[C+C] Robo tactics tileset + sprites

[Fickludd]

Hi,

I'm extremely new to pixel art, but since I'm rehabilitation programmer I though some game art would be cool. So this is my first attempt at doing some stuff for a game project that's been circling my head for a while.

The plan would be to have top-down view, with a couple of player controllable robots. The setting could be techy, fallouty, gritty or whatever.

Going for low res (like Canabalt, Mode and Cave story), specs are
Floor tile: 8x8
Wall tile: 8x14
Sprite: 8x12
and hoping for total 16 color palette.


UPDATE Aug 17th


UPDATE Aug 1st




UPDATE July 13th







First attempt:


Any critique, comment, feedback, edit or shameless boasting of own ability wanted  

[Yuri]

The robots look like alien critters, isn't it? Not a bad thing, though.

[Fickludd]

The robots look like alien critters, isn't it? Not a bad thing, though.

Yeah, it wasn't really intended to get the alien head, that just happened =). Four pointy legs felt right though.

Update with reworked colors:

[Ichigo Jam]

This is quite nice; I particularly like the scenery colours.

I think you should try and increase the difference between the tops of the walls and the floor, especially on the desert tiles. At the moment I think it's too easy to read the tops of the walls as bumps on the floor.

I tried an edit to show you what I mean (I basically re-used your side-of-wall texture on the top of the desert walls):


I also added shadows to the walls, and I used some of the brown on techy floor to try and help it integrate with the desert floor better.

[Fickludd]

I think you should try and increase the difference between the tops of the walls and the floor, especially on the desert tiles. At the moment I think it's too easy to read the tops of the walls as bumps on the floor.
I also added shadows to the walls, and I used some of the brown on techy floor to try and help it integrate with the desert floor better.

Hey, nice suggestions! I totally agree with the desert wall top bumpiness. Shadows and dirt also good ideas...

...remakes desert walls with rocky tops + techy floor dirt + shadows...

v3 tiles:




I'm pretty happy with the tiles for now, but the units are causing me trouble. How do I

a) get the readily readable against the background (both tile and desert). The bright high saturation colors work, but the units look ugly.
b) Make something look good in only 8x12 pixels?

Some attempts:

[questseeker]

The third "tech" tile in the bottom row is so dark that it's more similar to wall sides than to the other 5 fellow tech tiles. At the very least, it looks special.

The thick dark gutter between tiles is very heavy: I think "tech" tiles would be nicer with only hints of their boundaries (just enough to count squares easily).

[Fickludd]

The third "tech" tile in the bottom row is so dark that it's more similar to wall sides than to the other 5 fellow tech tiles. At the very least, it looks special.

The thick dark gutter between tiles is very heavy: I think "tech" tiles would be nicer with only hints of their boundaries (just enough to count squares easily).

Thanks for the feedback. Uhm, I agree with the darker tile, it's less dark in this edition.
Actually I like the gridiness of the techy tiles. Of course, breaking it up a bit could be good - I've added some anomalies + one 2 tile square that breaks the grid. Opinions?



I've also worked some more on the robos populating the world. I'm totally out of ideas for new robo designs, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Anyway each robo will have one standing pose and a two frame walking animation in all 4 directions. Maybe later there will be a wreck frame for when they're dead. Death occurs by explosion. In the sprite sheet is also a bullet animation + bullet hitting wall animation, and two HUD elements: Target unit indicator and selected unit indicator.

[EyeCraft]

Okay... forgive my gif not disposing of frames properly. If you open it up in an editor and look at each frame you'll see how its supposed to look. For the life of me I can't figure out WHY it is doing this. 


( Can anyone help me with this?  )

I'll do one without transparency:



With explosions you need to have a sense of motion to the smoke. Think about the material expanding outwards and floating upwards. Also having the cloud go completely dark after being completely bright doesn't make sense, lighting-wise. If you want to do a flash, best to do it before the smoke clouds appear.



Also, don't be afraid to breathe a little colour into your backgrounds. You can still keep the contrast low with higher levels of saturation. This will make the scene more exciting. You just don't want to take it too far or the readability goes out the window. 

[Fickludd]

With explosions you need to have a sense of motion to the smoke. Think about the material expanding outwards and floating upwards. Also having the cloud go completely dark after being completely bright doesn't make sense, lighting-wise. If you want to do a flash, best to do it before the smoke clouds appear.

Also, don't be afraid to breathe a little colour into your backgrounds. You can still keep the contrast low with higher levels of saturation. This will make the scene more exciting. You just don't want to take it too far or the readability goes out the window. 

Thanks for the feedback, and nice explosion! Looking at yours I'm definitely gonna go over my smoke again. Regarding the flash: I got the flash-idea from the excellent metal slug explosions http://www.spriters-resource.com/arcade/ms/sheet/11301. My logic behind having the dark frame after the bright one is to trick the eye that the bright one was actually brighter. After seeing something very bright everything else seems dark until the eye adjusts, and I'm thinking this could be simulated in this way. I don't know if the flash shape should be the same as the smoke... in metal slug they used circle flashes but that didn't work very well for me.

Yeah the BG might still be a bit unsaturated =). I won't take it as far as your examle, but once I make a more complete mock-up it will be upsaturated a bit.

So yeah, I'll soon be back with a nicer explosion!

[Fickludd]

Ok, new update:

Redid explosion with EyeCraft's edit as a reference... comments?


Also new mockup with user interface

[Geti]

This is right up my alley! Looks very cute, and the gameplay concept intrigues me.

You might want to try out some more flat areas in the "concrete" tiles, and maybe speckle some vegetation around. Wastelands are fun and all but there's nothing wrong with some colour in there too, to compliment the boxy tech stuff. I didn't like all the ground noise so removed a lot of it, I'd suggest having one completely blank tile, two light noise tiles and one heavier noise tile, rather than the constant texture you had. Texture like that is better used sparingly or it gets filtered out visually and interferes with sprite readability.

Very sloppy edit showing some meta-tiling and holes - it'd be fun to have areas you can shoot through but can't walk on.
I also added craters from explosions and areas where the tiles have been removed. I've got to go off to bed, just note that this isn't correctly tiled or anything, just a suggestion of some areas to pursue.
Crappy contrast edit too, slipped in at some point.

The explosions are hard to make out in the stills but look fine animated. Maybe a few secondary flare particles that move away from the explosion wouldn't go astray.

Keen to see this progress, I'll have to drop in some time soon.

[Fickludd]

Thanks Geti for the wonderful edit =).

I think your ideas bring a whole lot of dynamics to the scene, now I can't really enjoy my original mockup as much. Unfortunately I'm away so I won't be able to work on this for a week but I'm really exited to get to it again.

The 16x16 wall tech tile is great, version of that is going in. Holes in the ground is a another winner, allowing visibility but being impassable + giving another depth level, and I also like the larger 32x24 concrete tile. Craters are good, it's unclear how they would work with explosions though.

Is the green stuff fungus or mold? It bring some nice color but I can't really get used to it. Have to play around some with it later =). Same thing with the dark brown tech tiles... are they too dark?

About the dirt texture... I just arbitarily picked from my 6 tiles using the Tiled editor. Less noise seems to be a good idea.


So my thoughts around the gameplay would be:
The player controls a small group of mechs/androids/robots (Mech commander) that walk around in a future wasteland. Encounters with other robos result in turnbased fighting, where the actions of every robo in the group (and for all enemies) is planned first, and then realised at the same time (Like that somewhat resent top down dog-fight flash game). The world should be a randomly generated endless place, so I've been pondering a bit on how to generate maps from code.

The UI will be all keyboard in a Linux inspired command based way (the text in the bottom, which I had to make half the pixel size to get a decent amount of text in).

Ok, that's enough rambling - off to bed!

[Geti]

The green stuff was just vegetation noise, it'd be better to use actual plants but I think some mould here and there wouldn't hurt.
Whether the brown tech tiles are too dark or not probably depends on your monitor - I was just making it look like the tile had been pulled out and the dirt below it exposed.
Craters would simply be added wherever an explosion took place - you could just read whether the tile was dirt or tech and put the appropriate crater there.

Glad you like the edit.

With a command based interface make sure you've got a good tutorial. I know it seems like an odd thing to focus on now but you'll need to explain the interface well. I think a small, handmade "training mission" would be nice.
The gameplay as a whole sounds pretty good, an endless world is a bit.. un-fun though. I know losing is fun and all that but it'd be nice to see a randomly generated 16x16 wasteland that two players could have a war on, fighting for relics and land; some sort of epic scale chess.

This is the kind of game that would be awesome if you could play by relay - a daily move, "Dragoon Lance to F6, Chicken Mecha 31 to E12" kind of deal. If you happen to be online at the same time as your opponent you could play a whole war in 30 minutes, but you could also spend days playing out a small skirmish. Turn based games can be played at any speed, which is a wonderful thing. Have a think about it on your week off.

I'd love to see how you envisage the overworld, especially with many "clans" of robots around.

Looking forward to more, I'll be sure to give some more criticism on the arrival of new art or gameplay ideas

[Fickludd]

Ok, major palette and saturation revisit, as well as incorporation of a lot of Geti's ideas. How does this palette work for you guys, I'm sitting on a really wierd monitor right now =P (Not actually on, but in front of =)). There's only the tilesheet for now, a new mockup will be coming later.



In the tile sheet is also a WIP space ship wreck. Uhm, I'm kinda lost with that so any pointers for reference's or any help would be great.

Hmm, I'm thinking about the gameplay as more like fallout tactics but with one huge level instead of many. The player would actually move around and fight in the mockup world. Multplayer is kind of tedious the program so I would probably make it single player, but maybe some form of hot-seat would be nice =).

[Geti]

Yeah the ability to play in turns would be sweet.

Note that you need a "blank" tech tile as well, you've got a lot of detail but nothing to block out areas with. Something to strive for with each tile is versatility, it should be able to tile with itself without clashing horribly and have as many useful edges as possible, so you don't need as many "bridge" tiles. Sure, some specific detail tiles are a great idea, and in this high-tech day and age where tilemaps can be of a pretty well arbitrary size you really can go nuts, but save yourself some hassle and ensure you've got a good covering of the generic as well, hahah.

Those colours look good, I might do an edit in a bit but they seem fairly solid.

The wreck looks like you need to do construction beforehand. Box out what you're trying to create first.

[Fickludd]

New tilesheet + spritesheet and new Mockup.




@Geti: I've added a 9-tile set for making large blank concrete blocks. I've been reworking the ship - see the separate thread =)

[Olothontor]

I feel like there needs to be more distinction between the various "classes" of robots. Right now it's easy to confuse the four or five of them that exist, and that'll be a problem in-game (although, to be fair, you are pretty restricted by your tile size). Perhaps try making it so that each robot has a stripe of its team color, rather than the whole thing. That'll allow you to play more with the shape and form of the thing.

You're doing a wonderful job.

[Fickludd]

I feel like there needs to be more distinction between the various "classes" of robots. Right now it's easy to confuse the four or five of them that exist, and that'll be a problem in-game (although, to be fair, you are pretty restricted by your tile size). Perhaps try making it so that each robot has a stripe of its team color, rather than the whole thing. That'll allow you to play more with the shape and form of the thing.

You're doing a wonderful job.

Thank you!

At first I was didn't believe I could add a mid-value neutral color to the units because it's hard to get good readability vs. both the backgrounds. However, a red-tinted grey worked out pretty well - striping them up made the units more interesting as well as hopefully differentiating them more?


Also added front and back views to the rest of the units, new larger badass robo and the final transport ship whole + wrecked.

[Geti]

fwiw the ship tweaks are looking niiiice

Liking the unit progression as well. Make some mockups, or dare I say it code something. I'd like to see how it'll look in action.

Gameplay wise you might be able to get away with streaming chunks of world and just generating on the fly. I guess the great thing about wastelands is they're uh, messy. Well suited for lazy procedural generation. Wandering about in a random world fighting some fools here and there would be fun. You just have to make sure the interface is easy to use quickly - sending 50 walk orders to get across one "map square" isn't very much fun if you've already cleared it. Your CLI might help address this as long as you have acceptable pathfinding and the option to interrupt orders. Be interesting to see an interface like that used in real-time, actually.