Forest Strike

[LukasIrzl]

Hi there,
I want to quickly introduce you to a game I am working on.


Forest strike is a 2D round-based strategy game in pixel-art style featuring animals as characters.
On gamedev.net, I write weekly Dev Blog entries, if you prefer to be up to date: https://www.gamedev.net/blogs/blog/2690-forest-strike-dev-blog/

Actually, I have a few questions regarding the design...

1. What do you think about the graphics? Here are a few examples:








2. This week I was changing the explosion "animation" quite a bit:
Old version:


New version:


Which one do you prefer?

Thank you for reading and please provide feedback.
BR Lukas

PS: I hope this is the right forum.

[yrizoud]

I find it very refreshing, visually. I don't have any strong opinion about the explosions, both work.
You may want to put a shadow under the characters and bombs (even just a solid ellipse), and also the scenery would probably benefit from having these walls cast a shadow on one side to give some depth.
There seems to be a strange scaling issue, for example on the first screenshot with a "hand" cursor it's evident that not all black pixels have the same size, even when the cursor moves. Similarly, the pixels at the tip of the foxes' ears change size during animation. You should really try to have all graphics at a resolution where you can scale them by an integer factor, (x2, x3 etc, not x2.5) otherwise it looks a bit weird.

[LukasIrzl]

Hi, thank you for your feedback.
I am going to do the shadow stuff this week (hopefully). It is bothering me for quite a while, that there is no shadow. Actually, I was not sure how I am going to implement it. (either by drawing the shadow for each sprite or by using a shader)
You're right, there are scaling issues. I somehow got accustomed to it, but it definitely should be fixed any time soon.
The only thing I don't see (yet), is the issue with the black pixels. For me it looks like they have the same size. You mean the pixels on the hand cursor, right? 

[yrizoud]

Honestly, a dark green ellipse is very likely to be the best shadow.
Yes I meand the hand cursor. Another example is in the title screen, it's quickly visible that the hearts of blue flower is taller than the bottom petal, while you drew them both "1 pixel high".

From my inaccurate calculation, you're drawing 24x24 tiles, but you display them at 107x80. This causes the visually unpretty sight of uneven pixels. You could try displaying tiles at 96x72 instead, it is the closest integer factor (400% horizontally, 300% vertically)

[LukasIrzl]

I'll try out a few different types of shadows.

Regarding the scaling issue, the "title screen" and the game have different resolutions.
The title screen, actually it was just a image drawn for social media aspects, was drawn on a 210x120 canvas (I guess) and scaled it to a width of 1024 with keeping the aspect ratio. I thought with scaling to this resolution, I won't end up with scaling issues (at least not visible). Now that I took another look, I saw a few issues. So, thank you

The game has a resolution of 288x288, which is exactly 24 (tile size) x 12 (amount of tiles in both ways). When recording, I was cropping the whole game to the relevant things, so the images do not have the same amount of pixels as the game itself. The game window, on the other side, has a resolution of 1024 x 1024.

Currently, I was not thinking about the resolution aspect that much, but I guess, I should change it a bit. Eventually, changing the game resolution (288x288) might be necessary as well, depending on the size of the window. Am I right with the last thought?

[yrizoud]

You should really set your mind on a specific in-game resolution as soon as possible, because you don't want to have to redraw all your graphics at a different size.
Be extra careful of things like fonts, because at low resolutions you don't have much choices. 6 pixels wide per character (including spacing) is very readable, but under that, the text gets very messy.

Consider how much screen space the elements take (are they small enough that the player can see many of them ? Large enough that the player differenciate and manipulate them easily?)
The game seems to scroll, so at least you don't HAVE to have the game window show complete tiles.
At the moment you are zooming the pixels 355.55%, in order to display exactly 12 tiles horizontally.
If you zoom 400% instead, player will see 10.6 tiles horizontally.
If you zoom 300% instead, player will see 14.2 tiles horizontally

[LukasIrzl]

Yesterday I fixed the scaling problem of the game. Now, it definitely looks better, although I was accustomed to the "wrong" scaling.
@yrizoud: Your hint with showing 400% helped me fixing it.

Now I have to think about moving the camera, since not all tiles are visible. I think, I am going to implement a drag&drop functionality to move it.

[LukasIrzl]

Hi there,
I wrote another weekly Dev Blog. Be sure to check it out: https://www.gamedev.net/blogs/entry/2264339-forest-strike-dev-blog-4/
Here are a few images from the entry.



Please tell me what you think.

[LukasIrzl]

Here are two screenshots showing the shadow progress:

[LukasIrzl]

Here is a new GIF of the shadow process.

What do you think?