[Concept][WIP] Revamped project approach, comments/thoughts appreciated!

[skaytr]

I suppose in those games the characters are quite large compared to the tree, or else you wouldnt see them. I don't even know where to start lol, where would you suggest?

I do have a character concept, but it is certainly not refined enough to be an asset. Honestly though, the Art style for the game dosn't really matter to me. It's already been changed so many times, and as long as it still works with the story/gameplay mechanics that I have written, and it looks good, I don't really care...  it probably sounds like I'm kind of bypassing the artwork for the game, which is impossible. I suppose I just don't really know what I wan't yet.

Honestly I would be thrilled if my game looked like Ahriman's Prophecy, which was the game I was aiming to compare to:


If i'm not mistaken, the assets are not 1 pixel : 1 pixel ? they are blown up slightly right, should I be doing that too? For example, create 16x16 tiles, and blow them up to 32x32 in-game?

Even in here the trees are tinyy compared to mine... Doh.

This time around, the FOURTH revision of my assets, I'm going to sketch rough templates for sizes/perspectives so it dosn't get out of control. again...

Well. Considering I'm still super super new to pixel art, I've learned an awful lot. And even I was heading in the wrong direction, I can only learn from it in the end.


When I have my tree again, should I update this thread? or create a new one? Or should I start with main character first?

@YellowLime:

Yeah... lol I am not even that happy with the tree honeslty, the more I look at it the more i see the flaws. I'm only happy with time I invested into it, not giving up allong the way. I'l shrink this down and use it as a base I suppose. I have some more planning to do (yaaaaaaay)

[PixelPiledriver]

If i'm not mistaken, the assets are not 1 pixel : 1 pixel ? they are blown up slightly right, should I be doing that too? For example, create 16x16 tiles, and blow them up to 32x32 in-game?

How does your engine work?
It depends on how you want your camera and display settings.
Widescreen, black bars, zooming etc should be given some thought.
The player views the game from what you give them, its important to see it as a whole.
You should rough a quick screen composition before making any assets.

When I have my tree again, should I update this thread? or create a new one?

You can always rename the thread and continue on if you want to change focus but keep a progression.

[skaytr]

Hmmm... personally I love the old-school graphics of the screenshot I posted. However, maybe using 32x32 native tiles would be better. And honestly, I'ts not 2001 anymore, It wouldn't be out of the ordinary for the game to be larger than 10 MB haha ( Ahriman's Prophecy is only 10MB ).

Of course I'd love may game to look as good as possible, but I'm only 1 man, and I don't have all the time in the world

I'm using Game Maker for my engine btw. I already have enough knowledge to code most of the things I need, And I have the ability to scale the assets up if I need/wan't to.

I did notice that allot of the newer games from Arimanth games (ppl who made Ahriman's Prophecy) have ALLOT more colors in their pallet, and use Anti-Aliasing on everything. While there is no doubt that this looks good, I Think I'd rather stick to classic graphics and focus on unique Assets and engaging story, rather than grinding on beautiful assets and never have a completed game (especially for my first full game!).

I'l make a mock up of the scene that I wan't first.... boy, where to start haha.

Thanks guys!

[Cyangmou]

The image you posted is a resized jpg. Scaled pixel art looks terrible and jpgs have a shitload of artifacts due to compression. search for gifs or pngs or make your own screenshots while you are playing the game.

I found this one (it's resized to 200% but at least it's a clean screenshot)

Here you can see how it's originally pixelled

From a quick overlook I'd say it's RPG-Maker graphic and it isn't neither great from the tiling approach nor from the pixel art - so I won't recommend to use it.
It seems that you can get a lot of the stuff from here:
http://www.tekepon.net/fsm/modules/refmap/index.php?mode=map

For their newer games it seems that they use the art assets from the newer softwares which actually isn't pixel art.

[skaytr]

From a quick overlook I'd say it's RPG-Maker graphic and it isn't neither great from the tiling approach nor from the pixel art - so I won't recommend to use it.
It seems that you can get a lot of the stuff from here:
http://www.tekepon.net/fsm/modules/refmap/index.php?mode=map

Obviously I would be creating my own assets, and I would make sure they tile better and are somewhat unique. And I personnally don't have a problem with those graphics, but I do see what you mean by the tiling.

Also, Are suggesting that I myself use assets from that site? or that they are using them from that site and not creating their own?


Edit: May I ask in your opinion  of GOOD pixel art/ tiling RPG games within the past 1-3 years? and what is good about them?

I'm also thinking about completely changing the setting of the game. I'm probably way too ambitious at this point. I think I should basicaly drop the story, focus entirely on instance crawling... if I knew how to create rougelike instanced levels... I could just drop the Player in the middle of nowhere, without a town, and just go nuts XD

Theres an Android game called " Pixel Dungeon " which is super fun, and has literly no story. You just start off in a dungeon and fight your way through the floors, and its amazing! I'd probably keep my game more open world though.

Update:

I sketched something up... I quite like it, and would sitll be 95% the exact same mechanics as previously, except I have more freedom when it comes to anatomy of vegitation, I already have proceedural lighting engine in game maker for this so thats not a problem . I like the color pallet on this image also. I can still have "Forests" of wierd Teal/Yellow blobby vines, I can still have caverns and cliffs of the offset stones on the surface. Make-believe worlds were always more interesting.

I had planned on creating scenes like this in game anyway, But now the player is dropped right into it... youl find out why if you play the game! ^^ hehe

[Decroded]

What resolution is your game going to be?
If you're talking about 16px tiles then you're drawing the tree so big I don't understand how you think its appropriate.

Pixel art aside, its also odd to sketch an entire screen full of ground texture like that.
You could just sketch some areas then have the suggestion of the forms in other areas and patches of just blocks of colour.

I'm curious what you used as a base for you Game Maker lighting engine, or did you code yourself?

[skaytr]

Well, i only drew a little section of ground texture in the center, i duplicated it through the rest. I colored other tiles to see what it would look like through the entire screen. and the code i used for the lighting engine is based off of this guys awesome scripts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaDPr2Z1-lM

The shadows don't work that well with organic forms, but I basicaly removed the outlines, changed the alpha so the shaded area is always 90% black,  and made a global variable that defines the radious of the light following the player. When you collide with smaller crystals (or whatever it may be), the instance of crystal kills itself, increase the value of the global variable by a certain amount, which in turn effects the radious of the light following the play. I have a maximum amount defines aswell.

I figured for this environment, that it would be pretty dark for "Daylight" And the caves would have a seperate variable where you can only see a few feet infront of the player, unless of corse you collect cyrstals to temporarily increase the radius. I can also implement a timed element that decreases the radius over time. and another sweet feture is you can control the color of the lights! 

I'd probably use the cast-shadow feature in the caves if i can make it look more organic, But its pretty system hoggy to have multiple lights/case shadowed objects. I can only run it at 240 FPS on my beast computer haha (the other scenes run at 2200). I have it capped at 60 FPS though. smoooooth. XD

Edit: Not sure on resolution yet, and Ive decided Il use 32x32 for tiles, some sprites are taller though. Right now for testing the Game maker code I have the room sizes at 1400 x 800. My character fits snuggly inside a 64x32 sprite for his idle pose, but would need 64x64 for action animations.


Ive been doing allot of research/concepting/designing this time around, pretty excited !

Heres a WIP for the character:

[Pix3M]

Resolution is easily one of the first things a pixel artist needs to think about before they even start. It influences the art style, and as already mentioned it influences your working speed.

Ahriman's prophecy isn't as great as you think it is. Their door is taken straight from default RTP assets that comes with RM2k. The tree looks a lot like the tree used in FFVI: http://www.spriters-resource.com/snes/ff6/sheet/6653/. Lots of stuff were taken from that First Seed Material site.

As a result from taking from multiple sources, their art style is inconsistent. RM2k RTP and FSM assets are a lot more cartoon than the more realistic looking FFVI trees. Dunno how obvious that mistake is to others but inconsistent styles would make things look more fake than it needs to.

As for the pixel art itself, a couple of stuff I might be able to bring up. The rendering uses a lot of single pixel dots which generally looks much less polished than pixel art that is done focusing on pixel clusters (blobs of colors created from same colors touching each other).  That is what makes some of the best pixel art look really polished. A low-res game I think has a solid art style with solid rendering is LoZ: The Minish Cap, if you wanna see a better example of low resolution pixel art that looks polished.

To add to what PixelPileDriver said, you're gonna want to know what the game screen looks like. It doesn't matter what a game asset looks like by itself. It's how everything meshes together into a game screen that matters. For the heck of it I just scribbles down something very basic, but you may want to start with blobs of colors just to make sure the color scheming for the environment is solid.



This is 512x384. Seiken Densestu 3 is a game that uses a similar resolution but 25% the size you're working with - 16x32 characters (more or less), 16x16 px tiles, 16x14 tiles on the screen. SD3 doesn't have any glaring problems compositionally, so I'm just gonna use them as a shortcut to say that 512x384 may be a game resolution to consider. Trees will likely be a nuisance blocking the view for being the size it is but it's probably better than smaller bonsai trees that are obviously copy-pasted.



1400x800 though, is too big, even if you didn't mean to ponder over that as a screen size it's still a convenient number for what I need.. This setup is probably good for a strategy game which individual units are merely your pawns, but it's innappropriate for a typical RPG when the game play puts emphasis on the hero. Also look at how the trees are now proportionally smaller, so you need more trees to make this scene look like a forest, and it's suddenly more obvious that this tree was blatantly copy-pasted. The more tiles on screen, the uglier the tiles look. You're also gonna get lost getting distracted by a gazillion different kinds of distractions when your hero is puny and seemingly insignificant.

Whatever sizes you work with, if they don't look good in your intended game resolution, they probably won't look good either if you try sticking them into a mockup as mere scribbles like what I did.

Also, a fun fact: you won't need anything faster than 60fps because that is about the rate human eyes work.

[skaytr]

Wow, thanks for that awesome reply!

First of all I would like to mention that I haven't even started tiles yet. I have literly only that environment concept, and I'm now working on my character. I was informed that the character is one of the best places to start from a community member that most inspirational to me 

Changing the resolution is no problem to me, I do see what you mean with a larger resolution though. Perhaps I was thinking that having a bigger resolution would (like you said) somewhat Isolate the player. It was a foolish intentional result that I hadn't put much thought into. Before I create any environment assets this will be something that I will extensively research and test.

I also feel like I should be scaling my assets up in-game... So even at slightly larger resolutions It will still look like decent Pixel Work.

When I say I'm a complete beginner, I literally mean I have never done any Pixel Art prior to starting this tree/tile set (at the top of this post), I have never created a 2D game (besides a brief side-scrolling project for College), and I'm still very new to professional quality Art/Asset production in general. I'm not just whining saying to take it easy, quite the opposite. I'm trying to gather as much information about Pixel Art and Classic RPG style Asset production as I can! 

Honestly I like my Character when he is scaled to a larger resolution (without AA of course).. It feels much more like the style I was going for when I first started

BTW here is a WIP for the run cycle. It is based of a simple run cycle from the animators survival guide. There are a few things I'm not happy with, especially at 1:1 pixel resolution. At higher ratios though it feels much less noticeable!

I'm not happy with the hair looping, it feels a bit to jerky for me
I feel his back leg/arm are not high enough contrast to his front leg/arm, and kind of gives the impression that halfway through the loop he is moving the same arm/leg again haha.
I'm also considering adding more details to his attire, which I feel would aid to the depth of the animation.
And his head turns on the wrong step... DOH lol thats something I intend on fixing later.

I'm not sure if I already mentioned it here, but it is worth noting that there are also 2D side-scrolling-platformy type levels in this game



Again, I don't mean to come off as immature or ungrateful, I'm just trying to gather as much info as I can before I start Asset production for the game - Still continuing to write/refine the story and background story etc... And concepting some more creatures for the game...

... for now though, I am just focusing on Hero, and pre-production 


Edit: Keep in-mind to there will be Hud elements that creep onto the srcreen. I havent nailed anything down for that yet, but there is quite  a bit of into being displayed at any one time.

Thank you!

[Decroded]

I also feel like I should be scaling my assets up in-game... So even at slightly larger resolutions It will still look like decent Pixel Work.

Yeah there are plenty of gamers who like to see pixels so you can work at a lower res then just scale it up.

When you scale, please be sure to scale only by iterations of 100%, such as 200% or 300% (much higher can tend to get ugly).
Please do NOT scale anything at odd iterations and especially don't scale some things at different ratios to others.
For me there is nothing worse than mixed resolution junk trying to pass itself off as pixel art.
The exception to this is of course when making effects such as something being expanded or jumping out towards the camera.

Have you tried scaling the window in GM yet?
I now need to test in Studio but previous versions required a small work-around to scale without blurring so PM me if you wanna talk about that.