Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Yes

29 (54.7%)

No

24 (45.3%)

Total Members Voted: 52

[DragonDePlatino]

I wonder what the purpose of using eye-tearing colors, no lighting and mostly bad, unnatural shapes is; they all just serve to make everything look bad.
The chicken has some potential though.

now isn't that a pretty swell looking chicken for ten minutes of messing around and not even trying to do things properly

p.s.: dawnfortress looked quite good

There are a large number of reasons I discarded DawnFortress and restarted with this new style.

• Detailed pixel art works very well when resized to 2x, but is indiscernible when viewed at 1x on modern 1080p and 4K monitors. In a game like Dwarf Fortress, graphical clarity is your first priority. Look at old sprites like those from the Legend of Zelda. Those graphics had to have very simple designs because they were intended to be viewed on fuzzy CRT televisions.
• The eye-tearing colors are intended to create a strong contrast between designs. An engineering dwarf needs to be red, and a woodworking dwarf needs to be yellow. When you desaturate colors, they loose their identity. My original color scheme was much more desaturated than this, but over time I moved to high-contrast RGB colors like [255, 0, 0] for red.
• But of course, if you dislike the glaringly-bright colors, the graphics are designed with this in mind. Everything is tied to a single 20-color indexed palette, so tweaking universal colors is as easy as opening the images in a pixel art program and dragging some sliders. Your chicken, on the other hand, would require manual redrawing or filters if you wanted to tweak the colors.
• Flat-colored graphics with bright colors and sharp angles resize more cleanly with pixel art algorithms like HQX and BRZ.
• More detail = More work. People would rather have a complete, but simple-looking graphics set rather than a detailed but incomplete one. Compound the fact that I need to draw thousands of sprites in a resolution higher than 16x16 graphics sets, and you have an insane amount of work that needs to be done. The simple style ensures that the workload is kept to a reasonable level.
• Lastly, I want to create a simple style that anyone can imitate, even if you are new to pixel art. If you are a modder who wants graphics for your mod, you will be able to create them yourself since the style is simple and requires no knowledge of smooth curves, anti-aliasing, smooth shading, etc.
  

[Bloax]

• Detailed pixel art works very well when resized to 2x, but is indiscernible when viewed at 1x on modern 1080p and 4K monitors. In a game like Dwarf Fortress, graphical clarity is your first priority. Look at old sprites like those from the Legend of Zelda. Those graphics had to have very simple designs because they were intended to be viewed on fuzzy CRT televisions.

Well I'm sure it wasn't because it was a rather early NES game and also not because it was a big game without too much space for glorious graphic goodness.
(and then pretty and clear graphics came around seven years later).

But whatever.

[cerapa]

Greetings pixel artists. I happen to have a request.

You see, I have been working on a hex based game(more of a battle system actually). And the thing is, I am in need of animations and spirites, since the walk animation of entities is currently

a spinning flag. Which looks less than formidable.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I am not looking for anything permanently usable or particularly good looking, and I could make some myself, but I would rather spend my time coding. I can get a lot more done in an hour of coding than in three hours of drawing a placeholder animation(I can get oddly pedantic when making placeholder stuff...).


As for the specifics:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is the hex base I am using at the moment. Anything in either of the bottom white areas gets drawn over by the hexes of the next row. This also holds true when moving left and right.
Both up, left and right bounds may be crossed. The entity will always be drawn over the hexes on the same row. The draw order of entities is not determined. This means that something like a long spear might in some cases appear to be behind, and in other cases in front of the entity to the left or right.

The sprite may be of any size. The bottom middle pixel of the sprite is always aligned to the bottom middle pixel of a hex(the pixel to the left).
An animation may have any number of frames.
An animation may have any given duration.
Sprites may use nearly any image format.
Sprites may use alpha values AKA transparency.

Basically nearly everything is allowed.


If someone decides to embark upon this quest, these are the animations I currently need:
Idle (does not need to be animated, but may be)
Move
Attack
Damaged
Death

Together with the image I would need:
Animation Duration (in milliseconds)
Frame Width (in pixels)
Frame Height (in pixels)
Total Frames
Frames Per Line

Wow, that's a bunch of "specifics". I am actually pretty much just looking for a small walking knight or something of that sort. With maybe a 2 frame animation for swinging its sword and a death animation where it falls over. And let me know if it isn't cool to ask like this. I would have used the request template but it seemed lacking for a request like this.

[Parsely]

Yeah the request template sucks and I can't be arsed to make one that catches all, but no this kind of request is fine! If I want to give it a shot I'll send you a PM.

[alexandertnt]

Here is a flower on some grass and rock/dirt:

[DragonDePlatino]

Hmm...it's a good start, but it looks a little dull to me. Here's my take on your flower!

First off, it looks like you have quite a few colors in your palette...19, to be exact. In your picture, there are two veeery similar ramps of green that could easily be merged without losing any detail. There are also a ton of yellows used only by the flower and 3 reds for the center of the flower. Remember...in pixel art, it's best to limit your palette as much as possible so you can create more unity in your art. When you create a new ramp of color for each object, drawing becomes more time-consuming and everything looks more disjointed. Reuse colors whenever possible!

For the second picture, I reduced your palette down to 3 ramps...5 greens, 3 browns and a single red are all you need. The palette is more manageable now, but everything has this terrible green hue to it. Let's fix that!

For the final picture, I reworked your palette into just two ramps. I added more saturation to your colors, upped the contrast and added some hue-shifting. Remember...if two colors are adjacent to each other on the color wheel (like yellow/green or yellow/orange) then you can transition between those two colors when your ramp becomes brighter or darker. In pixel art this is called hue shifting and it will make your pieces much more vibrant.

So...overall, you have a pretty good piece here. Your dithering is well-done, the shading on your flower is tight and you really nailed the highlights on the grass. My only complaint, of course, would be the palette, and like I showed that's an easy fix. Keep up the good work!

[Parsely]

I suck at picking my colors.

[DragonDePlatino]

I suck at picking my colors.

Then here, give this a read! It hits on all of the major points I mentioned in my critique. Don't worry, with enough practice you'll find hue-shifting is one of the easier pixel art techniques to get a grasp on. ^u^

[Parsely]

I've read allll the pixel joint tutorials. I'm pretty sure I have them linked in the OP. I have a hard time anyways. (Time to read them again! )

[DragonDePlatino]

So...the other day I was working on the New_Underground creatures, and I realized that the whole time I was working on this graphics set, Cave Story had been a really strong influence. The flat shading, simple colors, eyes...the tell-tale signs were there. But looking between Cave Story's sprites and mine, I realized my sprites were lacking a lot of the same charm. In addition, I do think Bloax raised some valid points when he critiqued my sprites. So after a lot of thought, I decided to throw out two weeks of work and start from scratch. This time around, I'll be working with a 32-color palette instead of a 20-color palette, and I'll be adding a lot more details. Here's a comparison of Bird_New in the old and new styles...



So, what do you guys think? The new style is a lot more time-consuming, but I'm really liking the results.

[Tiruin]

So, what do you guys think? The new style is a lot more time-consuming, but I'm really liking the results.

/me gives a thumbs up. She remarks that the style is very detailed.
On another hand, I also wonder how you are able to make a rotating gif...GIF creation always fascinated me. >_<

[mastahcheese]

So, what do you guys think? The new style is a lot more time-consuming, but I'm really liking the results.

/me gives a thumbs up. She remarks that the style is very detailed.
On another hand, I also wonder how you are able to make a rotating gif...GIF creation always fascinated me. >_<

(I can help you learn, since you also use GIMP. It's actually pretty easy, once you know how to do it.)

Also, the new style is really cool.

[Tiruin]

So, what do you guys think? The new style is a lot more time-consuming, but I'm really liking the results.

/me gives a thumbs up. She remarks that the style is very detailed.
On another hand, I also wonder how you are able to make a rotating gif...GIF creation always fascinated me. >_<

(I can help you learn, since you also use GIMP. It's actually pretty easy, once you know how to do it.)

I'd love that, thank you.
Problems I'm having with GIMP: Text formatting (how to make stylish and very decorative text)

[mastahcheese]

So, what do you guys think? The new style is a lot more time-consuming, but I'm really liking the results.

/me gives a thumbs up. She remarks that the style is very detailed.
On another hand, I also wonder how you are able to make a rotating gif...GIF creation always fascinated me. >_<

(I can help you learn, since you also use GIMP. It's actually pretty easy, once you know how to do it.)

I'd love that, thank you.
Problems I'm having with GIMP: Text formatting (how to make stylish and very decorative text)

I haven't figured out how to get the text tool to work well enough for me. I just free-hand it.
(I'll send you a PM on how to get animations to work.)

[alexandertnt]

Wow, that looks incredible.

I'm terrable at choosing my colours. I have read various guides, but I can never make them look right for some reason. For example, I would never have chosen a dark red for the dark grass parts, because grass is green. Even though it looks real good in your version, it just wouldn't too me if I were the one drawing it for some reason, or something like that.

I'm glad that the grass shading looks alright though, It took several attemps to get anything that diddn't look like awful static or shapeless blobs.

The almost-identical greens are accidental though, and the result of the fact that the dirt tile/grass top, and flower are in seperate files (and the colours chosen independently). They are indended to be tiled and be used in a game engine (that image is actually a screenshot from Unity). I will try to keep my pallete a bit better organised to avoid stuff like this from happening.

Thanks for the adivce!