THE SCREENSHOT TOPIC RETURNS

I don't mean to double post but its been a couple of days now! Does anyone have any further suggestions for me for the image I posted? I'd love to learn more from individual insight if possible. But if no one responds again I'll just assume there isn't anything else to be said and move on. XD

I think... if you had even bigger trees, massive ones, you could use them as an excuse to have mid-air platforms. Let the player jump onto the tufts of leaves. Like this:

Just an idea though. Wouldn't have to be all the trees - they could exist alongside the kind you have now. Came to mind because graphics aside, the screenshot itself is still rather plain, having nothing in it but that house. But I realize you're looking for input on the graphics set, and the screenshot is just the most basic test map you could come up with, so maybe you already have ideas for levels in mind. The graphics set looks good, what you have so far at least.

Thanks for the input Lockez and Joseph, I realize there is no "wow" factor in the screenshot yet but I'll keep working on it, I'm thinking of making a breakout sort of game with it and saving a platform for when I'm more comfortable creating more detailed pixel art. Thanks guys, and thanks for the example screen Lockez, great idea with the tree platforms =]

author=LockeZ
Oh, that's really black, but in a good way. It wasn't made black-and-white the normal way, was it? It's much higher contrast. Creates a deep darkness without significantly reducing visibility. Very film noir, especially with the rain effect. Though armored soldiers in a military camp in the forest isn't very film noir.

This is not a military camp)
Soldiers just guarding the entrance to the city.(And they patrol the forest, yeah)

Is that a bow-tie on the dragon or is that his tongue? If it's the prior than brownie points for you =D Also the grass and the characters clash too much, I've seen pixel art mix with low res to medium res 3d before but not sharp 2d tilesets or low detailed paintings/brushes as a background. I think the best approach would either be to go with a more pixelated 8 to 16 bit look for the grass. I think a 3d looking backdrop like Ragnarok online might also work if done right.

Been months since I worked on mapping, so doing this bit to see if I still got it in me. I think I still do, and yes, it's barren still since I just made it. Trying to get the bridge thing going for this, though I wonder if I shouldn't worry about coding that in before actually making them...hmmm.

There are steps on this tileset, but they're not the same color as what I'd want to use. I'd need to recolor them (wonder if I couldn't get someone to do that for me...) before I used them, otherwise they'd stick out like a sore thumb (they're brown after all...).

I could, but I'm trying to keep it as Final Fantasy styled as possible, so I need to do the "walking under the bridge" gimmick for it to look right. It exists though, just has its roundabout ways of doing it.

Because there's also the issue of making it so that you can walk across said thing. I'm trying to avoid having 50 events for it, and trying to just do it in one easy step (tile substitution I've heard works). I'm just not 100% certain on how to handle it still is all.

Yeah, that's what's going to happen too since I plan on doing so in this dungeon. But the reason I'm not going with the event way is that it's very easy to screw that up, and IIRC too many events can lag the game down. That, and not everything is easily accessed via events.

For events to lag the game you need thousands and thousands of them on a single map. Adding a few dozen invisible events that don't actually do anything except block your path doesn't slow the game down. It's a very common mapping technique.

Easiest way of making a bridge I've found: create a "height" variable, and put on-touch events at the top and bottom of the ramp that set the player's height to 1 when they go up the ramp and 0 when they go down. Create invisible events on the left and right sides of the bridge that are impassable when the variable is 0, and on the top and bottom sides of the bridge that are impassable when the variable is 1. Then either make the bridge entirely out of events that change from above hero to below hero based on the variable, or else make the bridge out of normal tiles that are always above hero and set the HERO as "always on top" when he approaches the bridge.

The bottom edges of those diagonal cliffs need work... obviously. Not sure what the hell is going on in the northeastern corner of the map, the heights make no sense.