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Messages - eishiya
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61
Pixel Art / Re: Shading opinion?
« on: April 11, 2020, 09:54:49 pm »
The new roof looks nice, but I think it should be bigger. Your upper floor seems just barely big enough to stand up in (don't forget that the floor between the upper and lower floors has thickness too!), and in addition to that, there's usually some space above the ceiling for wiring, ducts, etc, and/or a crawlspace or even a whole attic. When looking at reference images, don't only pay attention to the details, pay attention to bigger features like sizing/proportions and positioning.


Quote
"For an extra touch of realism, consider setting the doors and windows a little into the house rather than flush with the exterior wall, and perhaps raising the bottoms of the doors by a couple of pixels to show the threshold."

What did you mean by that? Because I couldn't understand this line.

Check out this image: https://forum.vectorworks.net/uploads/monthly_2017_05/535d00481de2bf4068cb0b3dd36ba0e6.jpeg.bfff00c79778a2b2f0003d0cd4b791c1.jpeg
See how the window is not flush with the wall, but sits set into the wall, and the near side of the wall covers up some of the window frame from this angle? Because the window is much thinner than the wall, it can't be flush with the wall on all sides. Typically, the window will sit aligned to the middle of the wall, which will make it appear set into the wall. Sometimes it'll be aligned flush with the wall or even stick beyond the wall (both of these designs create a larger windowsill inside), so what you've drawn is certainly plausible, but IMHO it makes the design look flat and less interesting.

62
Pixel Art / Re: Title Sceen WIP
« on: April 11, 2020, 01:20:59 pm »
The grey layer is so faint that it doesn't help, the background is still very bright/contrasty. Also, when you want to reduce the contrast of something, quick-fix adjustments like this are usually a bad idea, because they can make the whole piece look dull, often without fixing the fundamental contrast issues. Manual colour adjustments (e.g. making the colours closer to the ambient colour, which would probably be the sky blue in this scene) and reducing the number of colours used for distant objects (because distant details are harder to make out) are the more effective techniques.

I think the character animation would be great! Some subtle animation in the background would also be nice.

I was going to suggest having the character cast a shadow, but I think they already are...? it's hard to tell whether it's a shadow from them, or from the shape of the rocks. The rocks themselves feel more like a pile of rocks than a cohesive surface that could form an overhang/cliff the character could stand on, because they're all uniform in size and shape and have a lot of shadows (=separation) between them. Overhangs like this are typically a single rock (or a single tight blob of dirt), perhaps with some smaller/debris rocks on it (or embedded into the dirt).

63
Pixel Art / Re: Shading opinion?
« on: April 11, 2020, 01:16:54 pm »
Roofs aren't usually paper-thin. The tiles (or sheets, boards, or whatever else you plan to draw) have thickness, as does the (wooden/metal/plastic) understructure that they sit on. Thinking about the major parts that make up this roof should help you see where the lights and shadows can go.

I highly recommend looking at some reference photos for this sort of thing. Roofs aren't something you can draw well without having a basic understanding of how they work IRL.


Unrelated nitpicks, if you're interested:
The upper right part of the wall looks like it's at an angle because of the darker colours, but everything else suggests it's part of the same surface as the upper left.
The vending machine (?) seems to be facing in a different direction (mostly down to its width/depth ratio and the far side's white bit being much thinner than the near side's), but its stadow suggests that it's flat against the wall. The shadow of its legs also suggests the back of it is narrower than the front.
The air conditioning unit seems to be sitting a distance away from the wall because of where on the overhang it is. If it's meant to be attached to the house, it should probably be flush against the wall. If it's meant to be separated, then it could use a cast shadow to disambiguate this.
Speaking of cast shadows, that aircon pipe(?) looks pretty thick and should probably cast a shadow on the wall.
For an extra touch of realism, consider setting the doors and windows a little into the house rather than flush with the exterior wall, and perhaps raising the bottoms of the doors by a couple of pixels to show the threshold.

64
Pixel Art / Re: [Feedback] [CC] Bolero: Fantasy Tactics, pixel art
« on: April 02, 2020, 05:49:56 pm »
Yes, I think that reads much more like the character being hit!

65
Pixel Art / Re: [Feedback] [CC] Bolero: Fantasy Tactics, pixel art
« on: April 02, 2020, 04:27:13 am »
To me it reads more like squats than pain, because there's no sense of knockback or losing balance. Don't be afraid to put the character temporarily off-balance for the hurt animation!

66
Pixel Art / Re: [Feedback] Trying to learn human anatomy
« on: April 01, 2020, 01:22:07 am »
You don't need to quote both of us just to make the same reply xP

The point is you need to give yourself space to draw big enough for anatomical concepts to become visible. You can use your pixel art software if you're more comfortable with that, just use a very large canvas and make large marks instead of placing individual pixels.
Or better yet, pick up some simple new tools (pencil+paper, or a simple mobile drawing program) and give it a whirl. It will take extra practice to get used to making marks with a new medium, but it's a valuable skill anyway that will aid you in pixel art too. If you limit yourself to pixel art, you will progress much more slowly, even if the other stuff seems harder at first.

67
Pixel Art / Re: [Feedback] Trying to learn human anatomy
« on: March 31, 2020, 01:48:33 pm »
Seconding MysteryMeat. With art this small, you're inherently simplifying and distorting things just to make them work at this size, which isn't great for learning anatomy. You should give yourself enough resolution/space that you can express everything as you see it, without forced stylization. That way, you'll learn anatomy rather than a version of it distorted in ways you weren't even aware of, and when you apply your anatomy knowledge to pixel art, you will consciously make the stylization decisions. Your art will look better for it.

68
Pixel Art / Re: [Feedback] [CC] Bolero: Fantasy Tactics, pixel art
« on: March 29, 2020, 06:24:47 pm »
The perspective looks alright to me. My problem with the animation is that the legs appear to be swinging back and forth rather than moving as if the character is walking, because the feet never lift off the ground.

69
Pixel Art / Re: Combat U.I.
« on: March 12, 2020, 02:00:28 pm »
Have you looked at the code? If it was done by a programmer worth paying, the ratio/sizing should be in there as variables you can tweak. If not, I could try taking a look at it for you, maybe I can figure it out and make it easier to edit for you. No one deserves to be beholden to such silly limitations xP

It's not anything specific I find overwhelming, the whole thing is just full of information, most of which means nothing to me. You need to reduce the information displayed simultaneously, I think.
(To be fair, this latest go is much easier to understand since it's just

Even with your description, it took me a while to figure out where the enemy dice were. I see now they're darker, but I tend to read things from top to bottom, so I expect the first thing to happen (enemy rolls) to be at the top. Having to refer to the chart on the other side of the screen is also slow and unnatural.
Consider:
- The enemy dice at the top of the page.
- The player dice at the bottom. The confirm/reroll buttons can be below or above, season to taste.
- A horizontal "scale" between the sets of dice representing the different hands, with little arrows above and below indicating where on the scale each hand is (enemy arrow from above, player arrow from below, the arrow colours should match the dice colour, so that both the colour and position correspond).  Every hand in dice poker can be assigned a unique point value, so a scale like this can even be used to distinguish similar hands (e.g. a pair of 2s versus a pair of 5s, the 5s can put the arrow slightly further to the right, indicating a better score). The hands should be indicated with icons rather than text.
- A bolt icon on the "Re-roll" button to make it clearer that it costs a bolt.
- Removing the little "frames" around the dice, they just add more meaningless visual information.
- Making the pips all the same size. Bigger pips make the dice read less clearly, as low rolls don't look empty. Bigger pips look like they're "stronger" than smaller pips, which is obviously not the case, they're weaker! The negative space around pips is important.
- Since my suggestion adds an extra visual element, it'll take up much more space vertically. To aid this, consider putting the player and monster portraits to the left of the dice rather than above them. I think this'll make them read more clearly anyway; I kept just parsing them as decoration.
- You could put a win/loss/tie indicator on the confirm button, that would make things even clearer. It would also avoid the need to make the player auto-win when they roll a win the first time, and the player could look over the dice as much as they'd like to understand how they won (dice poker can take some getting used to for players not already familiar with it).

This would be easier to parse IMHO, and more compact. It would leave the entire right page empty. If there isn't anything you specifically need the two-page set-up for, I'd reduce it to one page (with the wire binding on the top to make things more visually interesting, or on the side if you need it out of the way).

Using a scale with icons instead of text would also be easier to localise (or easier to understand for people whose main language isn't supported).
(Edit: You could make the scale easier to understand by putting the indicators in the middle of the hand's scale segment instead of weighted by score, and only do the weighting if both players have the same type of hand, to show which has the better score.)

Here's a quick mock-up of what a scale could look like:

You could have it bigger, mine's smaller than it should be. There's space! If you go for a single-page notebook, you could even make it large enough to include text labels, though IMHO you don't need them.
I used your blue palette but IMHO it would read better with some extra hues. The full house and straight are hard to tell apart with the colours currently available.
Some indicators of poor/great on the far left and right respectively could help players unfamiliar with dice poker.

Minor suggestions unrelated to clarity:
If you're doing a "pen art in a notebook" theme, consider avoiding even fills of the darker colours. Instead, maybe employ hatching or other indicators of texture to make them look more like pen drawings.
Give the dice slightly rounded corners so they look more like real dice. The interior already has rounded corners, it's weird that the exterior does not.
Your player and enemy dice should have the same spacing. The player dice are currently more tightly spaced.

70
Pixel Art / Re: Combat U.I.
« on: March 09, 2020, 09:11:28 pm »
Does the score sheet need an entire "page" devoted to it? I have a hard time telling what's important and what isn't in this UI, or what I, as a player, would need to do. A player should be able to understand what's going on with minimal prompting and tutorials. Text explanations of what the various symbols mean, but you should aim to avoid anything like that for the basics, like what the dice rolls are for in the first place.

Your UI currently takes up more space than the navigable area, which leads me to believe that's where all the important things happen. But, the environment the characters are in has way more going on visually, so that's where my eyes gravitate to. If the environment is simply for navigation and isn't where the "action" happens, I'd simplify it and maybe make it part of the book UI. If the environment is meant to be more important than simply a map, I'd try to put more of the other stuff into it instead of around it.

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