General Sprite Experimentation (previously colour experimentation)

[Previous]

modern like the SNES

Modern like a video game console what is over 20 years old? ;-)


Those goblin's bodies appear quite pillow-shaded. I think you could get away with less shading on them in general, the ears look weird too (I'd remove the shading on their top and bottom, but shade the "inside" instead).

[Bombshell93]

okay I'm going for it,

in a nutshell the goal is simple, striking and crisp.

[Previous]

The chest is quite blurry and pillowy. For smaller parts like the hands and knee/leg parts, the darker grey shade could be used instead of the mid-tone to make the shading more visible. The back of the head looks quite bare, maybe a bright or dark line down the edge would help, or making the bottom at the neck less flat.

[Virtuaboy123]

The small pixels jutting out from the bottom sides of the helmet aren't really needed. They could easily be brought in.
As with what Previous said about the back of the helmet maybe have an opening at the bottom and show a neck going into the helmet.
Or because its a box shape the bottom could have a pointed edge. (hopefully you can picture what i said, i'm bad at explaining)

[Bombshell93]

I tried fixing the issues you brought up and tried starting the horizontals but turns out horizontals are a pain in the buttock to keep the perspective! XD

EDIT:

I'm unsure about the side view but its the best I could do, quite frankly my eyes are forcing themselves shut, I may have started this with awkward timing, I'll continue tomorrow hopefully getting something playable by night.

[Bombshell93]

so how does this hold up? before cleaning it up (like fixing the horizontals which I'm a bit iffy on) I'm going to get a tile and an enemy, and some UI props (hearts, sword, shield, magic, menu buttons, etc.) and get something active so you can at least run around,
to avoid having to flesh out a level editor specifically for this I'll be trying to make this randomly generated (of which I've never tried before) so I'll be pushing myself a bit.

[Chris2Balls [:B]]

The side sprites look flat, which is disappointing considering what's going on in the other ones.

[Bombshell93]

tried making it look less flat, also hearts and a placeholder background and I've added shadows under the feet.

[Previous]

Maybe making the arms not perfectly straight down on the side view would help. Pull the elbows a tad back and have the hands point slightly forward.

[Bombshell93]

I've started to shift around the engine and stick in bits and bobs to accommodate the change of pace.
I'll have the tile manage and player object semi-functional soon, then I'll start adding GUI bits and start taking a look into randomly generated worlds, see what I can do with this (I'm going to be making some castle-y tiles so I'd like to be able to randomly generate fortresses to explore, and likewise dungeons)

EDIT: some terrain generation is done, but I'm going to expand it to be better expanded, have volcanic terrain, swampy terrain, etc. etc. it'd be a simple but nice mechanic to encourage the player to explore.
Also until a better name is thought up, while being developed its codenamed "Mid Knight" because obvious pun is obvious.

[Bombshell93]

perlin-noise implemented, as well as some place holder tiles and some cleaning up (most lone tiles will be replaced with what surrounds them)
This is only moisture, but I want to have other factors contribute to the terrain, I just don't have a good reference for it to get started.
once I have this terrain generation working nicely I'll add in the border tiles (placeholders at least) get them sorted out and then get to work on the players interaction with the world, slowing down in swamp, not being able to enter water, etc.

[StarSock64]

The way the grass tufts look like objects makes the terrain too busy. I imagine it becoming an eyesore once scrolling movement was implemented. I'd either disperse them far apart or change it altogether.

[Bombshell93]

the tiles are very much placeholders, scrolling movement was the first thing implemented, and I'll fix it up when I'm done trying to fix up random world generation, low and behold the best the internet had to offer was perlin noise, which wonderfully ceases to work (well it works, its just delivering more violent noise than was intended, perlin noise existing purely for a softer effect of noise)
I've tried googling how other games approach the problem always pointing to perlin noise! I've implemented 4 versions from online and 2 of my own design and they all look like piles of crap!
so much for rapid prototyping, day 2 and all I have is a tile drawer and a player who moves like hes ice skating *facepalm maximum*

EDIT:

BAM! got it working nicely! (that is a zoomed out shot, I added zoom as a debug feature it wont be used in-game)

EDIT EDIT:
Okay I now have Biomes set up using this chart as reference


I'm going to do some fiddling with it so in each biome there will be a specific thresh-hold for water.
then I'll get the collisions working (it should be as simple as generating world colliders, which I can revamp my older model on P2PG Arcade to do.)
in terms of tile style I'm unsure on how I will approach, I'd like transitional sprites between each biome or at least biomes that are not direct neighbors (neighboring biomes could probably get away with a single transition tile)
my tilesheet is currently 1024 x 1024, this allows me 32 x 32 tiles (1024 tiles) of 32 x 32 resolution.
with 10 biomes to cover + water I THINK though I'm not certain, I may be able to fit it into the sheet.
its a hell of a lot of work so I doubt it'll be done within the prototyping period.

EDITEDITEDIT:
so you think I should make this a project in the game dev forum? the problem is I aim for this to be a paid game (a penies game but none the less) I was wondering if such threads are allowed in the game dev forum, to have info and footage of the game, but not a DL link (until its ready and a up for sale)
I've been pressured into doing a paid project, I've no source of income and about the only thing I can do is game development, naturally parents every other sentence is "making money yet".

EDIT4:
and here is a mock sheet of all the tiles I NEED to cover, these are tiles for connecting biomes, its possible they will be touching biomes outside of these but not likely, and I could probably fix it up with a quick post generation clean up to make sure each biome only connects with its direct sibling and not with its distant cousins if that makes any sense, otherwise there would be far too many tiles to make, this still leaves free room in the tilesheet though so I suppose I'll be using that for things like rocks or pits (unique for each biome for the sake of consistency). there will still be room after that too but I dont want to think too far ahead.

[Sengir]

This is definitely enough for a GameDev topic.

I can move this to GameDev if you want, or you could make a separate thread to for game C+C and keep this one for art C+C.

[Bombshell93]

I think I'll keep this topic for art as it already contains a mass of sprites used in other projects / sprites made for the heck of it,
Thanks for the clarification, I'll make another thread soon explaining the mechanics of the game and planned features (and ofc the progress so far and screenshots along development)