GR#077 - Adventure Game Mockup 3/4 - RPG projection

[Tourist]

Mea culpa, my edit was rather poor.  I still think you could take a second look at the edge from eyebrow up to the hairline.  I feel it should straighter than what you have, unless you mean for that lock of hair to really cover that part of the skull.  Here's a wuxia actress which might be a better ref to your original:



From the eyebrow up there is a fairly long straight edge, and then a short gentle curve, followed by a sharp turn at the hairline.

Tourist

[AlexHW]

I haven't been that motivated today, so i haven't worked much on it.. :\ hitting some walls on unrelated things.. ugh
anyways.

jams: thanks, yea, I didn't intend the knight to have heavy armor on his legs. I don't really like the look of a full suit of arm, makes them look slow and cumbersome. and yes, the girl isn't suppose to look tough.

redshrike: thanks, I googled dunsany and the images are definately cool. I love the atmosphere of it. It's good to hear you use the term dream-like, because I originally was inpired to make it kind of dreamy game-wise. knowing the art feels dreamlike makes me happier.

tourist: yea, i want the hair to kinda fall down a bit and cover it slightly.

[AlexHW]

here's an update.. trying to figure out the tiles near water/ponds.. I'm thinking i may have to separate the cattail heads into a separate layer and make them more pronounced.

[AlexHW]

here's a slight update..

[PypeBros]

The tiles are wonderful -- I love the swamp -- and the tones you pick bring in a sort of "painted universe" that fits well with fantasy settings. I'm surprised by the "squarish" look of some of them when transitions are missing.

Within the tree on the left, for instance, you bring in some variations in colours, but it looks like each tile must have a unique palette and the transition between brown and green leaves becomes a straight line. If that's technically possible, I'd have built the tree with layers that have more organic shapes so that the brown-to-yellow and yellow-to-green transitions drawn an organic curve as well.

There could be some readability issues with desaturated-sprites-on-desaturated-bg, but since it's a bit hard to see which tiles are meant to be walkable and which tiles are meant to be "walls" right now, I can't check whether it actually happens.

Regarding the portraits, they have a nice 14(?)-century look that also fits the theme well. However, they tended to depict women as pitiful souls praying for mercy ... which somehow appears in your leftmost portrait as well. If she's a major character, I'd have expected her to be more determined. Whether it can be done with eyes alone or the pose itself needs to be changed ... well, I'm unfortunately not skilled enough to tell.

[AlexHW]

thanks for the feedback.
about the square-ish look to some tiles, it's because I'm trying to design everything to work with some implementation procedures I have in mind for the game. I'm hoping to have the environments randomly generated, yet look semi-decent. It will be very difficult to make perfect, so the less specific the tile placement need to be, the better they'll be able to be implemented.

The girl is the main character, but she doesn't really confront many things herself. she basically just finds herself in various predicaments.

[Ryumaru]

I too was wondering about the tiles. They were all about 1 or 2 colors away from gbc restrictions and it looked like you were using different color palettes to create a higher color count in each element.

Since it sounds like you wish to make something actual with this, my only current complaint is the darkest palette entry in the trees. Only like 4 or 5 tiles are using it and it doesn't help at all with the form; plus it competes with the dark accent of the main characters which right now is the only thing that separates them from the background without animation. The pond currently appears very busy, even more so than all the stuff going on near the tree. You may just not have gotten around to it, but if I were working on the project, especially with a slightly randomized map in mind, I would have some tiles of a much lower frequency ( business, noise) than others so that the eye could rest in some parts of the map.

edit: Oh, and if I haven't said it already: I really like this.

[PypeBros]

it's because I'm trying to design everything to work with some implementation procedures I have in mind for the game.

Ah. Foreign implementation constraints. I know that. Too bad. To be honest, I find your art wonderful, and I think it deserves an engine that make it more than "half-decent". Two-pass rendering (similar to what the original prince of persia did) could easily allow your random environments to have a "top-part" overlay for tile (x,y+1) to be drawn over the "bottom part" of tile (x,y). That would just help offering seamless environments.

But well, I have no time to offer for revisiting the engine you plan to use, so ... do for the best.

[AlexHW]

well, I don't have anything specifically set in stone yet, I just plan to make environments randomly generated, and to do this requires a bit of forgiving here and there as to precise placement of tiles. nature isn't very rigid in its organization of things and tends to have some parts overflow into other parts, etc, so if i can have some tiles still look partially decent in unplanned ways, then i'll be happy. tiles that can be walked behind , such as trees and cattails will probably be placed on a separate layer.

ryumaru, i'll probably get around to the tree issue, i havent touched it for over a year, and basically need to revisit what i want to do with it yet.. also need to polish up the swamp/pond stuff

thanks

[Fickludd]

First of all I REALLY like this piece, and most of all the autumny colors - it's just like that outside in sweden at the moment (well not right now on account of it being night times =)).

Regarding the girls face I much prefer your version to Tourists. For some reason all the reference pictures posted are of models/moviestars, which I often find generically pretty and uninteresting! Whereas yours has much more of an arty personality. The other portraits are great as well.

Maybe as Ryumaru says you should fix the darkest color on the tree (bleeds because it's too dark), and in my opinion the red is just a little too saturated as well (but just a little - I didn't notice it until i zoomed in a bit and was shocked at how red it really was). What is the target resolution of the game?