[WIP][C&C] General pixel-art

[Flappy]

Some thoughts on your little guys, just to give you some ideas. Yours are below, mine are above.

Terrified first time critique-r here so I’m not sure what I should talk about exactly, so if you’ve got any questions on what I did or why feel free to ask. Let me just say: I really like your little men. They’re bright and colourful and strangely adorable. Onto the critique though.

Palette wise:

- White ramp could do with more contrast. I bumped it up a bit in my edits but it could probably be taken further.

- Yellow on white/yellow next to white is a hard combo to discern at times. For example, I didn’t notice it on the old purple wizard guy until I zoomed in. Not sure how to fix exactly.

Design wise:

- Blue faction, I would personally exorcise that orange. The orange faction are orange, so it’s muddying up the distinction between factions.

- Leg area, those thin strips of skin showing beneath pants/skirts that are only one or two pixels tall. These create a strip of high contrast that distracts the eye and helps to create noise. High contrast should really be focused where you want the viewer to look, torso (your largest blob of colour, best for creating a quick ‘read’), and weapon (because that’s also important information).

- You can get a stronger design wise by stronger clothing division. Right now they’re suffering from what I’ll dub mix-and-match syndrome (honestly not a real term, don’t bother trying to look it up). Basically across all your factions you have similar elements, such as pleated skirts/dresses, the same shoes, etc. Splitting features across factions, like pleated skirts being only for blue and horned helmets only for green helps to separate factions.

That’s the main points I think. My edits aren’t necessarily the best, but like I said they’re just to give you some ideas. Alternative views and everything you know.

[AshCrimson]

Thanks so much for the edit and critique Flappy, I really appreciate it and your edit gives me some new ideas that im going to try. I just want to say that im trying to keep the size under or about 32x32.

Palette:

Perfectly reasonable; will try to bump up the gray/white's contrast. Im just worried about making them too dark as im still inexperienced with palettes. Will also remove yellow on white, thanks for the input!

Design:

Regarding blue's orange armour; my intent was that it was supposed to be bronze, mimicking ancient greek armour but i understand that it could lead to misreading and confusion. I'll try to find an alternative to this.

Regarding the leg skin; this is really valuable input; i wasn't aware it created noise so i will take steps to remedying that, thanks!

Regarding your last comment; thanks for pointing this out, will work to ensure certain design choices are unique to each colour/faction.

Your comments have been really helpful and they've given me a lot to think about; thanks so much! Hopefully i can repay you one day for your advice. I've found when you're making something (regardless of the medium) you can get bogged down with what you're doing and you become unable to view your work with an independent, unbiased eye, so differing views are always welcome.

r1k: Thanks for the comment; will edit it and generally play around with it and see what it looks like if i make them less bent/sticking out less.


So i've been spending the last few days re-doing some of the classes/characters. Haven't gotten onto the medieval (purple) ones yet and i still haven't finished any of the other ones but here's what i've got:



For comparison's sake old version is on left, new on right, although not all have previous versions.


I was disappointed with most of them last time, but im hoping they look less stock and have character/flavour to them, rather than just looking like generic military units.

Got to say again i really appreciated your input flappy; i incorporated most of your edit's details in my new attempts. Tried adding a roman-flavour to one of the blue units, added some celtic (mainly scottish) elements to the green as well.

Sorry for the double post; i just want to know whether this is a step in the right direction in regards to making them look better and "different".

Further update (Some more done):

[AshCrimson]

Update:

Here's some casting animations for the factions priests (unsure if i'll make unique one's for mages though)

[AshCrimson]

Here's some updated attack animations:





Sorry for the slow and small updates, been juggling work and pixel-art for the last few weeks.

I know the waist is quite stiff but i am unsure of how to show the rotation of the waist without making it too exaggerated.

I've also been working on tiles:



Also some updates on units:



Edit:

Added Anti-aliasing to Outside outlines for Roads, Mountains, Rivers, Marshes/Swamps, Lakes/Ponds and Towers.

Changed Towers, made them slightly thinner in the middle.

Changed Castles appearance, tried to make the bricks in the wall visible.

Changed Marshes/Swamps; hopefully they look more like either of them, i also changed their colours as well to green, still unsure if they read well though.

Changed Mountains: Made they more rounded, unsure if they look better compared to previous version. Tried to split them up with a black outline in the inside.

Roads/Paths: Removed banding from inside and replaced with Anti-aliasing. Hopefully it looks cleaner now.

Forests: added dirt beneath the trees (inspired by an edit made on another forum)

[AshCrimson]

Sorry for the lack of updates, been busy with my new job, still pixeling but at a slower rate.

Played around with trying to twist the torso during a sword swing, hopefully it looks more active and less awkward:



Updated idle animations, with two versions; one for battle and one for the map.

Map/Non-Combat idle animation (Tried to keep it from looking too much like the combat idle animation, but it ended up looking stilted, so i added a bend):



Combat (Not a lot of difference, but they have an initially wider stance):

[Seiseki]

The tiles look very strange when you outline absolutely everywhere.
It's like everything is floating above the ground.

A good rule for outlines is, don't outline where stuff connects into the ground.
You want the trees, mountains, rivers and roads to blend into the ground.