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CREATION CUSTOM CRAFTS: CRAVING CRITICISM

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Creation
An avid lover of Heartache 101
1446
@goldengaav: yeah, it should, it was my reference. The coloring edit was done by alterego.

Anyways, I've finally gotten around to whipping out a cloud tree. I pretty much followed the general agreement that I should modify the original tree.

I played around with photoshop options and nothing really looked really convincing so I just recolored everything by hand.



As usual, I'm looking forward to your comments. The outline is a bit dodgy and will need to be fixed.

EDIT: Some Starflowers (concept by Ketsumio):


They don't look as good at Ketsumio's but I wanted to create my own. Not sure which looks better, with or without stalks.



That cloud tree actually looks pretty good, but compared to the cloud, which has no texture (other than a few grey humps here and there) It might be a little too detailed.

But other than that It's a Great cloud tree, I actually didn't expect a recolored tree to look that good ;)
Ketsumio
I guess he's an Xbox and I'm more Atari
1020
The ones with the stalks look better IMO. They look more like flowers because they're smaller and have stems.

Are you going to have star people walking around on the cloud to??? You should cus it would be awesome!! I can see one on a little crescent moon boat going down a river. LOL
Creation
An avid lover of Heartache 101
1446
It's been almost 8 months since I've posted something here, holy!

As usual, what I'm really looking for is criticism to improve my ''craft''.

Some icons:









The first three are the weapons I have in mind for the first demo while the last one is the first of three armors.

Would you have any funny ideas for some unusual armor? I want to stay away from the usual leather armor, chain mail, etc...

I realize the weapons are pretty cliché but I don't really have any good ideas for original weapons at the moment. Any ideas anyone?

Some character for Slimongo (it moves slower in game):


The faceset for the same character:


If you don't like something, I would appreciate if you could point out what you dislike so that I can fix it.

Thanks!
chana
(Socrates would certainly not contadict me!)
1584
ok, if that slime is supposed to be totally obnoxious, then it is a success! If not, maybe prolong the branches of the glasses? The mouth looks a bit like it was pasted on the face?
Creation
An avid lover of Heartache 101
1446
Thank for taking the time to give some feedback. I had noticed what you mentioned about the mouth and thought I had fixed it. I'll give it another try then :).

Some new stuff, mostly pixels.












As usual, comments are more than welcome. I can draw alright but I just started pixels two days ago and I'll admit I'm struggling with some things.
They're cute, but I think the gloves don't have enough contrast, and the money bag, chef hat(?) and the pants are very flat (Maybe that's what you were going for, though).
The hot dog could use a little more contrast too. The ketchup is not a good idea, since it's color is very close to the sausage's.

The chest is very nice the way it is, but if you like to nitpick, you could improve the animation a little by observing RTP chests: the lid shouldn't jump two-three pixels up right after opening.
Creation
An avid lover of Heartache 101
1446
Thank you very much yuhikaru for the in depth feedback. I'm not going for flat things :). I'll fix them all, I agree with your observations.

Those are the icons for HP and MP. Not happy with the readability of the word ''Chi'' on the second. Will need to mess about with it for a while.

You are quite skilled at pixel art Creation! Your use of colour and shape on such a small scale is quite impressive. I agree with yuhikaru's comments, and I also think the money bag looks a bit flat too, especially compared to the square-shaped sprites you made. I suggest giving all of your sprites a uniform light source to help you define the details beyond the outlines themselves.

One way to make text stand out on a small scale is to use complimentary colours; try having the hp text in green and see if it stands out more.

Good luck, I'm looking forward to more.
Creation
An avid lover of Heartache 101
1446
Honestly, I just started two days ago so I think I still have looong way to go.

Thanks for the input, time to fix things up!

1. The heart.

So I thought it was too small and the text was difficult to read so I followed up to some of your comments and redid it entirely. I think the shape and shading is generally speaking better.

Before
after


2. The boxing gloves.

As ゆひかる mentioned, it really did lack contrast.

So I actually went ahead and added a third color (it had only two) and changed the other colors to add some contrast/readability.

Before
after


3. The money bag.

Let's face it, the first version sucked. I was lazy and just wanted it done and over with and it shows. I decided to redo completely as well. I opted for a Canadian dollar sign as US dollar sign was taking too much room on the front of the bag.

Before
after


As you can see, your comments are not only read but also put into action. Again, I'd like to hear your comments as to how to improve.

Thank you.
I don't know, I thought it was cute before, too. It was like a medal or something. If you're comfortable making them flat and you did all of them that way it would look fine, imo.
They have certainly improved, but I don't have much more to say, since I'm not particularly good in pixel art. Have you read Despain's PA tutorials already? They're really good :O
One important thing, though, is that the boxing gloves, keys and TV head guy are the only sprites with a very dark outline, almost black. To keep the icons consistent, I think you should either give the others a darker outline too, or them a lighter one.

Also, why my username in japanese? xD (Just curious)
Hoorah :D Creation's back



^ x2 btw :0 Yeah these were really just off-the-top-of-my-head sort of things so they're admittedly bad. But believe it or not, one of the most defining aspects of any pixel art is the outline (echoing ユヒカル)

If you're going for a comical style (which you are) then you might have everything outlined in black, or at least a dark color. Going for a more realistic style and you'd shade the outline along with the rest of the object. However even a bold outline can be shaded as you can see in my boxing glove example, which is what I think made you hate your (already good albeit two-dimensional) money bag so much.

I was a bad artist and I made the money bag look like some garlic who had too much to drink before staggering into the tattoo parlor, but yours is way better so disregard mine! XD I think the problem with the boxing gloves is that you just need more space... If it's possible, try just drawing a single one (like I did) or make the sprite itself bigger.

Judging from the impossibly rapid improvement I'd say you have some talent :>
Already your sprites are looking much better Creation. Honestly, at present they look good enough for a professional game, but it is hard to get a feel on how well they fit with your game seeing them in isolation like this.

Would it be possible to see this in the context of a screenshot?
Damn, I lost my password again 0__o'.Anyways, I wanted to update this to Slimongo's game profile but I guess it'll have to wait until I can find my password again.

I've been at my pixels for a lot of my wake time but I'll just post the more, say, final versions of what I've done recently, no point in showing the WIP.








I think I'm still making progress as I went from doing minuscule icons to 4 direction animations. Fair enough, it's still not perfect but I'm satisfied with what I've done so far (still determined to improve though which is why criticism would be great).

Here's a new gameplay video. You'll notice I've switched to PA for the chipset this time around. Not sure if you'll prefer the previous versions however, we'll see. New icons, new battlers, new character sprites, new menu system, new animations, new chest, new items, new weapon and armor... Pretty big update all things considered. I know the back leg of the battler looks wonky and it seems like it has 3 legs :-).

LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Oh man, I really like the look and feel of that. Font is perfect. The menu is especially great for some reason, and I love how obnoxious the green slime's face is. It seems like it would look better for the text bubbles to always go all the way around the facesets, but maybe you're already planning on doing that and it's just buggy right now. Is it possible to add to the menu, in small text under the left and right arrows, what pages are to the left and right of the current page? (Maybe only write it in Japanese!?)

The monster's back left leg not being visible is fine, it's behind the monster, it wouldn't make sense for it to be visible. The back right leg does look kinda weird.

I feel like custom sound effects would help a lot, and also I feel like the music is horrid and shrill and it's actually bad enough that if I couldn't turn off the sound I would not play the game. Maybe the sound quality of the recording is worse than the sound quality of the real game, and I'm not hearing it how it's supposed to sound?
Thanks for the lengthy reply.

I'm actually having some trouble with the speech bubble script which just doesn't behave the way it should at times (such as in the example in the video). It would be possible to add info underneath the arrows, yes. It sounds like a good design idea.

Well, the music is actually fine in-game imo. It might be the recording which is bad.

Anyhow, I just finished a tree which was not as much as a pain as I thought it would be. You'll probably notice the mother 3 feel and that's because I shamelessly stole its palette.

Here's the development process. Any ideas as to how to improve the latest version?
final version (for now)


Also, I've done the save spot. Not sure about the ''S'', any other original ideas that I could replace the ''S'' with or do you think it's just fine this way? It overs above the ground by the way, thus the wings.

chana
(Socrates would certainly not contadict me!)
1584
I think "S" looks good and it has the advantage of making things quite clear! (changed your nickname and no avatar...?).
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
If you don't think the S is obvious enough, you could use a picture of a floppy disk instead - the universal icon for "save".
Or a book if you prefer.

Your sprites look great, but I notice that there doesn't seem to be a consistent light source for the sprites and the area. The sprites appear to be lit from the front and slightly from above, but the front of the cell is shaded. I suppose the light could be coming from directly overhead, but that doesn't quite match the sprites. This isn't a big deal, as lots (even most) old-school RPGs didn't really bother with lighting, but it is something you might want to keep in mind when adding shadows and whatnot.

The other thing, which is even more subjective, is the frontal nature of the sprites. Supposedly, in this kind of 3/4 view the characters should be viewed from a top-down angle rather than a more frontal angle. Now, I say supposedly because, again, the vast majority of sprite-based RPGs I have seen don't bother with exact perspective for the characters, either because of pixel limitations or for stylistic reasons. Even the RPG Maker RTPs don't bother with this, possibly because the SD sprite style has already thrown accurate proportions in perspective out the window. I only bring it up now because the ninja sprite is looking up, which actually gives me the impression of the camera looking at him from below, in fairly stark contrast to the level itself. Again, this isn't really a big deal, and a lot of games do things like this, but it is something you may want to consider. In the end, you can only be so accurate with small pixel sprites after all.

Your stuff is looking very nice and professional.
I really like the tree's overall shape, but I think the shading looks too simple compared to the character sprites. It's difficult to tell if it fits with so few tiles, though.

I usually do trees/bushes like this. I just noticed I changed the perspective a little bit, but my intention was to give it more volume.



I think it fits a little better, but it's probably lacking contrast.