AuthorTopic: Remaking Flashback...  (Read 18350 times)

Offline Helm

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Re: Remaking Flashback...

Reply #10 on: November 19, 2008, 11:10:46 pm


Please take this into account

Offline Kazuya Mochu

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Re: Remaking Flashback...

Reply #11 on: November 20, 2008, 01:08:26 am
helm I think he's got his light on the top left, judging but the bottom right corner of the image.
Image size doesn't matter! It's what you do with your pixels that counts!

Offline Helm

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Re: Remaking Flashback...

Reply #12 on: November 20, 2008, 09:33:38 am
Best not to because that would hast shadows on the fore walls the player sees constantly, whereas if you put it at the top right the light is cast on walls that the player doesn't see because the foreground tiles obstruct the view.

Offline dkh

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Re: Remaking Flashback...

Reply #13 on: November 21, 2008, 01:03:25 am
Yep, Flashback is just a game with very good graphics for me (and very good animations and very unintuitive controls :P - at least when playing on an emulator). I don't think studying and recreating its style is more difficult than the other games that have been mentioned or Metal Slug for example or whatever. It's just hard because the originals were so damn good.

Anyways, have changed the shadow - I was kinda confused with the horizontal position of the light source, but Helm makes a very valid point and - last but not least - that's the way Flashback has its shadows too.

New version features nothing groundbreaking, I've just been pushing a few more pixels around:


Let me know what you think please.

Offline Helm

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Re: Remaking Flashback...

Reply #14 on: November 21, 2008, 10:09:36 am
It's looking more and more beautiful, it starts to bring tears to my eyes with its flashback-ness.

However I have bad news for you. Devastating, sad news. You will probably have to rework some surfaces.

This ties is with 'omg what's so difficult about Flashback art anyway?'. Well what's difficult about Flashback is that it's very deliberate. There is artistic direction and it is consistent. Delphine had thought things out very very much. Let's look at a flashback screenshot.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/jaguar/flashback-the-quest-for-identity/screenshots/gameShotId,27493/

This is from the jungle level. This whole level is lit in this way: the front surfaces of everything are lighter and then the 90 degree walls that Conrad looks at are darker. Not only the vines and shit, look at the door mechanism. Straight ahead, lighter, side, darker. This is how they wanted this level to look and they're consistent about it. Also my theory is this: this level was the first  they did early in their development process and besides being amazingly well-pixelled, it's also a little different from all other levels of the full game. Let's look at a screenshot from one of the levels that looks more like yours:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/snes/flashback-the-quest-for-identity/screenshots/gameShotId,117907/

and perhaps

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/flashback-the-quest-for-identity/screenshots/gameShotId,2986/ and

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/flashback-the-quest-for-identity/screenshots/gameShotId,322652/

Here we see the reverse. All front sides are pure black or very darker and the sides that Conrad sees directly are brighter. There are various practical advantages to this method, a big one is that the developers didn't have to make tiled 'brick' or similar walls to put in the black spots and there's also visibility concerns, generally it's a better idea than frontbright in my opinion.

Either way you go, you have to be consistent. Right now you have the black fronts on your platforms, but on your door mechanisms and the like the lights are reversed!. This breaks persepctive and makes the mechanisms look as if they're 'floating' in front of the game plane!

So my suggestion is to reverse the lights on the mechanisms. I know it's a lot of repixelling and I'm sorry I didn't spot it earlier  :-\ But trust me, once everything is rational-correct, your image will look much, much better.

Also here's a total color revamp to study.



also main character relaxation pose. Flashback has such a stick-up-ass main pose because of rotoscoping more than anything, they needed all the animations to revert to a standard idle frame that the actor could resume clearly every time. Since you're not rotoscoping... keep this in mind.

Offline TrevoriuS

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Re: Remaking Flashback...

Reply #15 on: November 21, 2008, 10:34:42 am
The colour changes seem to go alot more into the general 'feel' the entire flafshback game had. Very good edit. Are you actually gonna build this into a game by the way?

Offline dkh

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Re: Remaking Flashback...

Reply #16 on: November 21, 2008, 03:42:07 pm
Thanks for the continued feedback, I'm learning a lot from this!

New version is up: for now I didn't worry about the main character, just took your version (I actually drew my own one in a more relaxed pose but then overwrote it on accident). Also took your colors from your color-edit but tweaked some a little bit more (as I said, I'm especially lacking in the color picking/theory area - I think with my new version, the bright blue kinda sticks out, I tried to lessen that effect - not yet very successful though).

I have also taken your lighting advice to heart and reshaded all surfaces. You were absolutely right about your observations, makes much more sense now.


I might use these tiles for a game I have in mind, btw, but I'm not sure when I'll get to develop the code because I have lots of other programming jobs, some commercial that will probably keep me occupied till 2012 or something. ;) And I'd also make sure to change them around much more because it's still pretty similar to Helm's original piece.

Offline TrevoriuS

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Re: Remaking Flashback...

Reply #17 on: November 21, 2008, 06:42:28 pm
Well what you could do to avoid similarities with Helm's piece is: Add more of your own. The game needs more than one area, so what if one of them is partially designed by Helm? All the others are up for you right? :P Now just lower the saturation on that bright blue by a bit, and dturn it a bit more greenish and your problem is solved, but that may already be too much for some of the other detail it's used in. On the other hand, there's this screen hanging on the wall next to the text 'sector II', there's some colours in there that could apply to replace it, but I suspect that monitor is just still there, uneditted from the previous version?
« Last Edit: November 21, 2008, 06:47:00 pm by TrevoriuS »

Offline dkh

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Re: Remaking Flashback...

Reply #18 on: November 22, 2008, 03:05:41 pm
Trevorius: Well, for the moment this is just a study and I'm trying to improve my pixel art skills, if I ever get a chance (time-wise) to produce a game in the nearer future, then I'll worry about the rest, I guess.

Anyways...


Minor updates, fixed the monitor, changed the vertical lift bar colors, realized the bright specular highlights on the foreground monitors, boxes etc. were too contrasty and fixed that and tried to tweak the brightish blue color.

Going in the right direction, still?

EDIT: another minor update, some more pixels, mostly worked on the colors though:

« Last Edit: November 22, 2008, 05:01:44 pm by dkh »

Offline Crow

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Re: Remaking Flashback...

Reply #19 on: November 23, 2008, 09:09:08 pm
Made an edit to the radiator, I don't think it really worked with the rest.

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