ELECTRICALKAT'S PROFILE

LulzSec has been pretty annoying as of late... They were DDoSing the login servers for both League of Legends and Minecraft, so I randomly could not play them at some points. (Although, in both instances, they did not take any passwords AFAIK.)

author=Illustrious
As someone who has been around this scene basically since it first existed, I probably can be quick to assume Saya intends to also stick around for years honing her skills. She may or may not. Possibly, I am making a tall order for someone who really is just working in rpgmaker/pixel art casually. It depends what she wants to gain by making original graphics. It can make sense she is learning something about pixel art by tracing, but I just would not include this kind of material in an actual project. If the goal is present these graphics for an audience or to make this stand out among games that use rips, it probably will not go too far on that end.

I should mention that I didn't read Saya's post within the Screenshots topic before now. Yes, I can see why everyone thinks that she wants to use these exact graphics in her game, and I can understand why you're taking this position. It was probably a serious miscommunication or misunderstanding on her or our part...moving on.

Anyway, I agree with you about potential players recognizing those graphics, and it would apply to more people than only us inside the RPG Maker community. If Saya had released a game using those graphics to the outside world, she would have likely been called out for it, and received a much...harsher response.

I don't believe it was her intent to imply that she created all of those tiles on her own, just that we - as people who have played so many games, and created things of our own in the past - kind of assumed this (and I probably would have as well), since she didn't provide enough details beforehand. It isn't a tall order to ask for an "original" aesthetic (I placed that in quotes because the word original is relative - both you and Mog have debated that well enough), but we are all influenced from somewhere, whether we realize it or not.

If Saya does stay as you mention, and continues to practice her work, I'm confident that she will eventually develop her own style from this experimenting.

I'd say both of you are right (Mog and Illustrious), but Illustrious is thinking a lot more on the long-term side. Yes, different games have different aesthetics, and creating your own original graphics generates its own aesthetic, this is true. But this is for seasoned artists, which Saya is clearly not; she is just beginning.

Eventually, she will reach a point where she can freely draw her own pixel sets, but this takes a lot of practice...like anything else, really. Tracing SD3 may help her to gain a feel for pixel art (I did this with Mack and Blue tile sets, in a previous age). I also did not see any attempt by her to (deliberately) plagiarize SD3, and she did mention that she drew the grass and dirt on her own (without a "reference"). Although, it probably would have helped if she had mentioned tracing parts of SD3 at first, but that isn't important now.

Anyway... Back to commenting, I liked your progress with the cliffs. What you probably learned from SD3 - in that case - is how to make your cliff rocks more jagged and hard in their looks. Now, what you could do is take your original two pieces, and apply this whole hard and jagged theme to them as well. Or maybe even start again from scratch with these ideas in mind. It's up to you here.

Hm, you could try using Blender. I've personally used it for a short while, and I've seen some other people in my old 3D Studio classes use it for their projects. It's actually quite powerful for an open source engine! Some people have made short, really well crafted films with it, like Sintel and Big Buck Bunny.

The only thing that I could say about Blender is that its user interface is horrible. I much preferred using Maya back then...as finicky as it was, at least its user interface had some semblance of organization. But then again, I suppose that is the price of using open source software. :V

Otherwise, I think Autodesk still offers "free" versions of their Maya software. (The Personal Learning Edition? Does it still exist...?)

I've tried using OpenMPT (which makes tracker files but not MIDIs, so it's a little bit different of a workflow - but I think you can export your files into WAV) and "Linux MultiMedia Studio" (which is also available for Windows, despite its name). Both of them felt like they had decent interfaces, and supposedly LMMS is similar to FL Studio in its UI. I haven't used FL Studio, though, so I can't really verify that.