PERIHELION'S PROFILE

Writer, programmer, and artist with Project BC.

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A little help with my roofing style tiling?

Hey, a pretty good start! I have a few comments about the building.

  • I would personally remove the dithering on the bricks and the roof. Beginners tend to overuse dithering a lot, but generally you only want to use it when you really, really want the texture or have a very limited palette. Also, instead of copying and pasting the same brick everywhere, I would make variations to break it up. Some can be a slightly different hue, have different shading patterns, etc.
  • Put the highlight on the sideways roof tiles along the (physical) bottom of the tile instead of close to the camera. Right now the tiles sort of look like they're coming towards the camera.
  • Instead of simply making your colors darker to create shadows, shift the hue more towards blue or purple. Also try to have all of the shadows in the scene tend towards the same color. A unified shadow color is one of the easiest ways to make your colors look cohesive in a scene. This interview with a talented artist talks a bit about how he selects colors, and the color chart might be a good thing to look at.

slash does art

Cool! Your NES-style tiles are simple and effective. I like the animations. Your drawing style is cute and distinctive, too. I particularly like the blue girl; the purple outlines add a lot of energy. One suggestion I have is experimenting more with shadow colors. Shadows will generally be cooler than midtones, often tending towards blue or purple.

Rainfall: The Sojourn Kickstarter ad !

Although I feel bad for Ghost and the backers, I can't understand why anyone would have pledged to the project in the first place. I totally believe that Ghost's heart was in the right place and he put a lot of passion into the project, but it was a huge mistake to run a KS without more experience. I would have been shocked if the game had come out. There were so many red flags. Not only has Ghost never finished a game of comparable scope, but there was basically no progress on development to show at the time of the KS, and they were planning on making their own engine. That alone could have easily added a year to development time and produced a buggy, subpar result--if it ever got done at all. Not only that, but the programmer wasn't even the project lead. Was he even being paid? What would Ghost have done if he had flaked?

Even setting the engine aside, though, asking for only $6000 to make an entire SNES-style RPG of professional quality is simply ludicrous. If I'd been thinking about backing the project, I would have changed my mind immediately upon seeing the goal. Even if you can find a pixel artist who's willing to do it for that cheap, it's so little money relative to the amount of work that you're basically depending on their passion to finish the project rather than any financial incentive. Decent pixel art costs at least $20-30/hr professionally, and if you pay someone significantly less than professional rates, you shouldn't expect them to be reliable or prioritize your project. They have to eat, you know. Granted, the artist should never have agreed in the first place if that was going to be the case, but this shouldn't be a surprising outcome.

It sucks because it's clear Ghost was really invested in the project, and it sucks that the backers lost their money, but no one should be surprised. Kickstarter is NOT a foolproof preorder system, and you cannot give people money without examining their qualifications and realistically evaluating whether they can finish the project.

Ready, Set, Donate!

Just out of curiosity, how are you paying for custom graphics, soundtrack, and battle and menu systems with $5k? Are you using entirely graphics commissioned for your game, or by custom do you mean only partially custom and/or not RTP?

Vacant Sky coming to PSN

You realize this game has nothing whatsoever to do with RM, right?

Release Something Weekend

@Liberty, Archeia: If you don't want people to continue to be confused about the large team, perhaps you could edit the event description with an explanation. I think the problem comes from people not reading through all the comments, which is understandable since the comment thread is so long now.

Liberty, no one is trying to smear your character or anything. I'm sure Shade_Hunter just didn't see the earlier posts about it. Really, there's no call to get worked up; you have to admit that the huge team looks odd at first glance. Even if there are no real prizes, people don't like entering competitions where they suspect someone else might have an unfair advantage. If you do something that seems fishy, the onus is on you to offer an explanation, not on everyone else to take it as a given that everything is fine without questioning it. But you have discussed this at length, and I understand your frustration. I think now you just need to make sure people know what's going on.

vacant sky's failure and the trends of selling rtp to stupid humans

I keep saying it because no one's responding to it. I didn't want my actual point to get lost in all the side arguments.

Seriously, I would be happy to retract my claim that you're being malicious if you actually offered a satisfactory defense, but I guess it's pretty clear by now that you have no intention of doing that! I'm not here out of personal spite or to stir up drama or anything if that's what you think. I just think you (and everyone repeating what you said) are being unfair and that you should stop. If you think anything I said is wrong, I'd be happy to discuss it further.

That said, of course I don't actually think you're going to change your behavior just because I pointed it out. I guess I posted mainly because I don't want neutral third parties to get the wrong idea and then stayed because it seemed like people were misunderstanding my point.

vacant sky's failure and the trends of selling rtp to stupid humans

I totally agree with you, DE. Again, I was never saying that EoE is going to be a great game or that people should fund it. There are a ton of things wrong with their Kickstarter. I just want people to criticize it for things that are actually true.

vacant sky's failure and the trends of selling rtp to stupid humans

@DE: I don't think the EoE guy's first game is going to not be terrible (you were talking about him, right?). I agree that making a commercial project for your first game is an awful idea, and I would never support it personally. This is exactly the kind of legitimate criticism that people should be making about the project! There's plenty to complain about without insinuating that he's intentionally setting out to screw people out of their money.

@Ghost: I was never intentionally implying that art absolutely costs a huge amount of money in every single case. Again, I wasn't saying that you have to spend that much money, just that it's reasonable to for a commercial project, and that therefore VSA and EoE aren't just laughing all the way to the bank like some people seem to think.

vacant sky's failure and the trends of selling rtp to stupid humans

I'm not intentionally jamming words in your mouth. Have I misunderstood you? I was going on this:
The less people involved in the creation of a game, the better off it is; budgetary or otherwise.

This with your use of Cave Story and Dwarf Fortress as examples seemed to imply that you thought games should only be made by one person, but if that's not the case, I'm glad we got that cleared up!

Again, I'm not trying to say that these expenditures are absolutely necessary, I'm saying they're reasonable. This applies to you too:

Perihelion
It's fine to think that using RTP graphics as placeholders for your Kickstarter is distasteful. It's also fine to think that $20k is way more than you need to make a game, although I think it's reasonable to want to hire professionals if you can. However, that's just my opinion, and I'm not here to argue opinions. The point that I'm making is that given the costs that the EoE and VSA devs listed, there's no basis for calling them greedy and assuming they're pocketing the money because those things actually cost that much at professional rates. Feel free to criticize them for unnecessary expenditures if you think they're unnecessary, but don't say they're greedy unless you have reason to believe they're not spending the money on the games. I don't know if you personally are saying that, but other people are, and that's what my problem is. If you're not saying that, then I don't have a problem with you, so why are we arguing?