Hi everyone, great work, you're making me very excited about the game. Some humble feedback:
In general, I think you have the tendency to make small things too oversized. Specific examples:
- Weapons lying on the ground. (Compare them to the size of wielded weapons.)
- Tiny items (Meph's crafts posted recently.)
- Meph's tree trunks (they are huuuge... the size of a bed.)
- The cats!
It seems like you always try to use the whole tile. It allows you to use more pixels, which allows you to make fancier graphics but I'm afraid it's a bit counterproductive. Let's take Meph's crafts or the weapon items. I'd say you're adding too much visual details to the game - while the crown graphics are fancy indeed, the actual in-game item is very unimportant and doesn't deserve so much focus. It really shouldn't be the size of a dwarf! You need to realise that by making unimportant things big you're stealing visual focus from more important things (creatures) which harms clarity. Items should be small and easy to ignore, almost merge to the background. If a dwarf walks through a stockpile, he/she should be clearly visible even in the corner of your eye. I'm afraid that with these huge items, dwarves would be drown in visual bloat and unnecessarily hard to spot.
Item sprites should only be as large as you need to in order to make them distinctive, and not a single pixel larger. Take the weapon items. You are already able to make weapons distinctive enough when wielded in hand, and there really isn't any reason to make the item sprites any larger than that just for adding more detail – that's just a visual distraction.
Making small things oversized also makes you want to make big things even bigger - see the elephant debate. I understand that if a cat is almost the same size as an elephant, you want to differentiate them a bit. Instead of making the elephant bigger, make the cat (much) smaller.
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As for the clothes debate:
While theoretically, showing the actual items that the dwarves wear seems cool, you have to realise that the in-game economy / clothing system is very primitive. IIRC, dwarves currently have only 3 different dyes, and everybody wears the same set of clothing. Showing realistic items would only have one effect: everybody would look the same, it would be a visual mess, and you would lose any ability to tell different dwarves apart. You can already test this in Stonesense - all dwarves are interchangeable, you can't see individuals.
Telling dwarves apart is critical! You need that for narrative purposes, to be able to create stories in your head. Anything that makes all dwarves look the same is the exact opposite of what you want to achieve.
Even just using profession colors gives you much more variety that using the 3 dye colors that the game has. But forget about professions! Much more important are the unique profession sprites, like mayors, nobles, priest, guard captains. You really want these to stand out from the crows, not to merge with everyone else.
When, and only when, the game actually makes nobles wear fancier clothing, makes blacksmiths wear blacksmith tools, guard captains wear different-colour uniforms, makes priests wear priestly robes... only at this point it becomes useful to show the actual items worn. Until that time it would be actively harmful because it would just create a visual mess of non-distinctive individuals.
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It all comes down to this: the purpose of graphics is to add clarity. Not to add fanciness.
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And please allow me one wish: different tiles for different tree species! This would probably mean different bark and different leave sprites. Trees are so omnipresent that it would be a shame to have them all look the same.
Keep up the good work, I can't wait to play this!
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Topic: Steam/Itch.io tileset - Mayday/Ironhand - Discussion and Suggestions (Read 461528 times)