Squaretale's Pixel Game

[pistachio]

Let me just say, you will have a hell of a ride by making pixel art this f*ckin' detailed and huge! Of course this is not trying to stop you in any way, just telling you what to expect.

I'm thinking here an index painting or vector-like approach will help you. That is keep shapes simple, and render them out if they are close to the focal point where we're gonna see em. Also focusing on suggesting, instead of rendering, and flat areas saves you time. So that is what I tried to do in this edit.


fullres

Here's also a more complex lighting setup. Lots of light on dark, some godrays, etc. I don't know if the player can/does walk on the tree or ruins so the lighting there is mainly to look good, it's not functional. And due to the size it's quite rough but hopefully it demonstrates what you can do with the lighting/bg as well.

[Bacrylic]

I like what you did there. It looks good as a whole. However there is the fact that during gameplay the camera is gonna be pulled in much closer on the character. I would like to see a pan out shot to this extent though.

The mountains are a nice touch, but theres actually gonna be a lot more forest scenery with layers of background elements and canopy lighting. The open space feels nice, I'd like to keep sense of vastness while enclosing it in woods.

Thanks pistachio.

[eishiya]

You can still shade in this manner and have it look lovely zoomed in, especially if you use the shapes of the solid clusters to suggest more detail than is actually drawn. I think it's more pleasing and less flat than an overload of detail, and less distracting from gameplay.

Pistachio's response gave me a rather sad thought: I'm afraid you might end up in an Auro situation here, where viewers will think the art "looks pixelated" rather than like pixel art, because it's not taking advantage of its medium, but rather fighting against it. Your art looks like it's high-res art that's been pixelized; you're not doing anything with the art so far that wouldn't be better (and possibly faster) in HD or vector art. Your art is full of large shapes with angles that don't work great in pixel art, it has lots of noisy details that would be easier to make subtle and more natural without PA's limitations, it's full of slight variations of colours that look like they want to blend smoothly but aren't allowed to. Where you do have details that do look native to the medium, like the little 1px thick grass blades, it looks noisy and artificially straight, high-res art would give you more flexibility.

I'm not saying you shouldn't use pixel art for the game, but consider why you're using it, whether it's really helping the game look better, or holding you back.

If you're certain you want or need to make it pixel art, then consider its limitations and make use of them, play up to the medium's strengths by adjusting your visual style. Pixel art is great for:

• Horizontal, vertical, and 45-degree lines (1:2 lines can work well when there's no banding accompanying them, like there currently is in the spears).
• Creating ambiguity for viewers to fill in, take advantage of that by not trying to draw all the details, and by creating edges on your tiles that read like different things depending on which tile they're next to.
• Custom palette variants, which can be created quickly since there are relatively few colours, so take advantage of palette swapping instead of just using colour overlays for effects like weather and night, custom palettes can always be made to look better; palette swapping can be done in almost any engine via shaders.

There are probably other things I'm failing to think of, too.
Right now you're in a sort of uncanny valley of pixel art, but you have many options for remedying that.

[Bacrylic]

@Eishiya, you're right.

Games like Owlboy, performing high res pixel art, and pixel artists like Yur Gus are just terrible.
(Overloaded with sarcasm. To the point the lid fell off the pot)

[eishiya]

Snake and Fool both make better use of their medium than you do, that was the point of my post. Their art doesn't look like a translation of something else into pixel art, it looks like it was always meant to be pixel art. Perhaps instead of dismissing the criticism outright, you should examine their and other great artwork for how it transcends or makes use of the limitations of pixel art, and learn from that.

It sounds like you misconstrued my post as telling you to make low-res art somehow. I did not say that anywhere, and I took care to make my suggestions size-agnostic.

[Bacrylic]

noted

[Bacrylic]

 
So yeah............theres this.............its a wip, but there's some good shit here.

[eishiya]

Looking good! The increased contrast and foreground layers really help draw the eye to what's important.

Are the falling leaves important? If not, I think they might be a bit too detailed and contrast too much, as they draw a low of attention to themselves.

[Bacrylic]

@eishiya
Just possible adds to consider

[pistachio]

Just wanted to comment on this, the lighting/atmo's improved a lot in the latest shot, digging the dark FG especially. I dunno if I gave you any ideas up there Happy to help either way. Keep it up.

If/when it gets animated we wanna see that ANIM