Yoman the characters are kinda banded to hell and back, but it's quite evocative anyway. Can you walk up and down the slopes? That's something I never bother with but probably should at some point

They're like five pixels tall, how the hell do you see anything at all?

Suddenly, new desktop background.

Also, made a new fractal, whatchu guy's think about this one.

This. I can never understand all the nitpicking you pixel-arty types do.

I disagree with a lot of the nitpicking about banding that gets thrown around as sometimes it's actually useful with curvy shapes, but here's what I mean:


(8 high bros)

Red lines indicate direction of banding from high->low value, not along the surface. Banding is where you essentially have a gradient of low contras colours in a line through a small area and it makes sprites look very blurry. Sometimes gradients are useful, but here all the colours are very close together in both hue and value and it detracts from the pixel art I think.

The grass and stones etc are also blurry but the red plant is what made me notice it I think.

http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_p ... ?TID=11299
http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation ... pic=8110.0

Those are two threads you should read. Sometimes people are too pedantic about things and end up changing more than I'd like with banding edits (I don't see some things as banding when others do)

Yay, I learned stuff about pixeling today. I'll have to try and apply that to an image later. What should I draw? (something simple pl0x.)

A tree, or a rock with some moss. Organic shapes.

OK, I'll try a tree stump.

One thing though: How do I set the CC palette as the default palette in GraphicsGale? I want to change the hue of some colors a bit, and I think that the CC palette has some nice base colors, but since they're in 8bit I can't change the hue slider.

Yes they do walk up slopes, and I code in Game Maker 8.1 Pro.

Thanks for the critique I suppose Geti. I was aiming for light sources a bit, but moreover I just didn't want sprites made of 4 shades of 2 colours. Does it really look that blurry?

FYI the red 'plant' is a glowworm, the blue thing is a porcupine-dog, the purple thing is a bird and the brown/blue thing is a humanoid.

I also didn't mention that it will be displayed at at least 2x that size, which is GBA resolution.

Quoting the image for context:



Cool, looks like it'll have some sort of exploratory element, though I can't tell much from 1 shot
Thing with light sources is that they seem to be front lit or unlit, with a few elements of top-down lighting thrown in (darker outlines at the bottom etc) and almost like they could be 1 colour and just jpeged. The detail on them really doesn't read well, you seem to have more noise than articulated clusters, and very low contrast ramps on all of them.
I read (past tense) the sprites left to right as:

flower/bean (though I can see that it's just the worm having an unfortunate connection to the grass)
blue person in brown clothes/armour
green lizard-dog
purple bat or bird

Honestly it's just your cluster and colour usage which clashes with the approach I'd take.

Misc criticism:

Foreground/background contrast could be better, though it's clear where the terrain is now regardless.
Foreground could transition to black a little less starkly, you have detail coming into the play area, why not outside of it?
Colour coded is nice, it's clear that each thing will probably behave differently.

I viewed it at x2 pixels, then looked harder at x5.

I hope I'm not coming off as harsh, I just think it could be a learning oppurtunity. Read the pixelation thread above if you get time, it has a lot of excellent musing about clusters and some good example images.

This is actually really cool if you have a 1366 by 768 computer. (With Windows 7)

Download
Here's what it looks like if you do

Edit: Aaaugh! The image quality is being messed up through PhotoBucket. Added download links.

Twenty minutes of sketching. Low quality Jpeg decreased by FB upload. It's actually quite hi-rez.

these are the sprites i'm be using for my mod that i making. could use a few criticisms.

The turret looks like it will be actor-controlled, rather than unmanned and automatic.

Yeah, make it actor controlled!