I hear ya, Zenobia. I tried giving them an outline in the most recent update, but it only sortof helped.

Also, any general help with the people would be appreciated. My first attempt was too small, my second attempt (still on the spritesheet) is far too big, and the third one that I've started mocking up has the right scale, but looks rather silly in terms of proportion and angling.

Everything looks great so far, although some reference as to the backdrop that the character will be on will help with color critique; after all, part of the visibility is based on what's framing the sprites.

The running animation looks a lot like he's punching the air in front of him. The walking animation looks great, if a tiny bit choppy.

I was feeling inspired by a couple of different influences (two of which were on this very forum; namely Vedsten's tiles and Arne's thoroughly-worked-through 16-bit palette), and so I sat down and whipped together some hexes while staring at Vedsten's iso-tiles. After a while, once I was relatively happy with the tiles themselves, I moved on and tried my hand at an actual building. A lone tower with simple wooden palisades.

I'm sure there are hundreds of things wrong here, and I'm sorry if I have inconvenienced anyone's eyesight with this. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what I could do better.



P.S. the mockup may end up being 2x view, so be sure to check out the image in both ways. Let me know which you like better, both with the current version and your edits (if you do any).

Thanks in advance.

Update: 8 Aug 2011
      * Added people! With the addition of units I think I'm definitely going to stick with 2x for this project.
      * Sameday Secondary Update: Hats! Since it's such a small scale, hats will be the main identifier for units (although if this were to make it to real-game stage, there would also be scroll-over tooltips with unit details. So far, no real theme to the hats... a hardat, wizard's hat, centurion plume, tophat...

Update: 9 Aug 2011
      * Scrapped the previous units, since visibility was shit even at 2x. Trying to design a new model for the units, something that I can group into 2s and 3s on a hex, while still having some of them stand alone for independent and special characters.
      * Sameday Secondary Update: Trying to work the people so that I can have units of 3's, that can be upgraded to 6-man and 9-man teams. I want to make all of the upgrades as visually rewarding as possible (i.e. if I expend some resources to up my soldier's defense stat, I want to see their armor get visibly more awesome on the sprites, rather than just have it be a purely numerical difference). Also attempting to make the towers seem a bit less flat; so far, just an outline. That made it better, but didn't fix it entirely. The bold numbers in gold are for letting the player know how large the unit occupying the tower is (that number will also show up in unit tooltips in-game).
      * Also added another shade to the water. Not sure if I like it.
      * Added an experimental "Special Character" to show he would fit into units. He would essentially replace the leading guy in the unit, and be front and center in everything. Making him as obvious as he is is going to present a problem as I try to face the units in all 6 directions, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I want to nail down the look of the units before I try to face them.

Update: 10 Aug 2011
      * Rounded out the tower a bit! Thanks, Ichigo Jam. It still doesn't look quite right, but it's a step in the right direction.

Update: 11 Aug 2011
      * Finished rounding out the tower, again thanks to further clue-by-fouring by Ichigo.
      * Added bonus: working out unit selection. eventually I'm going to start adding mockups to the tooltip and order menus to this gif, but for now it's just the highlight example. Kinda pointless to post, but hey. More shinies to look it.


Update: 12 Aug 2011
      * Now with 150% more units! At the size I'm working with, it's becoming difficult to make unique characters though. If anyone has advice on that subject, don't hesitate to pass it on.
      * Also, minimap!

That's a great improvement. The colors are still nice and readable, but keep the feel and mood of the game intact.

The stone is much better and less glaring. I'm unsure of why the grass changed (not that it doesn't look good, though).