I didn't think to anthropomorphize it! I thought it was just creepy. Like a streetlight in a dark alleyway, but smaller. But it's more sad than creepy when it's the size of a lamp.

Tip: If working with triangular pixels is too weird at first, try starting with square pixels and converting them, two triangles to a square.



Then refine them so that they're not tilted (or at least tilted differently).

Less talking more pixels, you guys! I don't care what shape they are suffice that they are elements that make up pictures.

Tile one of these and use the fill tool. It's fun!






Edit:

Honest review left! It was less than positive, but hopefully a wall of text will make up for it.

Fairness is definitely a problem; the difficulty varies wildly depending on what the random level generator comes up with. I don't feel like I have enough control over the ball's direction; I can see a brick, but short of drawing a vertical cloud and pwning myself in the process, I can't do much about it. The angle of the cloud should have more of an effect on the angle of the ball, or there should be more air resistance to make the ball's horizontal motion slow down faster. I don't feel like I have enough control over the ball's speed, since I can't aim toward or away from good and bad things. Juggling a red ball is really annoying, and it's frustrating when the ball flies up and scrolls the screen beyond the coins I haven't finished collecting. These would no doubt be less annoying and frustrating if I had any control over when they happened.

I don't like how I stop drawing clouds so abruptly. I can only estimate where the line I'm drawing ends, and if I estimate wrong, I get a cheap death. It'd be great if there were an indication that told me how close I am to finishing the line, an indication that I've stopped drawing, or if I didn't need to stop drawing at all. In  a similar minigame in Mario 64 DS, you can draw the line as long as you want, but Mario (the "ball") doesn't bounce as high. In a similar minigame in Warioware Touched, you can keep extending the end of the line, but the beginning of the line shortens as you do so, so you can move the line all over the screen, but it's always a fixed length. I think either of these would work pretty well.

When the ball flies off the top of the screen, it's annoying to have to guess where it's going to land, and if I guess wrong, there's another cheap death. It'd be nice if either the screen scrolled to keep up, or there were some kind of indicator to tell you where the ball is (and, ideally, its direction, like when you pause the game).

The art on the title screen and the background is beautiful, and the art everywhere is completely incoherent and inconsistent. You've got outlined, fading clouds, a gradient on a ball, textured backgrounds, a typewriter font on the title screen, a serif font in the menu, either plenty of different sans-serif fonts all over the place or a few which have been scaled a lot, shadows in some places, menu buttons with two parts (the text scales independently of the image (the image which, incidentally, is textured and outlined)), pixel art, and probably some other stuff I've forgotten. Some unification is in order! There should be one art style, two at the most if absolutely necessary. You're probably only likely to solve this if you have an artist in-house doing all the cleanup.

As an iPhone app, you need to animate those menus a bit. It would really help if you actually adhered to the iPhone UI guidelines; it took me ages to find my way around. The hierarchy is unclear and the text is poorly chosen.

Are they achievements or challenges? Use consistent terminology. Whatever they are, they're unreadable in that small yet upscaled white-on-black font at the bottom of the screen. I had to relaunch the app to read the first part of the welcome message; I missed it the first time around.

That "touch to edit" field? Make it selected by default. That, or increase the touching area; it's hard to aim for it.

Take your logo out of the background of the menu. It clutters up the screen and makes the text less readable. It's not going to make people happier about Tumbleweed Interactive.

The underlying game you have is really fun, and if you get rid of a bunch of little flaws, people will see that a lot more clearly. Cheers from a (visual/UI/game) design geek who enjoys nitpicking!

For when you want to be evil to someone, without actually eating them.

Also, if anyone of you have access to american iTunes and have an iPhone, I have five free gifts to give away (our game), since it's holliday and all! 

If you have any left, I promise to leave an honest review!

[f/16/local]

I agree with Sparky, these all seem usef/16/local

 

In the interest of constructive criticism, the one on the left looks like he's staring at something delicious and the one on the right is asking if it's okay to look now. Also, to conform to the existing smiley set, they would need brown strokes for the lines and antialiasing to avoid jaggies. The pencil is great, and it would be perfect with some antialiasing.

I think it would work better if it were grey, so it wouldn't blend in as much with the hand and it could work as a generic pen/pencil/tablet stylus, but that's probably pedantry on my part.

Show > Tell Edit for the pencil:

Core Xii and lurkers with similar objections: I'm in the share-your-ideas-it's-good-for-you camp, but I can understand the fear of putting them on the Internet for all its evil people to see. Be sure to discuss them in private channels (IRL, PM, IM, email), though. People you know aren't going to profit off your brain without your finding out, and feedback from anyone is usually invaluable.

Oh, mice are great! They're just suboptimal in competitive environments. I made a mouse-only avoid-the-enemies game and I found that the high scores were based more on mouse quality than on player skill. The worst players on the best hardware outperformed the best players on the worst hardware.

It was much more fun than keyboard controls would have allowed, though!

Edit: necropologies

First off, I'm super excited by this game! The art is delicious and I like the ideas so far.

You said the game should encourage tribes to stick together, and I think one way of doing that would be to have the camera dictated not only by your location, but by your tribemates'. For instance, all the members of one tribe could share one camera, whose location is the tribe's mean/median/mode. That way, if the buffalo rider runs off to the left without everyone else, he ends up running off-camera and can't see anything. Or he ends up running to the edge of the camera and he can't see in front of him, but he's always visible onscreen, even though his tribemates aren't. Or maybe the camera is moved only a small amount in the direction of the mean/median/mode of the tribe, so that he always knows where to go to find everyone else. The scouts, of course, might have their cameras work differently--maybe they could move their cameras freely (with the limit being that they have to be onscreen). And the chief could have a better camera somehow, but I'm not sure how.

Actually, I'm not sure that a mean/median/mode camera would be the best idea if implemented to the extreme, but cameras should emphasize characters' strengths. The buffalo rider should be able to see far ahead of him while he's riding, the better to avert obstacles and aim for enemies. The war drummer and shaman should have good views of their friends. Stuff like that.

Maybe animals could factor in to the war drummer's drumming. For instance, a bird could circle overhead and it would be beneficial to beat the drum every time a bird matches his x-position. Or the plants could react to and grow with his drumming, and he needs to beat the drum at the end of every flower bloom animation or something. He can't beat drums based on the music alone; he needs visual cues. What else could those visual cues be?

Maybe buffalo riders could be the only ones who can get buffalo to jump to higher ground? Then riders aren't inhibited by the weight of the animal, but other people are.

As a trackpad user, I think mouse motion should be avoided in a game such as this. Players with gaming mice have an advantage over regular mouse users and trackpad users. But that might be my ideology speaking; I don't consider multiplayer games where timing and accuracy of input make a difference to be fair unless all players have the same kind of input, AEBE. The keyboard allows for this.

I look forward to being a war drummer!

To my knowledge nobody's ever done a game where you play the endless minions who are pitted against the all-powerful hero, although playing the zombies in Left 4 Dead could be close to that - I haven't played it. But imagine, let's take Doom as an example, there's an AI playing the DOOMguy hero, and you are put into the body of the nearest enemy and have to whittle down his health or whatever as best you can. If you die, not too much of a problem as there are tons more enemies in the level for you to take over.

I love this! To take it one step further, the AI could take control of your character when you're not controlling it. To pause, you just put down the controller, and the fight keeps going (but doesn't actually get anywhere, if the balance is right).

There could be a button just to make you hold still! So the AI doesn't kick in.

            
          
      

the guns in this stump leave something to be desired

Here you go:



(In practice, of course, the skips would happen much less frequently.)

 

           
       
                             


           
       
                              

dang syntax

A BUG

Lil' bit of manual!

      
   
      

Nice!

     
 
     


     
 
       

Thats actually quite a crappy circle because it's just not right.

I said that it's a way, not a circle! Everyone knows that four ways make a circle.

In this case, as I forgot to note, a 16*16 one!

Draw a lot of crap. Stuff you're willing to throw away. Do it in your spare time. Any time you have a minute or two free, fire up MS Paint (or whatever) and try to recreate something real nearby. Try to match the curvature on the handle of the coffee cup. If it doesn't seem like it would be fun to draw the rest of the cup, don't! Have fun while you're doing it and you'll be inclined to do it more. Lots of unconditional practice can do wonders. By unconditional, I mean that if you commit yourself to making something good or complete or complex, you'll get depressed when you fail and you won't want to try again.

Once you've practiced enough, you'll find yourself repeating certain patterns. I'm sure every pixel artist here recognizes this:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

It's the easiest way of drawing a nice-looking circle. Three dots, two dots, one dot, two dots, three dots. It's used on the smileys here. If you use this pattern enough, eventually you'll come across a road sign with rounded corners and think to yourself, "Hey, I could use the 3-2-1-2-3 pattern to replicate this."

When you can recognize these sorts of patterns and you can notice IRL when a pattern might be useful, you can explore your imagination with the same eye. Hey, this gnome's buck teeth have rounded corners.

In summary: practice unconditionally drawing stuff you're willing to throw away. Practice doesn't necessarily make perfect, but it's a great start.