I have a soft spot for Mucha. ^_^  Well done!  You made her a bit edgier/darker than Mucha's work.

Why is the goggled kid holding a handset in his left hand?

Looks more Eurocomic to me, but I like it.   He's got style.

Slightly at a tangent but I think it's premature to decide that you want your building menu to be radial.  Just label that as a UI design decision to be made down the road, and think about alternatives.  That is - imagine if clicking to bring up a building menu brought up a toolkit window, a rectangular grid showing all the buildings available.  This would be immediately accessable, the user would be able to memorize which squares correlated with which building, and it would require only two clicks total to build any building.

If you have more buildings than a 4x4 or 5x5 grid, then possibly you have too many buildings for people to keep straight in their minds.

Cute!

For the first animation, the head turning, the shiny spot on the top bounces back oddly after it turns.  Is it possible it was intended to have it stay there throughout, rather than moving?

Congratulations, may it bring lots of joy and relatively low crunch time compared to the gaming industry median! 

Looking a lot niftier there, Ishi!

I'd personally like to see RPG mixed with shmup. You can level up your weapons and character, but when you start up a battle, it becomes a shmup.

Have you seen Escape Velocity?  Escape Velocity Nova is the third in the series but each is standalone, there's no need to get the previous ones.  It's basically in the Privateer/Elite line, but 2D.  Flying between worlds is shmup-style, with possible enemies in between, but you can upgrade your ship and buy new weapons.  You can take or decline missions from various factions which shape the overall plot you follow.

Obviously this doesn't conform to the JRPG-style, but I thought it bore mention as a game that does have both RPG and shmup elements.  In other words, a mash-up shouldn't be thought of as having to be a Frankenstein-like mix, if you can figure out a theme that holds it together.

They were drawn with posemaniac models as reference, so that may explain it? Of course, it's very likely just my lack of experience that causes the look of something being not-quite-right.

Not familiar with the specific software, but I'll suspect it doesn't model body fat/muscles, so those probably won't bunch up when you move the body into different poses.  If you look at typical live drawing studies, you'll see a lot of attention paid to just these things.  In particular, you'll see that your limbs seem rather straight.

Not that I can claim great expertise in the subject, just a few art classes.

Ah, the old performance bug-a-boo!  Did you use Torque2D's LUA for the script then?

No iPhone here, otherwise I'd check it out.

My take:

Shot takes an 'I impacted something' call.  It destroys itself and sends its target a 'you were shot here for this much damage' message.

Enemy takes an 'I was shot here' call.  It can handle the logic of whether to explode, be wounded, etc.

For the moving platform issue, I'd implement that by having the objects store the object they were directly on.  Each update, objects track whatever they were sitting on and move with it, then implement any additional logic such as 'no longer supported by this other object, fall over'.  You have less messiness to get through that way.

What's been most effective for me is starting with something really small, so that I can actually have it working, then add on to it a step at a time.  I try to get something accomplished each day on it.

Were they drawn from models?  I'm thinking they may have been constructed, since I can see some of the construction ovals.

I'm not sure what if anything might be off, but they don't have quite the look of live studies, which is what prompted me to ask.

Pretty sharp!  I'm curious about how it felt to develop with Torque 2D as well.  I played with the 3D engine once a long time ago and felt it was too complex for my skill level at the time.

Today I've been working on cloud sprites for the background.

They look great!  I love the stylized rendition.

I like it, the arched openings on the side add flavor.  There's a big bit of wall space between the arches and the big opening, you could probably tuck a statue or a bas relief of the local empire/king/whatnot's crest or symbol there.

More ship bitmaps!  This one's an enemy ship.


There'll be a gun mounted on top of the ship at the middle.  Just one, since it is small!

Welcome!  Best of luck with your upcoming trip to GDC.

IMO what you do is:

1. Record icons which overlap each other
2. Designate the highest one as the anchor and align it to the side of the screen
3. Align other icons under it, each one's top being at the previous one's bottom

For second iteration you just line the new icons up under bottommost one of those that were previously aligned.  If it goes off the screen, move it over to the right instead.

I dunno, look at whatever Spore did?

Here's what I'd suggest:

1. Store both the 'original location' and the 'actual display location'.
2. On your first pass, detect icons that are bunched up and line them up along the edge of the screen.  Mark these icons (temporarily) as 'moved'.
3. On your second pass, detect icons that are now obscured by the newly positioned icons, and move them up as well.  Again, mark them as moved.

Repeat passes until no icons are obscured, or all icons have been moved.