Resonance

[Overkill]

It's been a while since I posted art for my sidescrolling game, Resonance: http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/index.php?topic=4523.0

The story for Resonance starts when a deadly electrical explosion occurs, from a big communications tower in the center. This explosion sweeps the entire village to shreds and keeps expanding. The player gets caught in this explosion and torn to shreds.

However, he is given a second chance, revived as a magical, resonant being. He doesn't know what the explosion was about, nor does he know if there are any other survivors. He suddenly realizes that he can have special powers bound to him by electrical communications beacons and starts to use this for his own survival.

But there are other survivors, resonant Electrofiends, brainwashed into thinking they're the next phase in evolution on the human race, and they're bent on destroying normal humans and all other living things who don't cooperate (including you!).

Then the player is constantly exploring and trying to survive assaults from the both the human front (who employ jammers and other tech) and Electrofiend front (who have their own beacon types that only they can access (until later) which give them boosts similar to you).

I've barely done anything in a year, artwise. I was sort of hoping on finding a pixel artist at some point, so I could spend more time on my game. But since that doesn't seem to be happening, I'll stop letting these pieces rot on my drive, and ask for some critique!

Anyway, I suck at drawing art quickly, so right now, I only have a few pieces!


My grass tiles, should look slightly similar to that thread from a year ago, except I think that they're slightly better done now.

The hero, oldest to newest. (Last updated on May 21, 2009):


WALK (latest  May 26, 2009):



a beacon. I need to make several variations on this later so the game doesn't look so bland.

And here are some screenshots from the current engine build (there are tile errors, yeah):




Your comments, critique and edits, please!

[EvilEye]

Not too bad. It has some issues though.

On the first screen you can clearly see the tiling in the grass on the bottom. You need to keep the part that touches the other tiles the same color.

The water(?) on the first screen looks more like snow.

The beacon is at the wrong angle for a sidescroller. It looks like you're seeing it from a top-down angle.

[crab2selout.png]

I really like how thick and full the grass looks. You nailed the texture. Your colours are pleasing. It's even got a good range of values to separate it from the background. When you said you sucked at drawing, I was expecting programmer's art, but this is clearly above that.

There were a couple thing I felt detracted from your tile set. Aside from the boxes mentioned by evil eye, you've got a couple places where you can see where one tile ends and another starts. I quickly marked some of them below. What's causing it in teh spots I noted is that you have those light green spots which all end at the same y position. Move a couple of them up and down and you won't have that problem.

One of my biggest complaints is that you just flipped your ground tile to make the ceiling and sides. I understand it as a time saving measure, but you should still edit them after flipping, to ensure they tile well and remove any obvious edges showing(and there will be edges).

This is some promising stuff you've shown here. And in case you weren't aware, there is a section of this forum for advertising projects, either paid or unpaid.

[Overkill]

Some of the REALLY bad transitions that evileye pointed out are just me being lazy plotting the tiles in the map editor. There are some transitions between tiles that don't exist, so I had to fudge them with cheap tile arrangements, and there's the odd spot I just got lazy and copy pasted tile regions on the map without fixing up awkward corners.

But the comments about the water and some of those ugly, squarish tile transitions are useful.

And I totally agree, the flipping of the grass was pretty cheap. It's a lower priority to fix that, but I'd totally love to have the sides and bottom be unique arrangements that kind of look more believable and less copy-pasted.

Oh, and something super cool I want to do but probably won't because of the crapload of work to draw extra frames: make the grass bend around and flatten when the player walks on it.

Thanks, EvilEye and Crab. I'll try to fix things when my math exam isn't staring me in the face, ready to kill me.



Oh yeah, and since you mentioned it, Crab, I actually do have a thread looking for an artist if anyone wants to help: http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/index.php?topic=5741.0

Anyone who wants to help me out can drop me a PM or IM me or something still! I'm quite open to improving my own art style now, but prefer collaborating with a few other people to speed up the production.

[Helm]

Hello Overkill. Here's an edit for your main character.



First the good: Your color selection is wonderful. It's not often I do an edit without feeling the compulsion to mess with the palette, and here I really didn't think I could help it any. I like the color selection, I like the ambiance, good going.

The bad: Posture. Dude's going to roam the land, give him some sort of dynamic pose. Don't forget, the player sees this pose second to running the most, and think of the psychology of the player. When they stop pressing buttons and are thinking on where they want to go and they see a sorta constipated looking (no offense meant, first impressions here are important!) main character, they will not get that subconscious boost they would if they saw a posture that suggested power and determination.

A lot of what I did was adding stronger, more stylized legs to him, bending the arm as if to say "I can throw a punch at any time" and a rather arbitrate alteration to the head. About the scarf: I strongly suggest you pixel it as a separate sprite and have it hold wind according to the direction the character is going at, perhaps animate a small ripple for it, it's really not much of an extra workload for a very very pretty effect if you get it right.

I used the clothes highlight to bring out the hair a bit. This is extravagant and pretty anime-ish so I could understand why you wouldn't need that but I tried it for kicks anyway.

You will notice I made the far part of his body considerably darker: this has the effect of making the character not appear flat. Yet you still retain the partly turned for more character posture, it's a good - and very time honoured - point of compromise.

Hope I helped.

[Overkill]

I took a study break for a bit, and decided to work on the hero sprite! (matrix algebra final tomorrow worth 64% of my grade, and the prof didn't even tell us what's on it, just "like the assignments but harder")

Thanks for the edit, Helm, that was very helpful. My pose is slightly inspired off that (too much?), hopefully the player has more volume and looks less dull:


<-  Mine     Old     Helm's  ->

And I had actually planned on making the scarf a separate, longer sprite at some point, but for now, I don't want to worry about paperdolling it on there, at least until I have a general idea of where to place it under the hero's frames.

[Helm]

I think I like yours better than mine (and good call on not using the hair shine) but there is still some issue between the length of the torso and the length of the legs. There's many ways you could resolve this... I'm happy to see followups. But algebra must come first now. Good luck with your exam.

[LordFred]

... I like the first and third... but in the first one you could put some reflect in the hair... like third... i like helm's hair... maybe a blend between the two...

[ptoing]

Quite a nice development. Look at how Helm's has some more back at where the shoulders are. Your's needs that, I think, his torso looks a bit tube-ish.

[Overkill]

I wasn't sure about the hair highlights yet, LordFred, since I'm trying to avoid a super-anime style for my characters. So for now at least, that's stayed the same. I'm probably gonna add some highlighting, but not quite as shiny as Helm's.

Also, good eye ptoing, I didn't notice the back just sort of ended like that, at 2 am last night. Hopefully this addresses that. I also corrected the coat edges on our right side, since they were just a vertical line before, and and also didn't give a good indication of where the arm actually was.

I'm not sure if I corrected the proportion problem between the torso and legs yet, but I did adjust the coat a bit to try and make it end more around his waist?



Thanks everyone! I'm almost thinking this guy's ready to animate. But before I do that, I'll address any major problems left, and I probably will get around to fixing some of my tile artwork there.