First platformer pixel attempt

[astrofra]

Hi there.

As I was lurking in this forum since a few monthes, and watching Ptoing's artwork with jealousy, I finally managed to start something in pixelart.
Prolly the conjunction of AdamAtomic's Flixel engine, and the fact that I was in vacation in Berlin without a network connection, anyway, I started to draw some pixel stuff on my old G4 Macintosh Laptop.

The fact is, there is NO pixelart software for PPC Macs, so I ended up drawing my stuff with the old MS DOS DeluxePaint, within DosBOX emulator. And I have to admit, it just ROCKS. The software is really smooth and behaves like my good old amiga's DPaint. (of course, Mactel owners doesn't have to mess with dosbox, as ProMotion just works like a charms under Parallax or VMWare).

Here's a screenshot, for the more techminded of yours :
http://astrofra.com/posts/stalker2D/dpaint-dosbox.jpg

Anyway, here's my first attempt in itself :



I started with a borrowed 32 colors version of the palette of AdamAtomic's Fathom, made a few ground tiles, then some props, then the main character.

I'm not quite happy with the style of the character itself, where I tried to mimic the style of Cave Story, but eventually achieved something quite odd, not really realistic, and not really cute.

At this point, I haven't any idea of what kind of game it could be. I'm thinking about something that could be inspired by "Stalker", the Tarkovski's film (and not that shitty 3D FPS). That would imply 3 characters, and a Lemming's like gameplay (anyone would saw the film will understand).

I have great expectations regarding your critics and comments, guys, for I know you are booth experienced gamers and pixelaters
The tilesheet is quite messy atm, I quickly started to test it in Flixel, it kinda works, but I need to figure out how to deal with the tiles, wether the level will be manually edited or procedural.

Let me know your opinion, guys 

PS. Sorry for the truncated post, i'm uploading from a bar in berlin :')

[Atnas]

Hey! What you have here is really solid, I love it. You know, you might not have emulated cave story but that's a good thing - the sprites toward the bottom right with the large heads look rather silly. I haven't looked at your animations in motion but they look as solid as the tiles.

[astrofra]

Hey! Thanks ! Hehe, I have to agree, the fat head character looks really shitty. The look i settled on is close to that old amiga game "marvin marvellous adventure". Not sure it's a good thing.
I should probably start a full Level mockup at this point... Figure out the style of the background, fog, lighting scheme...

[Seele07]

Hey, your stuff really looks good - better then my stuff  . No (new) critique at this point.

What i want to mention is, that, before the "new" GrafX2 was startet to ressurect and developed again, i had to try GrafX2 for DOS with DOSbox on my Linux PC too. (Never owned DPaint, too bad) .

So, if you need a nice PixelArt Program even for your PPC-Mac, you really should try the "new" GrafX2, which can be found at:

http://code.google.com/p/grafx2/

Supported platforms

Grafx2 is working on the following machines :

    * Amiga OS 3.x 68k (.lha)
    * Amiga OS 4 PowerPC (.lha)
    * AROS (.zip)
    * BeOS (.zip)
    * DOS (Windows version, with the HX Extender)
    * FreeBSD (.tgz)
    * Haiku (.zip)
    * Linux (.tgz)
    * Mac OS X (both ppc and x86) (.zip)
    * MorphOS (.zip)
    * Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT, XP (.zip) (.exe)

Heheh, well okay, i hope you like the program - if not, i can totally understand, why you use DOSbox and your fav. PixelArt Program (DPaint) .

EDIT: Well, seems that DPaint is now free for download - i tried it and it's fun -> http://www.seele07.de/bilder/sonstige/dpaint_screenshot00.png

.Ingo.

PS: sorry if my sentences sound strange in some way, - english is my second language  .