GR#078 - Generic Soldiers + Tiles

[Fickludd]

I happened to play a game on kongregate http://www.kongregate.com/games/ryzed/xenosquad which was a blunt copy of the good old Incubation. That got my brain rolling for a bit, so I've mocked up some soldier and a couple of tiles for a turnbased squad-tactics game in some city.



Ok, grid size is 16x16, sprite size 16x24, size refs are obviously ffVI

So any feedback would be great - palette, design, readability, anatomy... yeah. I'm gonna try animating the sprite (walking, firing standing and lying and crawling).

[milleja46]

Looks good...though you really should of tried elminating the grid

[pistachio]

Background is good, but the character sprite seems to blend into it a bit too much. You could add more contrast, or speculars/highlights.
The edit, with previous suggestions applied:



Also toyed with some pixels a bit to distinguish from the generic Final Fantasy face more, but it's still seeming out of place. (Compare front sprite to back.) In that case there's this version. Better?

Other than that, I'd like to see more cracks/debris on the ground to reflect the demolished bricks.

[Fickludd]

Wow, that was a quick and great edit =).



For the readability, I don't want a specular on the helmet since i imagine it being quite dull (cloth more than metal). Instead i've just tried pushing the highlight color.

Redid the face as well, better? I like the one pixel eyes, but i think they look at the camera as opposed to along the ground, which bugs me a bit in this perspective.

The ground needs work for sure - cracks, derbis and broken walls coming up!

[yrizoud]

"The grid" can be pretty useful for a turn-based game, so the player can immediate estimate distance in tile units.
See the (map) backgrounds of Advance Wars or Fire Emblem.

[TPoe]

The thing that bugs me is the shading on the face seems to be coming from the bottom right, but on the helmet it's on the left

[Fickludd]

New version



@TPoe: I was trying to make the helmet shade the face but i agree it went to far. Is this better?

Some new tiles. I am having immense trouble with making the brick rubble in the demolished walls. Anybody got any good samples of pixel art rubble?

[Mahan]

Have you thought about a re-colour on the mortar and floor? The bricks and the dudes look good, just the pallet doesn't sit right with me.
   

Not that this seems totally right to me but I think blue looks nicer than the yellow.

[jams0988]

Well, I think it depends on where they are, Mahan. The original looks like they're outside, or in a place with a lot of sunlight. Yours looks more like they're inside of a building/somewhere with florescent lighting. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, I prefer the original a bit. It looks more colorful and happy, which sits well with the chibi-style spritework, I think.

[Mahan]

or winter, or in the northern hemisphere. The blue green spectrum of light is what I'm used to and so retain the preference I guess. Might even be influenced as far as war is a cold bleak dreaded thing so bouncy happy sunshine doesn't spring to mind

[jams0988]

As a New Englander, I think I'm allowed to ask "what kind of sick person *prefers* Winter weather over Summer?!" ;P
Also, you didn't change the coloring of the soldiers in your edit, which might be a factor behind why I prefer the original one.

[Fickludd]

@Mahan: It's pretty cool how you turned the scene into nighttime. It's not what i had in mind though, and I also think you need to change the soldier coloring for it to work.

[Fickludd]

After messing and failing with Tiled's automap feature (God that was confusing!), I gave up and made a mockup by hand.



I'm happy with the walls and roads, but the sewers and cracks don't work so well. Help anyone?

[Fickludd]

After seeing StevenM's recent awesome 8-bit mockups I had to revisit my tileset to try to achieve something similar... tadaah:



Yeah the tiled floor are almost identical to Steven's, but they where so genious I had to use them! This style rocks btw, anybody know of any good games using similar techniques? C+C welcome as always.

[PypeBros]

wow. outstanding difference, imho. Just don't forget to check your soldiers pop out on these tiles as well.

As for the "tiled dust", It reminds me of StarOcean-BlueSphere on GBC for which there used to be a "commercial critique" thread around.

[Fickludd]

Thanks!

oh yeah, found the commercial critique thread, that's a pretty cool game. Used some of their ideas to further improve the tiles.

Added soldier + tank, and pushed saturation way up. Cool? Partial outline or no outline? I'd prefer not to need the outline, but I suppose this is one of those function over form situations.