MineField - Game art and mockups [WIP]

[Geti]

As a bit of backing, I've been using a palette Arne used for his gameboy mockup here quite a while ago to work on a 4 colour, gameboy resolution game (without spriting restrictions beyond 1 bit alpha) in Flash.

The most recent mockup:


This is working on 5 layers:

-Foreground decor - the grass mostly, but anything in front of the terrain tiles goes here (so large underground flavour decorations might go here later.)
-Foreground tiles - what it says on the tin. 10x10 tiles on an 8x8 grid, so 1 pixel of overlap. Rendered left to right, top to bottom. I'm only making use of the overlap on the top of each tile, for things like the rocky surfaces.
-Objects - everything that does anything interesting. The player, mines, crate, fence, all of these are objects, and some are animated.
-Background decor -  mostly vegetation but also the road sign.
-Background tiles - currently only the cave tiles, this will likely include pipes and buildings later on, unless I make them out of decor.

The HUD is still entirely work in progress, I've only started mapping out the elements now. I'm unsure of whether to go for mixed width 6 high gliphs (including shadow) or fix the size at 6x6 per gliph for monospacing. I've never been able to get a 4 pixel wide M or W to work, and it'll be even harder with only 4 colours to work with because of the lack of any multi-colour AA trickery. That said I'm interested in your suggestions here.

I'm aiming to keep content production time as low as possible on this title, but I also want it to feel polished. I figured you guys would be able to identify all the clustering and banding issues a lot better than I could.

As a note, I'm fully aware of the banding of the mine lights (most notable on the underground landmine to the right and below the centre of the piece) but I need the sprites for all objects to be compatible with light and dark backgrounds so I've resorted to outlining on the full light and full dark elements. Alternative solutions are also welcome.

I'll post some of the animations soon, I've got to run now and I'm hungry for some feedback.

[Geti]

Some of the player anims. Running still need work because of that jump forwards I think, though it looks quite good in-game.

His background arm looks a little gimpy in the falling one too, and I'm not sure whether to move his front leg more or not...

[Xamllew]

Good stuff Geti. Yea, those running animations look a bit strange. Looking forward to seeing more.

[Geti]

The second one is the player falling through the air, I should've cleared that up. More coming once I've taken some shots or made some .gifs, I'm very very short on time at the moment 

[Geti]

I played around with housing designs for far too long, but I arrived at something I liked (just shy of shabby overall, with little bits of tech greebling here and there) after much deliberation and am very happy with how it looks in-game:

[Toyoto]

Yo!
Seems we are working in similar stuff. http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/index.php?topic=11320.0
Though as you see I'm much less resourceful than you are when making tiles. Do you know any site with tutorials or just images about Gameboy games to study?

[Geti]

Though as you see I'm much less resourceful than you are when making tiles. Do you know any site with tutorials or just images about Gameboy games to study?

Reading through that thread it seems most of your problems aren't actually palette issues or detail issues, but more issues with your clusters Here's helm's famous "clusters that mostly always work" image.

Try to use more groups of pixels and less stray individual pixels. In your dirt, most of the "texture" pixels come off as noise instead of meaningful structures, which means that the terrain doesnt actually look like much...
I haven't come across many good tutorials for pixel art at all, much less very low colour work, so I've done most of my research through observation and practice. Almost all general pixel art theory applies to gameboy style work though, luckily, you just have to apply it a tad more strenuously. Getting the contrast in a scene right is very important, as is getting those clusters right and thinking about the meaning behind each and every pixel. You've only got 64 of them in an 8x8 tile, so every one counts. Good luck!

I'll get some more assets up soon, I still need to clean up the explosion animation..

[Toyoto]

Thanks I'll practice with that