The VG Resource

if you've been lurking in the game dev forum at all you may have noticed my thread P2PG Arcade getting a bit heavy on a game thats not the P2PG Arcade, a game I'm calling Brain Scratch adventure,

Basicly I wanted to make some people on youtube some sprites as fanart and I got a little carried away and decided to see how they looked in a game environment,

I kept working on the game so much so I actually fixed a tone of bugs that were present in my engine and now the engine runs faster and cleaner than ever thanks to it.

Anyway onto why I'm making this thread, the sprites I've made have a particular style I'd like to expand upon with several characters based on other games (to use with the secret NPC gimmick the game contains) I'd also like to get to work on backgrounds and improve and expand the tileset I have. Other little bits and bobs here and there too, just making sure theres nothing looking out of place or cruddy.

So here are the sprites
Here is a link to the people the character sprites are based off, if you can see who their meant to be then I've done a good job, if not and you know why let me know so I can improve them!



Here is a link to the thread in the Game Dev forum, in case you want to view the sprites in action!
as you can see they all have a fair amount of space to fill up, I still have a few things to add to the object sheet which I have already planned, but its not loads. Naturally I'd not like that space to go to waste so if you have a suggestion feel free to throw it out there.

Any and all comments and crits are greatly appreciated,
Thanks for reading,
Bombshell

upped the contrast and moved the weapon(s) onto the character sheet, also added sonic and knuckles and modified clement

blocked out unused areas to be sure I dont forget about them and fill them up efficiently, also added a new check point + animation, also added switch puzzle pieces.

The face on Sonic and Knuckles are unreadable and look weird. Also their heads/hair needs to be fixed fast!

The ground needs more contrast and the colors don't blend very well together.

The ground just looks weird. Not pillow shaded, but still emulates pillow shading. Understand?

I've not been a fan of the tiles and very much intending to redo them entirely (as you can see I went for a simple pattern in the mean time so I could get all the necessary tiles mapped out for use in the level editor (and yes it does actually pillow shade, I shuddered but it was because of poor colour choice),
as for the characters their not that important right now so I didnt spend much time on them I completely agree that they need to be redone, atm I've set myself a deadline for a few features by monday so I'll temporarily be concentrating on that, though all that requires is I make 2 enemies (everything else necessary has been sprited as a place holder at least.
So I present the wheel form of the wheelie worm!
a shoot at only enemy it will be slow until you approach it where it will flip into this and race back and forth until you destroy it.

Pretty good sprite!

okay so I couldn't live with the game looking so empty and the tiles looking so boring so I've been playing with its colours and style and I'm starting to get somewhere I like (I'm not quite there yet but the change in style has definitely made the environment pop a lot more than it did.)
Sonic being an obvious inspiration for some of the visual puns of this game and the main reason I've made the player run fast, I looked into some sonic tilesheets to see what I could do in terms of a grass tileset, the main inspiration for the current tiles was sonic advance 3's sunset hill tiles, you may be able to make the connection but I've tried to not make it immediately obvious.
tiles in use:
EDIT: updated top pic, removed grass lower tiles, its now just an alt topping for the rock tiles.

tiles themselves:

I may drop the bottom portion of the grass tile, its not really useful in any specific circumstance and it'd probably look better to have its bottom transition into patterned rock tile anyway. (not to mention it'd leave so much more space for expansions on this and other tilesets.)

I'm stuck on the background making and I don't want this to stop me for too long (but I still want a really nice looking background for the first stage)
so the screen size is 640 x 480 so I want 3 backgrounds,
640 x 480 background (horizon), it scrolls horizontally but not vertically,
640 x 120 cloud layer, scrolls faster horizontally but not vertically,
640 x 840 background, scrolls horizontally and vertically, covers upper layers and much lower layers of levels.

I'm unsure what my colour selection should be,
my horizon will likely be grassy hills,
cloud layer I have no clue what kind of cloud to go for,
the larger background I also have no idea.
I hate backgrounds but thats only because I completely suck at them!

Any advice, references, anything at all would greatly help.

I've been trying to get the background going but I'm still stuck, I think the main problem at the moment is colour selection and style,
EDIT: this background I've been trying to get as the furthest background, which will scroll horizontal, the sun will be removed, I derped when I thought to put that in.

I just can't seem to get it to work with the tiles above.

I don't understand what you're trying to do with the background. It looks like it's going to come out looking nice.

I dont understand either, thats my problem, I just want a horizontal scrolling background to fit in with the tileset but I can't seem to get it working. (the scrolling doesn't matter at the moment, at the moment the problem is the background in general)
it just doesn't look good with the sprites I have and its starting to get on my nerves.

Your tiles have lots of sharp angles, the background is more rounded. Maybe some more straight lines and jags would help.

well its a definite step up from before, I think I need to alter the background pallete so its not the same as the foreground, I may also need to flesh it out a little bit, have some of the rock colours in there so it doesn't just look like a pile of green legos

The background is a bit too edgey.
You went from one extreme to the other. What I expected to see were mountains made like the ones from Final Fantasy 6 for example.
I suggest you to round them up.