THE SCREENSHOT TOPIC RETURNS

author=Adon237

It is still kind of weird to me though, because there are hillside tiles in the left half.

This is how I was seeing it -

@Craza and Kentona

Thanks guys! Yeah, the numbers look pretty bad and it's something I haven't gotten around to fixing yet. I'm thinking of making my own black-bordered font and adding it to the project, as well as giving the facial portraits a gradient fade so the numbers are more readable. I'll post a pic when I have that done.

@Adon237

That's VX? Nice scripting! Though I do see what Killer Wolf means about the fences; they look like they are framing raised areas of the land in places.

unnnnhhhhhh I love the idea of RPG board games - but only as a videogame; I dislike calculating everything while playing a physical board game.

Actually, the clash was entirely intentional. It's a throwback to things like the early Final Fantasy and Turbografx 16 games (as well as just Cell-shaded anime in general).

NFGMan's book Character Design for Mobile Devices, Mobile Games, Sprites and Pixel Art puts it better than I could:

"...compare the character design in Final Fantasy VI to that of the enemies encountered during the game. Unlike the player's characters, enemy sprites are intricately detailed static images that are much larger and properly proportioned, a design tactic used since the very first game in the series. The reasoning is pretty simple. Let's say the party is going to fight a huge dragon. The player is already perfectly familiar with the characters in his own party, and provided they're given the proper range of emotions, is likely already quite attached to them. The dragon the player is fighting, on the other hand, is not a character he's going to attempt to empathize with, but rather an enemy he's going to try to defeat in combat...At first, it might sound as if the two styles would jar together-a realistically drawn dragon fighting a bunch of misproportioned, comparatively plain party members. However, this is almost never the case...

...In a way, it's very similar to how a cartoon works. Many cartoons, especially those hailing from Japan, have main characters that are markedly less detailed than their surroundings. This is because a simple design on the characters makes them easier on a psychological level for a viewer to project themselves into. As a general rule, the more realistic a character looks, the more distances he is from the viewer and the less empathy he will inspire, a trick that goes as far back as the earliest Disney cartoons-the good guy always had a big, relatively blank expression. He had large eyes, exaggerated movements and facial features, and a lack of overall detail, while a villain would have small eyes and sharper, less inviting features, and was likely to be much more realistically proportioned."

So the idea of 'cheating' with two different art styles is intended to make it easier to empathize with the heroes of the game, as they do all kinds of emoting and appear often in cutscenes. At first I thought about making the monsters in the same cute anime style, but I found that it made the bad guys less fun to fight. I'm hoping the final aesthetic of the game will be appealing to players for these reasons.

It's a very good book. I highly recommend it for any aspiring pixel artists.

If people feel the two art styles are too jarring, however, it wouldn't be too hard to switch the cell shaded look to a more airbrushed look, similar to what is used in the Y's remakes.

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(I absolutely love the art style of the Ys remakes by the way. That's my new goal to aspire to).

Thanks. Well, my characters are intentionally somewhat generic-looking, as everything about my game is designed to evoke memories of old-school 80s and 90s RPGs (such as Ys). While the characters look generic, however, the events of the story are intended to turn those clichés on their head. I'll explain in greater detail once I get my act together and make a game page.

I'm actually recolouring one of my character line arts in the airbrush style just to see how it will look. If I like the results, I'll post it to get feedback on which people prefer. As you can probably tell, visuals are very important to me.

It is definitely cuter, smoother (I had sort of gotten used to the very hard lined characters, but I suppose it'll do better).

author=Lucidstillness
Once again I have made more work for myself. -_-

Finish the actual game, or at least get into the 90% completion range, then work your visual upgrades. At least you'll lessen the risk of adding to vaporware :O
The new artstyle is excellent and worth upgrading :x