get around to actually doing, basically, you are pirating [THING], and have to protect the stream of data coming out of [THING] until [THING] has completed its download, I haven't given too much thought beyond that, but thats why his arm was static.

I'm wondering how the rest of the world goes about animation, if theres a more efficient workflow, or what. It basically felt like I drew the same thing 8 times, I feel like lining up highlights is probably more important than making things pretty on this level.

13
Pixel Art / Too Poor To Survive art
« on: February 01, 2011, 10:34:48 am »
I don't make very many posts here, but I thought I'd do a small art dump from a game I made over the weekend.

I did some updates to it since then (mostly performance improvements, some other tweaks) and you can play it here

But yeah, heres a dump. I didn't have much time to work on all of these, but I was fairly satisfied with the end result.







I'm not too pleased with the animations, they're very cheap, and not really that great, but I feel they work good enough for the game, and I've got another bigger project I've got to get to now  :blind:

14
General Discussion / Re: Cosmigo Pro Motion tutorials?
« on: January 26, 2011, 01:54:29 pm »
Quote from: dock on January 26, 2011, 11:23:03 am
In order to make this thread embarrassing, maybe I should post up my own observations. I just got my unlock code, so it's time for me to take this seriously. Obviously the manual is useful, but it's handy sometimes to have a little focus. It's not as though I use all of Photoshop, for example.

Random observations:

- 1+2 to cycle through animations is of course very handy.
- The tooltips are excellent in this program.
- H and Shift H are handy for resizing your current brush. I use this all the time in photoshop with the square brackets, so it's handy to find an equivalent.
- '.' for single pixel is also a godsend
- Pressing the G in the AFGS buttons (top left-ish) locks the palette to be universal for all animation frames.
- It seems to require a little hand holding. It doesn't like transparent PNGs (or rather treats the BG as white), and it often messes up the colours when I try to reduce the colours on a 2 colour animation. I've found myself using 8-bit PNG to stop it from choking when importing files from Photoshop.

So far I'm a little overwhelmed by it, but firing up a couple of my animations I can see how it can improve my workflow and ultimately improve my work whilst saving me time.

A few questions:

- Is there any temporary shortcut for panning the canvas?
I know I can switch with Alt+N, but in Photoshop I use the space-to-pan thing pretty often, and it's notable by its absence here.

- Is there a shortcut for toggling foreground and background colour?
This is especially relevant when I'm trying to pipette a new background colour with Ctrl.

go to File-> Preferences -> Shortcuts
You can change up a lot of shortcut keys there, including swapping FG/BG color in your brush. (Colors->Swap FG<>BG Colors Brush- You'll have to add one). It doesn't swap the colors selected, only the colors on the brush, so its a bit weird, but works.

I'm not familiar with photoshop, but maybe nudge? (press/hold the N key to scroll around)

15
General Discussion / Re: Recomendations for a good tileset imaging program?
« on: January 23, 2011, 12:25:36 am »
Quote from: ptoing on January 22, 2011, 01:35:33 pm
Cosmigo Promotion has a Tilemap feature. It's very handy and basically what it does it autocomplete tiles as you work on them:

Imagine you have a level made from tiles drawn out and you wanna change a tree somewhere, now if you change those tiles all the other instances get changed as well.
You can also specify x and y flipping and a limit with up to 9999 tiles, plus it can export a few formats of tilemaps and makes a tilesheet for you.

I know I am sounding like an advertisment here, but I am sure other people can attest to what I said, and I have used this professionally since quite a while.

I can attest to this. I got into game development recently, and thought to try out the tilemap features before even getting a map editor: it works beautifully. In tilemap mode theres a "sync mode" checkbox, when its checked editing one tile edits all of them, when its unchecked, you can draw freely, and check it again to generate any new tiles that might have been made. Ontop of this, its an extremely great pixel editor, and exports to a variety of formats. For example, the TXM formats integrate seamlessly with flixel, but any programmer worth his salt would be able to write a script to convert them to whatever is needed.

Making things even more convenient is the brush container: if you have a few smaller tiles you usually use in conjunction, you can just add them as a brush and draw at will, very useful.

Here is a screenshot i took while making the cave ground tiles, although I feel I should suggest against doing 8x8 tiles: it gives a lot of flexibility, but sure is tedious when you're making hundreds of screens. Also note that the thumbnail/preview window can be zoomed too! I have it at 2x since thats how my graphics are displayed.

The only problem might be simplicity, it can take awhile to really learn your way around the program if you're not used to it. Its not exactly MS Paint, its very powerful, but requires some learning to use.

16
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Size Character Guide
« on: January 21, 2011, 12:23:52 am »
Simply removing outlines from things doesn't really help, if something is designed with outlines in mind, it looks very strange without them, when they are simply removed.

When removing outlines, instead of just removing the line, you should really take advantage of the extra space provided. I did a quick, somewhat sloppy example of a 16x16 toughguy, with and without outlines:


I did the guy on the left first, copied him over and dropped the lines and repixeled on the right. Dropping the lines gave me much more room to define the character, it looked a bit cramped with them, but without it shows just fine. Its not really about outlines looking good or bad, when you get smaller, but more about getting the most value out of your pixels.

I like the RPG sprite size comparison, looks like it'd be good for a game in terms of showing different ages.

17
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Size Character Guide
« on: January 19, 2011, 09:57:17 pm »
Something that doesn't make a lot of sense to me in this, is that they all have heavy outlines except 2 of the larger ones. The smaller you get, the more valuable each pixel gets.

When you get past a certain size (I'll say 16x16 for now), the outlines from a logical standpoint, are absolutely huge in comparison to the scale of the sprite.
From a practical standpoint, I'd push that color and contrast are much more useful at smaller sizes than black outlines. Deformity is going to happen anyway at small sizes, so that should also be taken advantage of.

Here is an example in extremity from a project I'm working on, that may help explain some of my opinions slightly better

18
Challenges & Activities / Re: Tzigla Rocks!!!
« on: January 19, 2011, 04:54:53 am »
how about a board made from random tetris pieces, worked bottom-up endlessly, you just chose the piece you want to place.

Sounds interesting to me anyway

19
General Discussion / Re: Rapid animation for palette saving?
« on: January 18, 2011, 06:59:44 pm »
By flickering, I meant the flicker-transparency effect, I think its the first stage after you beat the 4 base castles. The entire background flashes in/out, which on a slow screen would look better. This sounds like a great excuse to replay this game, maybe I'll make the time later. I'm curious how it would look with some of the filter options enabled and tweaked with mednafen.

The harvest moon GBA flicker is pretty annoying, at least on emulator: its a 50% dither pattern that alternates, it can look pretty smooth most of the time, but there are times when it'll lag and be like "hey vision, you're totally fucked :lol:"

The subtle feeling of helm's flickering image earlier in this thread gives off a creepy feeling, and I think it works well for that, but I'd shy away from it in most cases.

20
General Discussion / Re: Rapid animation for palette saving?
« on: January 18, 2011, 05:59:21 pm »
Quote from: Jad on January 18, 2011, 04:53:19 pm
Ya, that game uses it for the mermen, before they appear out of the water. That's one thing I remember from the top of my head.
Theres a stage late in the game, where the entire background flickers.

A less dramatic example is on harvest moon GBA, where the textbox flickers

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