[WIP] Partisan Tactics Battles : Animations, woah

[.TakaM]

I just wanna say I really like how the tiles look. isometric games usually turn me off, but this looks great 

btw, the little (H) thing in the left text box really reminds me of uTorrent's logo

[Andy Tran]

 Noticing from your work, it has always been one of my favorites.

[ndchristie]

heh, did expect so many responses so quickly

no, im afraid we are not looking for additional spriters, though if anyone is interested in doing high-quality portraits, tremulant no longer has the time to do them (sad face)

ok, about the scene way of doing things.  Ideally, thats what i would do, however, it doesnt work at all with the current methods of construction, and also makes things difficult.  its likely though that many environments will contain larger block elements, in addition to the regular tiles.

Thanks for the advice too guys, some how i had never thought to reduce the level of business >.<  i will try that, as well as trying to unify each face with more local value shifts instead of the high-contrast ones.  now i should only need some time.....^^

could people be more specific about "actually looking like something" ?  everything i've done is a very specific material, and i thought that they communicated themselves rather clearly in that regard but apparently you dont think so

[Akzidenz]

could people be more specific about "actually looking like something" ?  everything i've done is a very specific material, and i thought that they communicated themselves rather clearly in that regard but apparently you dont think so

I think that what they're getting at (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that your tileset is being used to create scenes that look very much like.. they were created with a tileset. If you play through FF Tactics Advance, it's not difficult to tell where the grid sits, but it's very difficult to tell exactly where one tile ends and another begins.

If you think of them less as individual tiles, and more as pieces of a larger puzzle, then I think you'll get better results. You started to do something like that on this screenshot:



Take advantage of transparencies, work on more than one tile at a time, consider how they'll look next to each other, try to fight the lego effect as much as you can. And if you can, get rid of the visible gridlines - I think they do a lot to detract from the quality of everything. Previous Tactics games haven't used a visible grid, have they? I'm not sure.

[AlexHW]

could people be more specific about "actually looking like something" ?  everything i've done is a very specific material, and i thought that they communicated themselves rather clearly in that regard but apparently you dont think so

forget about materials.. start thinking about forms.
the problem is that everything looks like a material, but the materials have no form.
It's like the material is pasted onto cardboard boxes.
sorry if that sounds harsh.

patterns make no sense if they can't express a form, in effect they'll seem flat.
when you use bunches of various colors in one pattern, that seems to be destroying any coherent form.
also, things dont need to be so squared. the games not going to fall apart if some shapes aren't exactly square/straight..

[Joseph]

I dont know if you have a working demo for this or anything, as I have not played it, but one thing I would love to see in it that isnt in fftactics or advance, is free roam...well within an area.  fft and advance the only movement your player does is based on an event, which gets boring.  id like to go into shops, houses, new areas rather than go along with the story to find out.  with the graphics themselves, they look awesome, I cant wait to play it.  the textbox isnt bad but could use revisions.  and then the tiles are amazing as well as the rest of it, however I think they're too obvious when it comes to tiles.  I think you should work them into eachother so you dont end up with 12 blocks of grass instead of an area of grass.
good luck.

[Akzidenz]

the textbox isnt bad but could use revisions.

I wanted to say something about the type. I gathered from your old posts that you're not incredibly concerned with the UI, but for what it's worth, here's my nerdy design advice:

Lucida Mono is the wrong face to use here. Your interface generally should reflect the type of game you're playing - the type choice should come from the other elements of the game. Your game is set in medival (or quasi-medival) times, from what I can tell. Monospaced typefaces certainly weren't around then, and neither were sans-serif typefaces. Monospaced type is generally something that you should avoid - it's much more difficult to read than other typefaces, it takes up more room, and regardless of the style of the face it will generally evoke a typewriter connotation.

I'm not sure what your limitations are with type. If you can't antialias your type at all, then try using Georgia (it comes standard on all computers now) - it's a really beautiful serif face that's designed specifically for the screen (whereas most typefaces are designed for the printed page). If you absolutely need to use a monospaced typeface, then Century Monospace is about the best you can do (http://www.fontshop.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=catalog.fontdetail&displayfontid=BT.107478.0.0). If you have no limitations, and you can antialias your type, then you can really look around and find something nice. The Serif (http://www.fontshop.com/?fuseaction=catalog.fontdetail&searchby=manufacturer&displayfontid=FK.108399.0.1) is one of my favorite contemporary serifs. It's almost impossible to make Jenson (http://www.fontshop.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=catalog.fontdetail&displayfontid=M.125307.0.0) look bad. If you don't want to use a serifed typeface (they're typically meant to be printed), there are a bunch of nice sans-serifs - Quay is a beautiful face (http://www.fontshop.com/?fuseaction=catalog.fontdetail&searchby=manufacturer&displayfontid=EF.547.0.1).

If you want to look through stuff on your own, www.fontshop.com is great, they have a big selection - and The Foundry (www.foundrytypes.co.uk) is probably the best contemporary type foundry out there. If you happen to find a typeface that you like, but you don't want to shell out $150 to try it, let me know via a PM or something.

Additionally, your UI screenshots on your blog are pretty chaotic. If you'd like some detailed advice on how to make them simpler or more effective, just let me know. 

So, yeah. Take that advice for what it is. If you want to ignore all of that, I promise my feelings won't be hurt. But since I can't draw worth shit, I feel like I should at least offer up advice on something that I know about.

[happymonster]

Beautiful work!

I think that your tiles might benefit if you had a little more contrast and a little less different hues in them. Some of them have 3 or 4 different hues, which I think is excessive for some of the materials you are representing. This might help the tiles stand out more.

Have you tried dropping your sprites onto screenshots of other isometric games and seeing if their tiles makes the sprites stand out more?

[ndchristie]

Its been a bit too long since i updated.....

Thanks to all of their help with this, the tiles i think are far better now than they were in previous posts..  Now ive come back to an old issue though - the sand that ptoing has effectively dubbed "that ugly peanut-butter tile"



see the jiffy in hte bottom area? thats what i need to get rid of.  BUT ive never known how to make a sand tile that looks good. does anyone have any ideas?

also note that the background is only a fill that wont be seen in-game, as sky will almost never be seen except in some areas which will be on cliffs.  there is no "end of the world" arena edge for this project, everything will be built within restricted camera angles and obstacles that prevent the player from seeing anything empty area beyond the map

[fawel]

I was wondering what those brown and purple swirls were, they look really bad.  Right now they are way too busy and distracting.  THe fact that you cram as many tiles as possible into your mock-ups, without any transition tiles as well, doesn't do much to help.

Sand tiles... sand tiles.  Look at the far right... (from Tsugumo's tutorials)


http://www.bigbluebubble.com/pixeltutorial/chapter5.htm

I know you've probably seen that already, but I think it should help all the same.  It seems like you try to avoid large expanses of open space in your tiles, try and do something about that.  Also, sand is not in any way bright.  It's plain, mostly with flat unsaturated colors.

That's about as close as I could get using your colors.  So yeah, I hope that helps some