Official Off-Topic Thread 2016

[EvilEye]

Love the crazy shield design and coloration.

Now that Fire Emblem text, though . . . it's so obviously made of cheap photoshop effects it really brings down the whole thing down.
Very much reminds me of what those new to graphic design might do.

Why not let the shield speak and just go with a classy, thin, sans-serif font all white; no bevel/gradient?
And dark background to make the shield pop, with perhaps a subtle radial gradient glow behind the shield.

Sorry for the long wait here. I haven't had much time to do side projects. I fixed the cheap photoshop effects and brought in some expensive ones or so I hope.

Also fixed the font, or so I hope:

[Alex Sinigaglia]

There's an entire page of bot topics in the Pixel Art section of the forum and also this one: http://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=21090.0

[Ai]

Just finished this, which is a set of 18 specimen sheets comparing pixel (ie. non-AAed) renderings of .. probably about 120 different fonts, both bitmap and not. With kerning individually tuned.

(your rendering depends a lot on the exact renderer you are using, sadly. A lot of fighting with the renderer was involved here; simply updating Freetype to the newest version could cause dramatic changes.)

EDIT: PPD pm'ed me 'no image?'. So to clarify:

a) this is a link to a gallery on postimage.org with all the sheets. [it would help a lot if links were more visually differentiated -- that change to blue text is pretty non-obvious]
b) Feel free to PM me with an email address if you would like a zipfile of them.
c) Here are 2 example sheets:



Sheets are intended to be viewed at either 2x or 3x zoom, and designed so you can tile two side by side on a typical-size monitor for comparison.

[NowvaB]

The past month or two I've been studying "Game feel" for a personal project.
(Below is a poorly segmented and unrevised rant about indie games, sorry :/)
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Today I thought I'd take a break from tweaking variables and mashing buttons to play some flash game oldies to see what I could learn from some of my favorite games.  As you could expect my younger self wasn't as good at perceiving the difference between a game that was "fun" from a game that was the "funnest thing posted today". I played though some truly clanky, buggy, jank looking games that I only managed to get through based on nostalgia alone. Obviously there were some gems (Heli-attack is still amazing) and games still preserved immensely by their pixel art's infinite resolution but overall you can really see where the indie games of that generation fall short from games of this generation.

Wait hold on! I get what your thinking. Those older games were under heavy limitations and in addition to slow computers actionScript# didn't help optimization much either. Well I argue that you don't need a fancy GPU and a programming language faster than assembly to make a game that's fun, a game that feels good, or game that has gameplay that holds up when you play it again in the future.

I've been talking smack about the older games but they definitely had their own strengths. Back then awesome developers would create a lot of their games as a hobby for their community and fans would be inspired and develop their own. Now the indie market has expanded and as we all know has become flooded with poor quality games people want to charge for. I'm not saying that these developers don't deserve money for their games I'm just asking where'd the love go? Back then I could see that the new developers would try to make their games better with each release so theirs could be like the developers that they were inspired by now a lot of developers want to just stuff so much content into the store you end up accidentally buying it during a sale.

Are indie games even indie? Most of them have publishers and a company name.

Even with the ever growing avalanche of crushed dreams, stolen money, and bad games the good games that stand out REALLY STAND OUT. Thanks to the markets expansion indie games have been better than ever. Even though there is an eternal increase in bad games the amount of good games coming out has had a large increase as well. The best games are no longer just Dōkutsu, Alien hominid, and idk hamster ball? I can just open my steam game library and any indie game in the list will be better than those (okay maybe not better than cave story).

Anyways I've lost track of what I was saying. It's 6am and I haven't slept yet...zzz
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(End of rant)

tl;dr
If you are a new game developer and you want me to not hate your game please either use non-pixel based coordinates for movement or multiply your movement speed for diagonal directions by sqrt(2). Here's a diagram.

Seriously guys. There is so many resources available online now. No excuses.

[Dex]

So are we still doing Secret Santa this year? usually the sign-ups are posted by now and I just wanted to check

[Atnas]

Yes's I apologize, I've had a killer time lately and I'll be posting signups in a few hours.

edit: it up http://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=21635.0

[Allstarjam]

Hello!

I'm doing a survey for a term paper in anthropology. This survey will help me learn more about the culture behind pixel art.

The survey for artists is here - https://goo.gl/forms/evRlRdTflHAEMpyA3

And for those who enjoy pixel art, here - https://goo.gl/forms/4FwlIshnjtLKgb1D3

I gave it to my friend and it took him about 5 minutes. Some are short answers, but they can be answered in a sentence or two.

Any help is really appreciated.

Thanks!

[surt]

Some non lazy person make the following:

• Pico-8-like virtual console, hybrid of NES and SMS specs
• Can fairly accurately simulate specs either NES or SMS or be an amalgam of the best bits of both (eg. both tile and sprite flipping)
• In-virtual-console editors plus on-desktop editors for less constrained editing
• No 128x128 resolution, NES and SMS resolutions as well as integer scaled or aspect corrected fullscreen (no black-bars) approximations (eg. 384x216, 480x270)