I hope you realise that a statement like this, and quite a few others you have made, is not a sign of the aforementioned qualities
Geez, just leave it alone. Seriously, if this is how you act when I DON'T say something mean, imagine what a pain in the ass you'd be if I did.
Fine, you want to know what I said? I said this project probably wouldn't ever get past the demo stage, if that, and the only people who would care would be you and people who like Final Fantasy Tactics - but not because they liked your game. Because they liked Final Fantasy Tactics. Because you are designing your characters and game around what you think Final Fantasy Tactics should be. You aren't making a game. You are making a simulacrum - something which resembles a game only in the fact that a game is what you are copying. It's an emulation of a game. A facade. There isn't a lick of individuality in your work, and while you are technically competent at pixel art, the world wouldn't shed a tear over your game or your art. It wouldn't even freaking notice it enough to care. You are making a crappy game because it is nothing more than a self centered vanity project. You don't want to make a good game. You want to make a game like Final Fantasy Tactics so that you can pretend that you have the same talent. This is fan art.
I removed that post for two reasons. The first is that it is too honest. I can say that stuff about most amateur projects, and indeed much of the art on this board. It's an easy thing to say because it is almost always true. People learn to trace before they learn to draw. I thought saying it out loud was extremely cruel and discouraging - which it is or isn't depending on where you are, but it's going to sting like hell no matter what. The second reason I removed it is because you weren't going to take it well at all. My guess is that you are going to get extremely defensive - I mean EXTREMELY defensive - and take it really personally. I removed my comments to prevent that. You got defensive and took THAT personally anyway, so I imagine this will be much worse.
But let me follow it up with something. You ARE a technically competent pixel artist. Where you need to go next isn't to become a better pixel artist. It's to specialize, and to understand the requirements of your specialty. If you are making graphics for a videogame, it takes more than how many colors you can use. It requires understanding what a videogame is, what it does, and your part in how it does it. A creation - any creation, not just games - is something which works towards this perfect sphere. No bumps. No dents. If you make something that contributes to that sphere, you get a perfectly smooth surface. Everything works together. But if you deliver something which is at odds - something which doesn't do something as well as it should, or too well for what it's suppose to, it can ruin that perfect surface. The function of this artwork is extremely poor - some of the worst I've ever seen - while the style is far too grandeur for what it needs to be.
You need to create artwork that is something which realizes that it is a tactics game, that it is an amateur flash game. You've already created more classes than you need or will use and you don't even have a prototype working yet. You aren't being practical. You are flying out towards every half decent idea that crosses your desk without having a proper foundation to contain it, or without regard to how that idea fits into the grand scheme. For instance, you've got all these different classes because... well, because other games had these classes. You haven't considered exactly how each of them fit into the design other than the generic archetypes. I mean, if FFT had a thief class, then you need a thief class right? The problem is, you aren't creating something with the time and budget of FFT. You aren't going to be able to balance the game at all. You aren't going to be able to have that kind of depth because a) you don't currently have the talent and b) you aren't planning on going far enough with the game to see it through. You'll end up with a mish-mash of ideas stolen from a dozen different games that just don't fit together at all. A half assed smorgasbord.
Scale back, considerably. You are jumping every conceivable gun.
But that's design advice and this is a pixel art forum, which is another reason why I didn't want to go down that road. I only wanted to comment on what was there, and that was about two dozen different sprites that were virtually indistinguishable from each other.
so far, the only point youve made is that crowds are more difficult to see, which is common sense. the images youve provided of my guys in a crowd are still easily readable to me, though they do take longer to see than when characters are spread out.
making these characters different colors and shapes will not solve that problem in our project or any project
do you have a solution to this problem in mind?
It won't solve your problem, no. But shapes and colors will go a long way to helping it. Truth be told, you want shorter characters so they won't overlap as much. You'd probably also benefit from 3D terrain, since rotation makes the physical relationships between units more explicit. Having fewer classes, which need to be identified would also make a huge difference. The less diversity you have to remember, they less you have to explicitly delineate. You could design your maps so that grouping would be difficult, but that would impact the gameplay rather than being a purely graphical decision. Using harder outlines for the characters, and softening the dark internal lines would help. But the biggest difference would be a superior color scheme.
