The Pixels Of Joxon

[Kelvin]

Considering this is PBG we're talking about... his face could be a bit goofier.

[Natis]

To add onto what Kelvin said, I would also recommend making his face thinner. The face you made looks very round whereas PBG's face is pretty narrow.

[Joxon]

I made the head thinner, but since this is a neutral face, and there will be separate ones for different emotions, I wasn't sure how to make this goofier, but still neutral.

[Kelvin]

The cheeks still seemed kind of thin. I think I may have made it worse, though. I'm not good with human faces. :/

[Joxon]

Is this better?

[Jaharl]

Yes. The head looks more round.

[Joxon]

I tried to rework the tiles a bit.

[Joxon]

Okay, I'm really out of ideas. I can't seem to find a good pattern for the dirt. Any ideas?

[Kelvin]

Maybe you could try doing what Metroid Zero Mission does and have a texture that fades into a dark color? It looks good because you couldn't really see deep into rock and dirt and such from a character's perspective, so it makes it seem more solid and impassible that way, and the solid color, if picked right, isn't hard to look at for a long time. Repeating patterns could cause eye strain, especially if they're high-contrast.

http://www.spriters-resource.com/search/?q=tiles <- A good place to go for ideas.

[DragonDePlatino]

Here are two ideas!



On the top is a more realistic texture (a la Spelunky) and on the bottom is cartoonier texture, which I imagine is what you're going for. My general process for drawing dirt tiles goes like this...Start with the dark shade, add a solid 1-color texture, shade that texture, apply it to the tiles, then darken the edges to give a bevelled look like in New Super Mario Bros. It's not the most organic-looking texture, but it's a quick method that's easy to learn. You might also want to go in and break up the outlines of your grass tiles. Having the edges be a perfect square doesn't look very natural.

[Joxon]

So I tried to emulate something close to your NSMB like one, and made it seem like the dirt pattern is sticking out.

[CoatRack]

That looks good, although I think you should have left the detail on the grass visible on the sides where the colors get darker. It looks a bit odd how the detail suddenly vanishes, just lowering the darkness of the green on the edges where it turns dark a bit would work well if you ask me.

[Joxon]

There!

[Joxon]

So, a couple of effects that I'm not sure if they should be for collisions, or explosions. (Sorry about no GIFs, because freaking iPods)

[Kelvin]

Kind of looks like an impact to me, maybe for a bullet. You could probably add a couple pixels to the corners of the pieces on the large one so they keep a somewhat circular shape as they go out.