Thanks!

So would I.. sadly I don't seem to have the motivation or concentration to work on big projects anymore like I did when I was younger. Still, I enjoy tinkering with bits of art or programming here and there.

I've tweaked the colours a bit more as I've added new sprites. I've removed the orange skin colour as I don't think I could justify it just for the human faces. Instead I've tweaked the browns/reds and using one of those yellow-brown's for the faces.

I've had to remove the darkest blue as I need a pink/purple for the genestealers. It might be a bit too purple for the human faces.

Added a gretchin and trying to keep roughly the same design as the original miniature.

Also tried to add a little more shading to improve the faces and make them look more like an excellent painted miniature with shading and depth rather than a flat coloured one.

The colours are all still very saturated, but I think that's keeping with the original game? I might have to desaturate them a bit..

No doubt more tweaking and working on them will continue.

I love that kitheif! 

It sounds strange to say this but in some ways it was easier when doing art on the Atari ST or Amiga. On the ST you knew that you only had 16 colours to play with (baring any palette change tricks which seem very rare in games due to the CPU cost). Similarly on the Amiga (ECS/OCS) you knew you had 32 colours in-game (and maybe a graduated background with the help of the Copper chip).

However on PC's now there are no restrictions at all on the image size or number of colours.  So it would be easy to think that I could just add a few more colours when I'm struggling with only 16 to play with, or use 32 colours like an Amiga version would have been like. And that's right, it would make it easier and probably look better!

But, it wouldn't help stretch yourself against limitations, which is what is fun about doing these..

Improved the Chaos Marine (cheated a little and added 1 pixel in height for the horns, so 16 x 17 in total).
Tweaked colours and sacrificed the lightest green for an extra dark grey for the floor and walls.
Added Ork (though still need to work on it).

Right, sorted out the colours, added Imperial Fists and Blood Angels as well as a Chaos Marine. Had to sacrifice the darkest blue for a skin colour, but still looks good!

Many many years ago I had an Atari ST and used to like playing Space Crusade on there, apart from one thing.. I hated the completely random nature of everything. I wanted something more like Laser Squad and with that viewpoint rather than the completely top-down view in Space Crusade.

So at that time I made some 16 x 16 sprites for all the characters in the game (in 8 directions and 16 colours) and was very proud of them (though looking back I imagine they would look pretty poor today). These sprites have been long since lost, but I thought I'd have a go as an exercise at doing a few more with the same 16 x 16 size and 16 colour limitations. Just to see how I'd do it now..

The difficulty is that there are greys, blues, reds, greens and yellows used for the armours and skin tones of the marines, orks, etc.. in the game. This doesn't leave many shades for each hue. I've tried to use black as both the shadow colour and apply as a kind of partial outline away from the light source of top-left. I've also tried to make the various parts of the sprites (hand, gun, feet) stand out in this way as I do have a tendency to always over-detail.

Does it work so far? Here are an ultramarine commander and an ultramarine trooper:



10 colour used so far. I need to add reds, greens and probably make those orange/browns more yellowish for the final palette.

The graphics style is really nice! How do you draw those characters?

I've now added in the particle effect so that when your weapon fire hits a wall you get the ricochet effect and if you hit a unit you also get the unit damage effect. It looks better than I expected!

In my game I managed to introduce bugs that:

• Made a seemingly random set of units invisible.
• Duplicated units.
• Allowed units to attack their allies.
• Allowed units to attack themselves.
• Pushed units to -1 elevation even though I have no mechanics for underground battles.
  

...all in the movement code.

So unless you can top that you are probably pretty competent.

  Impressive! 

Spent yesterday going through the code and trying to fix some of the movement / UI bugs. The process of selecting, walking, turning etc.. sounds relatively simple, so how I mentioned to turn it into a clusterfuck of bugginess I have no idea!

Sometimes I write terrible code.. 

Lovely art!

I'd say 2 and 5 (if read from left-right, top-bottom)

Looks good!

Lovely art style

The poor tree!

You vandal!! 

The new version looks really nice!

Improved a little..

I like it alot, especially the graphics style and the story. However the jumping and movement is too floaty.

Good work!

I love the sprites, the colours you have used are really nice! 

For the trees, if you made the greens more of a yellow-green, rather than the blue-green they are now it would probably look more like day time without doing anything else to the graphics.