Evil Animation: a game made for a 72 hour programming competition in which you fight barney, teletubbies, and big bird.  So embarrassing.

Here's something I did with what I've learned from your edit

I like it reminds me a bit of Ben2TheEdge's sprites.

It was indeed a blast! The game truly drips with nintendo-level polish. I have some embarrassing photos from the event, but I had to promise I wouldn't post them

I just can't keep quiet about this anymore, Swarms.  I'm just in love with your stuff.  The style, the palette, love it.  I'm adding you on MSN

XNA allows you to publish games only on Windows, WP7 and X360. That's hardly every major platform.

You can use mono-touch / mono-game to get a bit more mileage out of XNA.  It's what we're doing on our current project

curious how well these blend modes line up with the ones implemented in photoshop.  I know things can be a bit different from program to program.  Overlay is a good example of this.  How do they compare?

Those are quite the boobs. I'd prefer a bit smaller, but that's neither here nor there.  What I would suggest doing is loosen the shirt up a bit.  Her shirt is currently shrunk-wrapped to here breasts - tucking underneath them.  Shirts don't do that!

In my opinion this is definitely a game design problem and not an art one.  You've designed the game where the important bit is the tokens, and the character fights are just flavor/polish.  The reason nobody looks at the top is because currently a player is penalized for doing so.  They get distracted from the actual game and get behind.  No amount of visual tweaking will solve that.  You'll just frustrate the players more because they won't be able to focus on the game as well as they'd like to.  You don't want to penalize them by looking at the pretty pictures, you want to AWARD them with it.

Being not nearly as familiar with your game as you are, I can only give uneducated suggestions about how to do this.  My first instinct is to pause game play after the player completes a successful move so they have time to be rewarded with a pretty animation of what they accomplished.  Perhaps you should even slide the tokens out of view when you do this, forcing the player to look at the reward - leveling the playing field for those who would otherwise just keep focused on the tokens.

i actually also think the secret land is the less generic name, it reminds me of the secret garden by frances hodgson burnett (which is a great book). i think both names could work but who cares about names anyway, when was the last time you disliked a game because the name was bad?

good games with dum names:
- princess tomato in salad kingdom
- populous
- adventure
- super mario bros.
- noitu love

You sure like your lists these past couple days.  Love it.

spunky

Do I hear a cross promotion deal? 

Sorry if I sounded a bit negative.  The last time I commented on the name I didn't really give much insight, so I thought I'd clarify my thoughts a bit.  You also have some good points.  I can respect that.

When I first started making games and had no clue what the fetch I was doing, I had come up with this elaborate rpg idea.  The title of the game was "Indigo: The Dream World."  For the same reason I cringe when I look back at that name, I also cringe at "The Secret Land."  I feel like it's too easy of a name.  If you want the name to be about the location rather than the character, I'd suggest naming the game after the actual name of the secret land.  It would build depth.  Similar to Ghibli's "Laputa: Castle in the sky".  Or if you didn't want to do that, I'd probably choose a more unique quality of this land, besides secret, that sets it a part.

I don't get too interested about playing a game that takes place in a secret land.  'Secret' doesn't tell me anything - It could be a very dull place once I get there.  I might get really interested to play a game called "Sacred Pillars" or something.  It builds curiosity about what these pillars are and what that would look like.  There was an old movie called "the Secret Garden" and even that was kind of interesting because it described the place more than just "land".  What would a secret garden look like, I wonder?  Why would a garden be kept a secret?  Again, it builds curiosity

 The archer, although seemingly simple, has a sort of minimalism that builds mystery and intrigue.  You've fallen into the same trap that Owl Boy did - which was also a placeholder name, but has become such an identity of the project that they had to keep it.

so bitter.  I thought it was funny, so I thought I'd share.  Yes, I don't mind so much if something is moved/deleted, though some transparency would be greatly appreciated.

Can the mods give me a heads up via PM if they're going to move my threads and why.  It's very confusing to me when this happens - especially when my thread gets moved to a subforum I cannot see.

Someone at work linked me to these and I thought they were absolutely brilliant.  Thought I'd share it with you...

Character Art Guide:
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/workshop/Dota2CharacterArtGuide.pdf

Texture Mapping Guide:
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/workshop/Dota2CharacterTextureGuide.pdf

BlinkOk:
This iso view was kind of a test to see if we could get away with it.  I'm still unsure of it myself.  But if we do keep it, we're definitely not changing the other themes to be the same way.  I dunno.  I think it'll be easier to decide once I make a test level.

Paste:
yeah depending on the screen I'm looking at, the theme3 graphics I've made look a bit jarring.  It is a bit interesting of a choice to put the saturation in the background for this theme, but that was done because we wanted white foreground tiles.  It's kind of a flipped way of sorting priority, but I think it's working.

Thanks for posting that moi, man metal slug is one beautiful game

[maintain control]

I've yet to see any games that feature some of the more complex pixel art like the kind you see in Pixel Joint's Hall of Fame for example: http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/17123.htm

The only thing that comes close is Metal Slug and a few others, but it's still nowhere near this level of density and detail; that's just not practical to animate. Dan, if I missed the game you worked on that used pixel art that looks like this, then please do show.

You're absolutely right that some pieces might be too ambitious to be practical for games, but I guess that depends on the artist.  I'm not going to give you examples of my art, because I don't think it'd illustrate my point well enough.  Instead I'll use extreme examples.  Ironically, the image you posted probably isn't the best example for your point. Despite the scale of the piece, he actually didn't use many colors - 16 for that entire image - though he didn't adhere to any limitations of specific systems.  The artist of the piece is Snake who also is the artist on the similarly complex indie game, Owl Boy.  Often times he uses full-screen pixel illustrations for rooms in his game.  He even showed me a work in progress of one entire town that was just a single huge image.

Gameplay footage of Owlboy:



(and believe me, this doesn't show anything compared to what he's working on)

Here's an image from the crazy artist that goes by Fool:
http://www.pixeljoint.com/files/icons/full/st_3.png

No, this is not exactly a mockup.  He was actually developing this game.  I saw many previews from different parts of this game as he was working on it.  I may not agree with using pixel art for a game of this scale personally, but I certainly cannot argue with the results and how beautiful it is.

and here is some crazy animations just as ambitious by the same artist - some of these were absolutely being made for his game.  The guy is a machine:
http://www.pixeljoint.com/files/icons/full/birbir.gif
http://www.pixeljoint.com/files/icons/full/fancer_full2.gif
http://www.pixeljoint.com/files/icons/full/22.gif

There are pixel artist that exist today that do stuff that those systems could have never done, and that's cool; their art functions more as a painting than anything that would be practical for a game.

This was the main statement I disagreed with the most and made me cringe.  You're suggesting that any pixel art that isn't done with NES or SNES specs are somehow not suited for games.  NES and SNES specs aren't the cause of good pixel art.  They are just two examples of many among game systems and their limitations.  There's great pixel art on the C64, the original Macintosh, the Amiga, and many more old systems.  And it didn't stop there.

Pixel art has it's place and it's uses.  When I first got in the industry, I was doing pixel art for cell phone games (pre iphone).  Not because it was "cool", but because phones actually required it for two reasons; 1. because of the limited memory and color output of the screen, and 2. because of the size of the screens, pixel art provided the best possible clarity for assets as opposed to other methods.  Our limits tended to be indexed 256 color images.  The main reason you want to keep color count low as a pixel artist is to maintain control of your image while achieving a desired look.  Sometimes that means 16 colors.  Sometimes that means 64.  The number really isn't so important.  And let me tell you, there were some beautiful J2ME phone games that would not meet spec for SNES.  A lot of the pixelation community started on these games.

I've never seen anything on Pixel Joint that was in a game, because none of it would be practical in a game.

so setting aside all the extreme examples, there are also TONS of more "practical" examples on PJ as well.  One easy way is to just search the word "mockup"
http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixels/new_icons.asp?search=mockup
many of these could possibly be similar to SNES specs.  Many of these are not.



I guess the point that I'm trying to make from all this is as follows...
good pixel art is not so much about the system specs you're using, it's about maintaining clarity and control at the pixel-level within the (often self-defined) limits provided.

Agreed. There's nothing wrong with doing pixel art if you're going to do it right. In a lot of cases, it's not done right or it just looks bad. I have a particular fondness for (good) pixel art because I grew up with that era of gaming. When I'm doing pixel art, I try to follow the rules set forth by the NES and SNES platforms. There are pixel artist that exist today that do stuff that those systems could have never done, and that's cool; their art functions more as a painting than anything that would be practical for a game.

as a pixel artist who worked on commercial pixel games both for reasons of style as well as for system limitations I cringed at this assessment.

waaaaayyy toooooo saturated on this screen at work.  Definitely will fix that