Some ongoing DS stuff (lots of pics)

[Turbo]

Lowpoly is fun * The models and textures are nice and interesting. May I suggest that you really push contrast hard, to see if pixel art techniques on small 2d pieces translate to 3d. Every texture you have could have this applied, from highlights on the characters to the brick and grass textures. By refering to contrast, i'd like to underline hue shift use (not ignoring the other constrast enhancing techniques).

Good luck with the game


* the pixel art of 3d modelling.

[poingo]

I realise that the textures are pixeled, but I meant that the 3D models aren't of course. Besides, whenever somebody else posts something that is 3D, it seems like he/her gets flamed for it, and everyone says that it isn't "real" pixel art.  I followed suit, and I was wrong, so forgive me. 
When I said they look like runescape, I was not implying that you ripped graphics, I was implying that they looked similar.  As in, they both have low poly-counts, whatever that means.  I really have no idea about anything 3D, so forgive my stupid comments.  The reason the grass hurt my eyes was the brightness.  So, before you judge me, just read my sig, because it really is true. 

[.TakaM]

you mentioned earlier the player would only be able to rotate the camera a bit, I think you might want to take advantage of this and make your trees look a lot cooler, I know they're currently not finished, so hopefully changing them won't be too much of a hassle

for the lack of a better term, it's a technique I like to call "paper-stacking", similar to paper-dolling in some ways, but it can work in 2d and 3d.
best explained by just looking at a tree from heroes of mana:

they look really cool, especially when you rotate the camera

[LoTekK]

Turbo - it certainly is; I love working around the ridiculous restrictions inherent to the work. So far I've had mixed success with pushing the contrast, as the textures tend to get a bit harsh on the eyes. Still playing around to find a good balance, though. So far just about all the textures so far have incorporated hue shifting to varying degrees, but for the most part I've had to reduce the saturation on the finals in order for the vertex lighting to have any discernable effect on the color (eg, the blue shadows and warm sunlit areas).

Stealth - no worries. To be honest I was initially a bit unsure of whether to post this here, so I ended up clearing it with ptoing first, though I was warned that it may not receive a very warm welcome.

TakaM - thanks a million for that screenshot. The trees in the previous shots were built with my mindset still in the "workable silhouette from all angles" mode, and your post has kicked me in the face and woken me up. I've played a bit with stacking and staggering a few non-planar quads on the same tree trunk, and the results have been very promising. The following shot is with a placeholder foliage texture (I just wanted to play with the alpha to see how everything would look, so it's rather indistinct right now). I'll play with the foliage and see what I can come up with.



Here's a shot of the trees with circles for foliage to show the structure (varying colors are being handled by vertex lighting):
circle trees!