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[RujiK]

PALE MERIDIAN is a story ARPG. Emphasis is on the importance of NPC's as people. With a limited number of allies, your ultimate goal is to keep as many people alive and united for the end climax.

Features for the pixel ARPG:

• Large seamless world. No loading/transitions when you enter a new town.
• Three sided war. Your foes have more enemies than just you.
• Support for full 1080p with no forced upscale.
• Limited Minecrafty building on your property.
• Different play styles (Stealth, brute force, or coniving)
• Intelligent/Hard enemies. A 10 vs 1 fight is suicide.
• Activities besides fighting. Most of the game will have your weapon sheathed.
• The world isn't dead. If you do nothing, events still happen.

Pretty Forest


Enhance that!


Map Size


Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks

[fingerman]

Hey Rujik,

the day/night cycle looks good. Also that you intend for stuff to happen, even if you don't influence anything sounds cool.

[Forstride]

The art looks really nice.  Very soft colors, with a really lush and natural feel.  Only thing I'd recommend changing is making the night shading more of a purple/blue hue rather than pure black.

[RujiK]

Thanks for the feedback guys! Also the evening does turn bluish but the gif is super sped up so you can't really see it. As for a not 100% black night sky, I'll try giving it a few tweaks and see if anything works.

[RujiK]

Well Forstride, after trying a few color tweaks I ended up changing pretty much every color in the spectrum... (Except the night sky ironically) Behold!

WHICH IS BETTER?



(Bold colors are early WIP. Done in a few hours and will still need some tweaking.)
They're SUPER different, but I'm not sure if it's better. Can I get opinions? If you prefer one to the other, how strongly do you prefer it? Maybe a mix of the two? Maybe something else completely?

[fingerman]

The second one!

[Forstride]

The first one just looks bad IMO.  The colors are way too saturated.  Just curious, why do you want to change it?  I think the original style looks very nice and unique.

[foreignsubstances]

2nd set of subtle colors is best. 

[happymonster]

The 2nd set, but I'd remove some of the blue tint from the greens.

[Ashedragon]

The 2nd set, but I'd remove some of the blue tint from the greens. :)

I second this.

[TheWanderingBen]

My favourite allies are always in BioWare RPGs -- sometimes I really care about those little bits behind the screen! It sounds like you're trying to take a similar approach -- gameplay useful characters that the player can care about. Could be really cool!

Do you anticipate building conversation trees for this game? If so, how are you building them? I also have conversation trees in my game, and though I have a fairly good pipeline now, I always want to hear how other devs deal with it!

(In the very specific case that you don't have a conversation system yet, but would like to implement one, and happen to be working in Unity, I can highly recommend my current pipeline: I'm using Twine to write the conversations and UnityTwine to import them into the game (those are all free, and I don't work for Unity, Twine, or UnityTwine -- just a suggestion in case that problem is still up in the air ).

Good luck!

EDIT: Also, I agree with everyone else, the second screenshot looks much better!

[RujiK]

Mellow colors it is! Thanks for the advice all. I gave a slight contrast increase but nothing nearly as drastic as before.

The 2nd set, but I'd remove some of the blue tint from the greens.

But blue is my favorite color! I'll see what I can do.

Do you anticipate building conversation trees for this game? If so, how are you building them?

Yes, and already implemented. It's nothing fancy, I just use ID's as bookmarks. So the base string would be
"[90010] Want a Cookie? [90011]NO   [90012]YES   [90013]Cool"
And then you just go to the new string based on the selection's ID. It's a little more automated than that, but that's the base idea. Thanks for the advice though!

My favourite allies are always in BioWare RPGs

Me too! Mass Effect Companions are a big inspiration.


Sonic Pigs go to market.


How many pigs fit in a house? (Collision Test)


What does this thing look like? Is it ugly? It's been causing some confusion

[RujiK]

Roofing system! Makes houses more immersive and interesting to explore since you can't see inside unless your actually inside...

Which is preferable? The smooth fade:


Or retro chunky look:



Yes, a pixel aRPG where it doesn't load when you go in a building. Completely revolutionary! Maybe too far ahead of it's time.

[3dgeminis]

Smooth fade.

[Cranktrain]

Oh, I'd say the 'retro chunky fade' myself. I think the issue I have with smooth fades is that at half way through the background is blended with the foreground that the first time I have to wait for the fade to be nearly over to tell what's there and what isn't. You could always make the smooth fade a bit quicker though.

[Xonatron]

I love the "retro chunky look" idea, but the "smooth fade" looks better!

[Jasmine]

I am in love with the water tile animations! Superb work on that!

- As for the sprite. It looks like man. A VERY nude man.

- Not to knock a good binary question, but is there a way to combine the too? Have a retro clunky reveal but with the squares fading rather than being so... sharp, for lack of a better word? Like have the squares fade out in succession?

If I had to choose one or the other, though, I'd go for smooth.

[RujiK]

Thanks for the input guys!

@M4uesviecr Yep, it's a man! I've been told it looks like a golem on two different forums... Glad you like the water, it still needs shore/ripple animations so hopefully it will look even better.

Combining the two roof systems would be nice visually, but as DizzyDoo pointed out, it wouldn't be good for gameplay since it would take awhile to see what's inside. I think I'm gonna go smooth fade with a FAST fade out and a SLOW fade in. I want to avoid walking into a house and getting attacked by a monster you couldn't see yet.

Another roof related question. While indoors, should the outside go black?

Compare the two below:


The black looks more "cozy" to me, but there is a lot less to look at. In 1080p that will be lots of black.


It would work kinda like Dragon Warrior. Here is a video at the exact time some one goes in a house if you want a rough visualization.
https://youtu.be/XyxKoFxAKKU?t=685

[Geoff Moore]

Effin' beautiful, looking awesome. How about making the black outside a little translucent?

[TonyManfredonia]

I'm not sure about total black when you go inside, especially since you don't really enter a different "zone."  The fact that the whole game is open world/pre-loaded, perhaps you can somehow dim the outside?