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[Lizardheim]

They are throwing a shadow, whilst their lighting makes it seem like they shouldn't.

[happymonster]

Well the lighting is from the top-left, I thought I was shadowing the bits of the walls where intersections would cast a shadow.

[mokesmoe]

(excuse the bad mspaint art.)
The left is what you are doing, the right is what you should be doing:


The sides of the walls facing away from the sun should be in the shade.

[Sam]

Following on from what others have already said, I took the liberty of mangling your mockup to add more accurate shadowing.



The issue you had was that walls were failing to self-shadow.  They're casting shadows on to other objects, but not on to themselves.

Unfortunately when they do self-shadow, the entire face of the wall that's visible to the player is going to always be in shade which makes them less interesting to look at.  Rather than just darken the now-shaded walls I also removed some of the specular highlighting they had on them, which of course just makes them even less interesting to look at.

Shifting your light source position should fix it up, like so:



The shadow projected on to the face of the vertical walls should probably not be an exact 45 degree angle, but anything else is going to start looking messy with such low resolution.

[happymonster]

Excellent! Thank you very much for explaining further and for going to the trouble of doing mockups. 

With the T-section walls in your altered shadow direction edit, should the shadow not go all the way upto the top of the wall, rather than diagonally down (i.e. South East) as they do now?

[mokesmoe]

They should be going diagonally down at a steep angle so the slope meets up with the bottom in one line, but it would look really odd in this low resolution.

[happymonster]

Ah yes I know what you mean! Yeah, the low resolution does contrain things a bit, but it does make it much easier for a programmer to do acceptable game art.

[happymonster]

I tried the proper shadows but it does look a bit blocky in low resolution. Then I reasoned that as the shadows will be done in-game I could have them at a higher resolution. However the mixture of low and high res looked a bit odd unless I smooth out all the low-res graphics.



I'm not sure about this though, I think it loses the charm..

[kaboom]

I actually think the mixture of pixelsizes in this case adds some charm. It certainly makes the characters look delicious.

Here's a little edit with less colors and some hue shifts.

[---]

I actually think the mixture of pixelsizes in this case adds some charm. It certainly makes the characters look delicious.

Here's a little edit with less colors and some hue shifts.

Nice, I love the rounded edges. Gives a little 2x SAL filter effect. I like it.

[happymonster]

Part of me likes the 2xSai filtered look, and part of me thinks it just looks filtered and low-resolution versions are better. It's like the scanlines question..

[happymonster]

The hue shifts do make it look warmer. Thanks Green!

[Sean A.]

That look really really cool, reminds me a bit of 3d dot game heroes how it had low res everything but then had crazy water and shadow effects.

[Starflier]

Essentially a side-scrolling shooter, but instead of a gun, you have a sword, which you can either run into enemies with, or throw at them, then catch when it rebounds back. While you're holding your sword you are invincible, but ramming into enemies forces you back, and if you fall off the right side of the screen, you die.

[diwil]

I actually think the mixture of pixelsizes in this case adds some charm. It certainly makes the characters look delicious.

Here's a little edit with less colors and some hue shifts.

Nice, I love the rounded edges. Gives a little 2x SAL filter effect. I like it.

Yeah, I enjoy this style tremendously. :O Ideas bubbling... :D

[Inane]

I'd go with the smooth look; if anything, it's unique, while lo-fi pixel art is pretty much the most common style of art by TIGS folks.

[happymonster]

Decisions.. Decisons! 
(I'll probably just have support for both, to make it easier)

[superflat]

Another vote for smooth.  It's nicely different.

[Josiah Tobin]

Another vote for smooth.  It's nicely different.

Yeah, I'd say smooth as well. It's so smooth. Like peanut butter.

~Josiah

[Nugsy]

I'm in the smooth van! Looks cool!