AuthorTopic: Caves and such. (First post here - hello, everbody!)  (Read 5451 times)

Offline jams0988

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Caves and such. (First post here - hello, everbody!)

on: August 25, 2011, 04:28:07 pm
First of all, hello to everyone here. I've been lurking here for awhile, but this is my first time posting. I'm looking forward to getting to know all of you. =)
I've been an artist for awhile (I guess I'm decent, definitely not great), but I just started pixeling a few days ago. I'm pretty bad at it. It's surprisingly difficult trying to cram so much info into so little space, and I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it. There are some incredible artists here, so hopefully you guys can point me in the right direction.

I want to make a modest little platforming game, and I just started my first tileset. Even though they don't look it, they're probably around five hours of work all together. Like I said, I'm having some trouble figuring this stuff out, hahah. Here they are!

First cave mockup...just some floor tiles and some quick background tiles, really.


After crawling around in tunnels for a bit, I want to have the game open up into a giant cavern, to change the scenery for the player. The waterfall is supposed to be *far* away, even though it's impossible to tell from the picture. I'm hoping when it's animated it'll be more obvious; the water is going to fall very slowly, and I might use some parallax magicks for the lake the falls are falling into.


First one again, but with higher contrast on everything. Everything looked a little too gray to me. At first, I was thinking I'd have basically everything in the game be tinted blue, like the only source of light in the game was the ambient light from the blue rock walls, but I think that'd get boring to look at very quickly, so I think I'm just going to light everything with natural white light.

So...any help or advice would be very much appreciated. I don't think the tiles look bad right now, but I don't think they look especially interesting, either. Any sort of help at all would be great, since I'm pretty much brand new to pixeling. Any sort of good cave/waterfall pixel art would be great too...I have no idea how I'm going to draw the cavern the waterfall is in right now...I'm imagining the cave walls getting lighter and lighter as they fade back into the distance to where the waterfall is, but I have no idea how I'm actually going to render that, and I can't find much reference for what I want to draw anywhere, since there aren't many super-giant caverns with huge waterfalls in the middle of them in real life, hahah.

I do have a few sprites done, too; the player's walk cycle, and a monster (slug thing) walk cycle, but I can't save them as gifs for the moment, so they'll have to wait...actually, on that subject, any recommendations for good pixellng programs would be appreciated, too. I'm using Graphics Gale right now, which I mostly love, but it doesn't have a HSB color picker, and I'm horrible at working in HSL.

Thanks again for anything you can offer me, guys. I'll be plugging away in the meantime! o/
« Last Edit: August 25, 2011, 07:15:51 pm by jams0988 »

Offline Voxxitronic

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Re: Caves and such. (First post here - hello, everbody!)

Reply #1 on: August 26, 2011, 11:01:31 am
The background tiles for the tunnel seem to repetitive. You might want to make them twice the size, or have larger patterns. A way you could make the waterfall seem far away is making it thinner or darker, because caves are generally pretty dark. It looks nice though, reminds me of Yoshi's island.

Offline reticle2020

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Re: Caves and such. (First post here - hello, everbody!)

Reply #2 on: August 26, 2011, 06:35:23 pm
I like it so far looks promising.  I agree with Voxxitronic about it being a bit repetitive, and maybe a bit more dimension to the background wall, like adding some depth to make it actually look like rocks...that would certainly make it more "interesting" :D

Offline jams0988

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Re: Caves and such. (First post here - hello, everbody!)

Reply #3 on: August 27, 2011, 05:10:04 am
Thanks for the advice and compliments, Voxxitronic and reticle2020. I just played around trying to make background tiles for a few hours, and ended up with this:

Looks like an MS-Paint drawing, hahah. I'll have to keep working on it tomorrow. The floor tiles I already made don't match that sort of lighting at all, either, so I'll have to save these background tiles for a different area or something. This is just going to get harder and harder. XD

Also, just as an aside, everything I'm working on is meant to be viewed at 2x...not that it matters for most of it, but...
Thanks again for the help, everybody.

Edit: Ah, also: does anyone know of any programs that'll take sprite sheets and turn them into gifs? I'd like post some of my animated stuff to get some advice on that, but I have no way of converting my sprite sheets to gifs right now.
« Last Edit: August 27, 2011, 05:21:58 am by jams0988 »

Offline reticle2020

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Re: Caves and such. (First post here - hello, everbody!)

Reply #4 on: August 29, 2011, 07:10:54 pm
Hey Jams,

  I would stick with the original idea for now, the new direction seems overly complicated if your just starting out.  Something I noticed about the original mock is that your using A LOT of colors and most of them are so close in hue that the difference isn't noticeable.  My guess is that you drew out the light colored rocks and used a blurring effect to create smoothness?  I know that many would say you should use less colors with more hue shifts and create depth that way.  Here's an example of what can be done with just 5 colors.  Don't look at this example too closely as it uses the forbidden pillowing technique...at least I think it does I'm still fairly new at all this as well :P  But it should give you an idea of how you can get quite a bit of depth from a few colors.



Here are some great tutorial sites to get you started:

http://kiwinuptuo.deviantart.com/gallery/27054576
http://www.derekyu.com/?page_id=219

In regards to your GIF conversion question, a quick Google search netted these results:

http://www.rightfiles.com/gifconverter/
http://image.online-convert.com/convert-to-gif
http://images.my-addr.com/converter_jpg_to_gif_online_freeware_tool.php

Hope this helps a little

Offline jams0988

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Re: Caves and such. (First post here - hello, everbody!)

Reply #5 on: August 30, 2011, 03:26:10 pm
Thanks a lot, reticle. Those tutorials look awesome, and your timing is great. I lost power for a few days (just got it back) because of that "hurricane" we just got here in New England, and the break had me dreading going back to trying to fix this pixel art mess, hahah. So thanks for the encouragement; I'll get back to work when I get home tonight. =D
As for my color palette in the original mockup, the back wall is only three colors, and the ground is five. It might look like there's more because I uploaded them with photobucket, which creates a lot of artifacts in everything I post. I need to start using a better image host, lol. I like the example you made, though; it looks nice and saturated, even in the dark areas. Mine gets a little too grey, I think.

And yeah, I think I'm going to hold off on the new idea for a bit. I don't think my skills are quite up to snuff for what I'd need to do to go in that direction, hahah. Maybe with a few more months of solid practice...
Anyway, I'll post something soon! =)
« Last Edit: August 30, 2011, 03:30:33 pm by jams0988 »

Offline reticle2020

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Re: Caves and such. (First post here - hello, everbody!)

Reply #6 on: August 30, 2011, 07:23:20 pm
Hey your very welcome sorry to hear about the problems with mother nature I hope everything is okay.  We don't usually have to worry about stuff like that here in Canada :P  Anyway as far as the fuzzy picture problem try using imageshack.us I've been using for a while now and it doesn't screw with my pics...check it out it's free!  And keep in mind that the example I did was quick and crappy and by no means a good way of doing a wall I was just trying to show you what a few colors could do to make things pop a little more :P  I'm still learning too...good luck!

Offline jams0988

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Re: Caves and such. (First post here - hello, everbody!)

Reply #7 on: August 31, 2011, 06:23:02 pm
Thanks again for the links, reticle. Followed along with a few of the examples just now (to be viewed at 2x - 3x):
Boulder:

Stone floor:

Wood floor:

I'm gonna go through the rest of them as practice, and then get back to my game art. I'll do a few more when I get home from work today. These are ridiculously helpful, as is the rest of this guy's work. =D
« Last Edit: August 31, 2011, 06:26:26 pm by jams0988 »

Offline reticle2020

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Re: Caves and such. (First post here - hello, everbody!)

Reply #8 on: September 02, 2011, 07:30:27 am
Hey no worries...keep at it and post your stuff so you can get feedback on it...I've already improved in only a few days with some really great pointers from forum members and some super sweet edits :D