Platformer Mockup

[araknidkid]

First off: Hello people of pixelopolis! A friend referred me to this site for spriting ciriticism and help, so...here I am! I like to sprite.

Anyways, I'm also learning to program, and people tell me that Platformer games are a great place to start with coding. So I made a mockup of what my game might look like. Tomorrow I'll make a sheet of sprites and tiles and then get back to learning code!

Without further ado, here it is.


I used crosshatch shading on the trees and clouds. The sun is supposed to portray a sort of "shiny glass ball" effect.

Your comments and criticism are appreciated!

[Crazy Asian Gamer]

wELCoMe to PixeLoPolIS!!

Alright, I get the feeling you know a bit about traditional art.

The mockup, to me, feels a bit strange. (I mean, how often do you see games at that resolution) But it's still nice, bright, chipper. Makes me wonder why the heck that stick figure is going on a perilous journey anyhow.

A side note: Your "cross-hatching" is often referred to in pixel art as "dithering", or more specifically, "checkerboard dithering" in this case.

A skill you should definitely learn is Anti-Aliasing. Learn to smoooth things out (I point in the sun's direction and the edges of the clouds).
Personally, I'd go with flat shading on the clouds in the given cartoony context. The sun's highlight can't be made out very well because of the super-saturated bright yellow.

A note: we tend not to like saturation very much. But personally, this isn't a bad context for saturation.

The black outlines make the sprite hard to make out. I don't know quite what to do with that.

Because this is a platformer, you really would only make out the "edge" of the platform. Google screens for platformers to see what I mean. (This is assuming you're doing things in a straight-up side view)

The tree's trunk seems to pop out more than the tree itself. Blend the foliage into the trunk more (I would take away that black outline between them), and darken the trunk a bit if it still stands out.

Good luck with teh game!!

Edit: Oh, and an important point I need to bring up: somehow make the sprites stand out from the screen. Like REAALLY out. That way, the player knows where the heck he is at all times.

[Ryumaru]

welcome to pixelopolis
asian gamer got alot of what i would have said.

one way to make the sprite stand out would be to make the outlines of everything but the sprite a dark, unsaturated blue instead of a full black.

good luck with your game

[.TakaM]

i think the use of black outlines takes away from its simplicity, if you took them away and made all the tiles flow together i think it would look much nicer, infact:

with something like this, it would make it easier to see the character sprite and enemies (?) against the background..

take away what you will and good luck on the game

[araknidkid]

Alright, I took some of your advice, and used it to create another mockup and a spritesheet!

NOTE: The graphics ARE very tiny, but if the game ever gets made, the resolution would be better and you'd play in a zoomed in type of view. So, no worries.

Here's the mockup:

The sun lost it's black outline, as did the ground/water, and the character changed! Also, there's an HUD.

Here's a quicky spritesheet:

Please note: the graphics aren't meant to be all that amazing; most of these lack shading (most**) and the frames of animation aren't very long. I've intended it to be this way because, sometimes, simpler is better! I have the HUD there, it includes: Health, Money, Lives, and powerup. The powers you can get are Lightning, Fire, Ice, Water and Rock. You can see how the attacks would look if you look above the HUD. The main character animations I have so far are walking, jumping, being injured, and casting spells. (no real "frames") I also made a textbox, alphabet, and text arrow!

Let me know how you feel about this newer version.

[Turbo]

Regarding the "start coding" thing, i'd recommend that you start small, and work your way up, if you ever find yourself boggled, or stuck. A platform game involves a number of skills that only a certain experience in coding may bring, mostly on the technical part (correctly drawing to screen, animation, handling the physics of the objects, game logic). This is probably bypassed if you're resorting to one of those game engine types like Game Maker or Multimedia Fusion, i've never used one of them but i think that is their function.

Anyway, a platform game will work well for you if you have the necessary enthusiasm to take it from beginning to completion (which sometimes involves keeping it up through times of absolute lack of enthusiasm, just pushing on to get to a better part of the development process, or to get it done), but if you want to have a steady, solid base, and make sure you don't give up because you got boggled by the large ammount of information needed to do a game of that kind, i'd suggest you start by doing a Pong (the one with the two paddles as both sides of the screen, and the ball going back and forth between them), and then move on to a Tetris, Arcanoid or Minesweeper type game (which aren't as exciting, but will make you advance a great deal).

Graphics wise, i liked the original one better, with the outlines. I'd just prefer to see them not black, but more similar to the color of the object they're surrounding, like an orange around the sun. Also, you could keep the outlines (or colors) of objects on the foreground dark, and the ones on the background lighter. I liked the initial character better too, the black stick man, looked like a bomb or something The colors look ok to me, nice contrast, altough .Takam's edit had a nicer sky tone, which worked well with the yellow of the sun.
There is a video tutorial by Kazuya Mochu on this site, from a few months ago, that deals with doing platformer backgrounds, you may want to do a search on it.

Good luck with your games!