my little world, monsters! ... [please C&C]

[PypeBros]

thanks. Said that way, my error are obvious, indeed 
I'll see if i can come with something better. My priority (gfx-speaking) is rather on treetops right now...

[Lackey]

Oops, sorry I didn't explain myself as well as I could have on the rock issue!   

At least for me, something that has helped my level art a LOT is to draw basically to-scale mockups in my little sketchbook, usually away from the computer entirely.  I'll go through and doodle sections of the level, and any part that I'm having trouble executing int he sketchbook i KNOW i will have a lot of trouble executing in pixel art.

I think this is good advice.  You can do it with the treetops, and it will be good practice. Those little lumps I doodled I do with my tablet, which makes it quite similar to sketching. I find that if you don't it ends up looking very much like space filling, when you start with the high intensity pixelling it's all finish and no base, heh.

The treetops will be tricky.  Usually when you're in a forest under the canopy you don't really see the bunches of leaves, just the branches, the chunks of foliage are only visible from outside the treeline.  You don't have this because in the platform game view it's a bit like you're in a field outside the forest looking in, if that makes sense.  This just means you will end up drawing trees, from the side.

Still use the chunky simplification on the foliage, no need to consult the Nieborg Codex on this one, but draw it like you would if you were seeing the forest AND the trees. Of course then you need to justify the hanging bits, hence my branches.  Anything can be broken up into tiles with some ingenuity and it's usually fun to try.

[PypeBros]

Hmm. I was investigating a very different way yo proceed, but i have to admit your "bunches of leaves" are terribly appealing. certainly complicated to pixelate in my 16x16 grids, but it would be worth giving them a try, definitely.

My main concern is that i don't see how i could possibly tile something like this, but maybe the double-layered map will bring the solution (e.g. have 64x48 bunches that overlap. Yeah, that sounds terribly challenging, maybe too much of a challenge for me, but the look it has definitely makes me want to try it, even if that means i need to introduce a new "sketching" mode in my sprite editor 

[PypeBros]

still wip, but i think it could be not as hard as i first thought. That would make ~24 tiles for branches leaves and treetops plus some 8 tiles per branch type (horizontal/sloped left/right). I think i can afford it.

edit: i still lack a proper exporter tool to get that tree out of the DS, but if you're looking forward for what those leaves will look like, you can have a sneak peek on this level editor screenshot on flickr.

[PypeBros]

okay, finally i could get my branches out of the console ^_^
i haven't worked much on the branches, but i'd be tempted to consider leaves as "a good first round", though the resulting tree seems to lack a bit something... it has a kind of "8-bit" look to me, but i can't really tell whether that's good. what this probably mean is that i lack some "joining" tiles.

Original pixels for the leaves are found apart under the tree (should i have been using more dark shades ?) and the tree is completely built on only two layers using some 8x8 tiles straight for the leaves, so yes, the whole treetop is done with 48 tiles.

any suggestions to improve this ? (except the roots, i know i still have to break the square-ness of those roots)

[victorX]

Yeah, you should use some darker colors for the leaves. IMO, it seems to saturated. The tree does seem out of place compared to the other sprites. Here's a quick edit:


-Used darker colors on the leaves
-Reduced amount of colors used on the wood from 13? to 5

Fun practice.

[PypeBros]

-->

-Used darker colors on the leaves
-Reduced amount of colors used on the wood from 13? to 5

those darker colours made we want to try a third layer behind the rest, but it doesn't really came out nicely. It somehow looks ... flat :/ i also fixed some odd effects of the initial "construction", but there are few things i want to fix in the lightest "bush" anyway ... i'm using too dark colours near the bottom right (but not quite at the bottom).

As for your edit on the wood ... i don't know ... i'm a bit uncomfortable with how "cracky" it seems ... I have 256 colours for my forest and working on wood with the current raster just came out "fluently", so i think i can afford a sufficiently large raster for them. maybe i'll cut down the lightest shade or so to have 3 tints free (alpha excepted) for drawing grass near the roots if i really need to switch to n*16 colours tiles instead of 256 colours.

[pixelaro]

grass hurt my eyes. didnt pay attention so i edited an edit instead of original. just changed colors and tried to add some depth. sry for bump i always forget to upload when i edit something.

[PypeBros]

hmm, but then, you're re-introducing the problem that grass and front-layer of leaves are darker than the background of the scene :=P. I'm not really convinced by the new colours you introduced in the trunks, but shifting towards green in between the rocks might be worth more investigation
(sorry for the damn' late reaction : i was on offline holydays )

[TrevoriuS]

Nearby = high contrast
Far away = no contrast

Nearby = high saturation
Far away = grey (well blue on this planet because of particles & photons)

So front should be both, darker AND lighter than background. The further away, the more vague it gets.
As for that matter, as well as readability of separate elements, pixelaro's modifcation is much better than the original.