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Messages - eishiya
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1101
Pixel Art / Re: First Attempt at Pixel Art
« on: September 26, 2016, 08:49:48 pm »
The grey shading(?) on the face is barely visible, even when zoomed in. Use a darker colour. With how light it is, you may as well not have any at all. I don't think that leaving shading out on a face that small is a problem at all.
Similarly, the shading and highlighting on the tears doesn't make much of a difference, though it's more noticeable at higher zooms than the face shading is.

The highlights on the cloak could be made brighter. It also doesn't make sense to have highlights both and below. Try to think of a specific light source when you draw, and draw your highlights and shadows according to that light source. Sure, often you'll want multiple light sources, but it's much easier to start with one, and it often looks more natural to have your main lights and shadows obey a single light source.

The blue pixel on the character's face when they turn towards the viewer reads like an eye, but is positioned too low to be an eye. Even if it's intended to be a tear on their cheek, I recommend moving it up to where the eyes would be since dots on tiny faces tend to look like an eyes no matter what you do, and tears usually come from eyes anyway.

The big tears don't fall smoothly. Instead it looks like they linger in a couple of spots on their way down. Try animating a single 2px tear falling down first to make sure the motion is smooth and feels right, and after that, add details like turbulence (the tears rotating mid-air) and splashing upon landing. When adding those details, be careful not to change the position of the center of the tear from where it is in the simple fall, to avoid those strange lingering moments.

The framerate for the tears seems a little low. I feel like the animation should be played at a higher speed, but perhaps with a couple of extra frames inserted in the face-turning part to slow that down and to make it smoother.

1102
Pixel Art / Re: KS screen
« on: September 26, 2016, 06:21:57 pm »
I just thought it was a button or some other random detail on the fan, I didn't notice it as an eye or the reader at all. I agree with Curly about making it green. You could also make it larger so that it's clearer that it's not part of the fan.

1103
Pixel Art / Re: Jungle tileset background.
« on: September 25, 2016, 04:33:43 pm »
Quote from: Vinik on September 25, 2016, 04:00:21 pm
Quick question while you are at it, does the light effect respects the pixel matrix or the palette? I have always considered how it was done in snes zelda, most likely a palette swap for light, and wonder if something similar can be achieved in current engines, all unity or game maker light effects I see break the "resolution" and are unrestrained by the palette. It does looks awesome by the way.
Not the dev, but a way to do this kind of look is to have the light as a series of layers that blend with the rendering underneath. In this case, it looks like there is a Screen-blended layer that creates the brightest part of the light, and a Multiply-blended layer that creates the dark areas. These layers have discrete levels of transparency to avoid overly soft transitions while still allowing something that feels like a "smooth" falloff. It isn't properly paletted, but because it uses a very small number of colours to blend with, it keeps the overall colour count low.
The pixel resolution is easy to respect by designing everything for 1x resolution, and internally rendering at 1x, and then scaling the result for display on the screen.

1104
Pixel Art / Re: Stingray perspective help.
« on: September 24, 2016, 08:21:23 pm »
I think if the walls "come out" more towards their bottom (think Zelda perspective), I think they'll read better. Think of the stingrays as your vanishing point, and design the wall tiles so that they appear to "point" towards the stringrays most of the time. Obviously with tiles and moving on the screen they won't always be doing that, but that's a good place to start. The walls just pointing towards the bottom of the screen does feel a bit weird with the perspective on the characters.

I think the tilt on them will be noticeable if it's part of an animation reacting to the player's movement. It's barely noticeable when displayed side-by-side like that, but these things tend to stand out more when being swapped out on the same character.

1105
Pixel Art / Re: Stomper sprites.
« on: September 24, 2016, 07:59:39 pm »
Would it be possible to add some indications of how the chains are attached to the stomper, and to the ceiling? I think that would make it feel much more grounded in the game's world. You could also add some bits flying up when it hits.

As for the animation to show its sides, I meant something like this, but perhaps a less extreme (this example is exaggerated to show what I mean) and with more frames for a smoother rotation:

You can apply the same idea to a vertical wobble (pitch backwards/forwards) or even have it wobble along multiple axes. If you wobble it vertically, you may even be able to avoid making the wobble frames go so much outside of its hitbox.

While making this, I noticed just how boring the stomper's silhouette is. You didn't think about its sides while designing it, from the look of it. They're completely flat xP I made the sides have bits that stick out in my rotated versions, but I did not change the original/middle frame. I recommend adding some parts that stick out.

1106
Pixel Art / Re: Stomper sprites.
« on: September 23, 2016, 06:32:09 pm »
I also think that some visible mechanism would look cooler. Magic can work, but more often than not all it does is fail to give the player any interesting information about the setting. If you go with a mechanism, you can probably make a scarier stomper - have it get a little faster as it falls, as if it's gravity pulling it down. That'll help sell its weight too, if you're careful with its acceleration (heavy objects have a lot of inertia!). You might even be able to do that in-engine, depending on how you have the stompers set up. That might make stompers at different heights feel different without much extra work, but it might make balancing levels a bit more difficult if timing is an issue.

As for adding depth, I think you're actually selling this perspective short. Sure, you can't see the sides of objects that are perfectly aligned to the camera, but who said they have to be? What if the block's mechanism is imperfect and one side is released earlier? Or, for the sake of clearer visuals during the critical part of the stomper's "attack", what if it falls perfectly straight, but wobbles/tips while being lifted back up by the chains, giving us a glimpse of its other sides (e.g. top and bottom)? It would give your world much more depth to have objects that aren't perfectly aligned to the camera, especially when it doesn't sacrifice gameplay clarity.


This is off-topic, but I like that your dynamic light is pixel-perfect and that it's got some flicker to it. It looks really nice and doesn't feel "lazy" like these effects often do.

1107
Pixel Art / Re: Stomper sprites.
« on: September 22, 2016, 02:25:32 pm »
Can you show some context so that people can see how it works in the game?

If I'm imagining it right, I think the problems might be that
1. It looks rather flat, and therefore lacks weight. Maybe make it so that we can see part of its side or its top (or bottom), depending on the game's view/perspective style, to make it clear that it's a thick, heavy block,
2. It's a bit of a boring, generic shape, and communicates nothing about how it works or why it's there. Why not make it a trapezoid, since only one part of it needs to be big and flat to stomp, and the rest is just there to provide weight and a way to connect it to whatever mechanism launches it? Maybe add some visual indication of how it's put together in-world, like hooks for chains, belts, etc. You could also add some indications of what it's done in the past - is there dried blood on it, or maybe it's chipped from hitting some past adventurer's magic armour? You currently have chips all over the place, and as a result they don't tell any kind of story, and so they don't look very interesting.

1108
Pixel Art / Re: Traffic Light in the rain
« on: September 22, 2016, 02:16:47 pm »
Echoing MysteryMeat's critiques.

I like the colours and animation, but not the composition. The red light seems to be the intended focus, but it's barely glowing and the yellow window reflections in the background grab attention much more easily. The red light is also too close to the top of the image, leading the eye out of it, and it's in the horizontal center of the image, feeling a bit static there. The linear perspective in the image also  guides the eye away from the light. Consider curving the street slightly so that it leads the eye more in the direction of the light.

1109
Pixel Art / Re: Critique wanted on a project
« on: September 20, 2016, 11:24:36 pm »
This is a matter of taste, but auto-rotated and imperfectly* scaled pixel art will always look sloppy to me, even if the underlying art is great. Rotation and uneven scaling destroy the clarity that pixel art can provide and just make the result look wonky. For a game with dynamic rotation and scaling, vector or high-res art looks much better than pixel art, because those distortions are not an issue there, since high-res art doesn't need each pixel to be perfect to communicate clearly.
*By "imperfect" scaling I mean scaling that's not an exact multiple, scaling where you end up with pixels of different sizes instead of them all being the same size and shape.

I'm personally not a fan of lighting like that, but I like the glimmer/animation you've got there. However, that feels more appropriate for something like fire than... floaty magic lights? The lights' animations don't suggest that they're varying in brightness, so the glimmering dynamic lights feel out of place. And since the floaty magic lights move up and down, I feel like the dynamic lights should too.

The white and red frames in the inventory screen are rather distracting and hinder the readability of the icons. The icons without frames read quite well though! I think you should simplify the frames so that the icons don't overlap them.

1110
Pixel Art / Re: Boxy Pig-like character
« on: September 20, 2016, 11:21:01 pm »
Try starting with a box first, and making the box read well. Then, add the pig features. You might find you need to reposition some features for it to make sense.

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