Thanks! I've got two different game designs that I'm bouncing between at the moment, one a tactical turn-based strategy with a bunch of these Dwarf guys, the other a roguelike with a handful of character classes to choose between. (This one is a basic warrior.) Either one could use this guy and more like him and a bunch of hex-grid tiles on the ground so I'm just testing out the visuals first. I'm also still lacking a coder so if/when I collaborate with one, their preferences could swing the game design in either direction.

RedCasket - really fun character designs!

Here's a new character I've been working on this week, keeping the clean, crisp look from the last model I posted (the astronaut above) but a totally different character/setting and more personality.

[Mage Maze]

Hi, I'm Mike. I was on these forums about 5 years ago, but enough time has passed that I should probably reintroduce myself.

I'm a long-time game industry vet. I've worked on big PC games, childrens' education titles, and for the past 5 years I've been at mobile game developer Kabam. Professionally I've been an Art Director, but I came up through the ranks so I know how to do some of everything: Game design, concept design, 2D and 3D art, traditional, sprite & 3D animation, UI, writing, and more.

Back when i was here last time I was working on an indie game called Mage Maze. It's still in progress, but mostly on the engineering side these days, leaving my time mostly free. Currently I'm in-between jobs and would love to spend the time working on a new indie game. The only catch is to find an experienced coder to collaborate with. If that works out, cool, otherwise I might just pitch some of my own ideas around and see if people are interested once they see what I have in mind and what my art style is. (Which you can see if you check out the links in my sig.)

Cheers!

[DangerMomentum]

Hi, everyone! I haven't posted on these forums for ages but have been following them again now that I'm trying to get back into indies. I woke up this morning inspired to assemble an astronaut and a tile-based environment for him to explore. All of this is just modeling, no textures aside from a small one on the faceplate.



I have no idea what the game is here. I just felt inspired to create it for look and feel. If I were to take it further, I might actually add some simple textures and one or two more colors to him, a few details on the suit here and there, and maybe an ambient occlusion pass baked in. And honestly, more interesting worlds to explore could be a lot of fun - lush, tile-based, low-poly worlds full of alien plants and creatures. It just seems silly to build that without a game concept to make it for. So if anyone has any game ideas that this would work with or is inspired, please share!

DangerMomentum - I like the isometric tile look. You could experiment with a higher camera, looking down on the tiles more, to preserve some of the feel of the top-down perspective. But I also like it precisely because it's not top down like many other roguelikes.

matwek - Looking good! I agree with SolarLune's suggestion.

Either one! Just make them match and see which size eye works better, the 4 pixel one or the 2 pixel one.

[Yrgkala]

FONTS!!



any favorites?

I think the thicker ones - #2 and #4 - work best as a title, but with some tweaks for legibility. Like in #2, making the 'c' more legible by not attaching it to the 'M' and cleaning it up so it looks even less like an 'e.' For #4, what Yrgkala said.

Keo - Great characters, but I especially love the animation and the little head bobble on the pantry-clad hero. I'd totally love playing him in a game!

Thanks for the paint-over, Knotty Spine. I especially like what you did with the smoke coming out the top. Thanks for the reference, too!

Love the birds and the dalek!

Not as exciting, but here are some shop items I've been working on for MageMaze:



I'm especially pleased with the potions (1up, acid, and befuddle)and the repair icon (the duct tape.) Yeah, it's a little silly... but so's the game!

Way cool!

[McMutton]

I'm a couple pages late but dang, McMutton, that model is really sweet!

Willy-wilson - That is really nice! I'd love to see a whole game with guys like that. Are you working on one or was this just for fun?

[Thatshelby]

Thatshelby - Really nice, simple, and cute! The only problem area is the left-most red bird, which is hard to read because it's overlapping the grey stone slab which is just about the same value as the red bird. Lots of solutions possible, like spacing out the slabs differently, or making the lower right one shorter like the one on the lower right, or making the grey ones lighter, or making the reed birds brighter... Good luck! (and yeah, what are these for anyhow?)

Letsap - The silhouettes are clean but the faces are hard to read imho.

Delicious - Lovely work! Great design and the details and lighting are super! I agree with Derek's comment about changing the foliage colors, unless you're specifically going for (or have no choice but to go for) a very narrow palette.

Bones, Ted Martens, and Kamac - Thanks, glad you like how they came out!

[Wayno]

Wayno - Welcome!

KeeWeed - Stickybump looked fun, 'though I had a hard time telling what was going on. Fishbowl really looks interesting. It reminds me of Continuity, which I also loved. So i'm especially looking forward to seeing how this progresses. It's hard to say without playing it but I imagine that it might be easy to lose one's bearings, even with only 6 screens... have you considered making each face of the cube a different (or slightly different) color?

Oh, and +1 for the use of obscure Pink Floyd in the trailer! 

This is just looking gorgeous! The characters, the environment... I'm loving those huge chunky slabs of stone in the last post, as well as the subtle touches on the more grid-like layouts (like the hints of skulls in the blocks.) Nice work, really looking forward to seeing more of this!

[DanSharman]

DanSharman - Nice character design. Nate's paintover (pixel-over?) really brought out a nice sense of dimensionality on him!

Mr-venusaur - Nice sprite. You got a lot out of very few pixels!

WillyWilson - I'm having a lot of trouble reading your pixel font. Is it "Aritsilence?" Maybe I have it right and it's just confusing because I don't know what that means.

Anyhow, thought I'd share some recent work of my own, some enemy animations from my game.
There's Leif the Thief:



and the Infjernal:



Yes, I know some people are going to disapprove of the second one because it's not "true" pixel art because I used a glow on him... but man, it looks nice against the game's dark background tiles! Still, it 95% qualifies as pixel art, right?

[Veo]

Veo - Those characters look terrific! Even at that size, each one is really disinct and has a recognizable silhouette and key features. Nice work!

Ted Martens - Really cute character! He (She?) feels very gelatinous: What about adding a little squash when it lands, a little bit of the body compressing and expanding outwards for just a frame or two to help it feel more alive and soft? (unless you're capped in number of frames, of course! )

Strife - I like the eyebrows, but if they're not working for you, what about something else to add interest to the head, like ears or  mandibles... or even just darkening the shadow under the brow (slanted lines above the eyes) to make him look mean without needing the eyebrows? Either way, nice design!

[DrDoctors]

DrDoctors and Franklins Ghost - Thanks for the suggestions! Your posts (including the earlier ones) have given us a lot to think about and we've certainly been talking a lot  amongst ourselves about solutions, trying to come up with a way to satisfy the desire to move faster  while balancing the fact that MageMaze is still at its heart a turn-based tactical game. We'll keep working on it and share progress as we go!

Kapser - Yep, we definitely took a lot of inspiration from Labyrinth. Thanks, glad you like how it's coming along.

And just so I'm not just posting thank-you notes, here's a new screen from the game, our in-game information about each of the monsters and characters you encounter. The text isn't final - I need to edit it down to be tighter - but at least this gives you an idea of the feature.



I just repainted a lot of the in-game UI buttons over the last two nights so that they all match (including that "back" button in the upper left) so hopefully we'll have some new menu screens to share soon too... Not that that's the most exciting part of the game, it's just all got to be done!

Great looking art, and your demon concepts, from this finished one to the golems to the really rough ones you posted, are all really clean and distinctive. I like the glowing eyes and the stone in the staff - great idea to add a touch of color to further help distinguish baddies from each other.

I also really like the gameplay demo you posted way back, where you can see his hands clinging to each surface. Looking forward to seeing how that translates to the game once the art is all flesh out. Good luck and thanks for the inspiring posts!

Well, it's been just a little while since we've updated this thread...  

But we have been working away on MageMaze, our turn-based dungeon adventure game, and have made some excellent progress in the last year after an unexpectedly long hiatus post IGF. We're currently shooting for a release of sometime this summer (2012) and will ship with 60+ levels and hopefully 3 gameplay modes. We've redone a lot of the game - the mechanics are now much more smooth, and getting new levels up and running is easier than ever. We have more monsters, an entire working in-game shop and inventory, all sorts of power-ups, a much more fleshed-out story, cleaned-up UI, and things are just in general going really well!

A few random levels of the game are currently playable on our site, http://www.Mage-Maze.com. They aren't the first levels in the game, so in some cases you might be at a loss for what to do. Our next update will include the first 7 levels of the game, which walks you thorough just about everything you need to know in order to play. And we would love to find new beta tasters for that - send up (Maph and/or I) your UDID!

In the meantime, here are some new screenshots:











Cheers!

Ah, that's funny Marc. Yep, I've been living in the East Bay now for over 15 years. And if we didn't actually meet, I'm sure we have a ton of colleagues in common, as I know a bunch of folks who have worked or work at Factor5, EA, Maxis, etc. My good friend Matt Gaston who you must have worked with on TR:L is still at Crystal working on various Lara Croft titles.

Anyhow, thanks for the kind words. St. Chicken looks really interesting - definitely accurate in your description of "unique and quirky" -  Just the whole concept made me laugh. Gameplay-wise it seems like an interesting blend of side-scroller and Pikmin, with your ability to call the guppies all back towards you. Anyhow, good luck with it and hope it does well for you!

Hi, Marc, nice to see another game industry vet in here (I'm sure there are plenty more, I'm just not about to read through all 350 pages of this thread to find them! )

Anyhow, I'm Mike. I've been in the games industry for 21+ years. When I got started in the industry, screen resolution was 512x384, CDRoms were all 1-speed, and pixel-sprites were the way to do animation. A lot's changed since then, but a couple of years ago, a friend from the GameArtisans.org forums and I started talking about loving those old sprite games, about how the screen resolution of the iPhone was similar to the monitors back then, how much I missed doing sprite animation, etcetera... So we decided to make an old-school sprite game together for iOS.

After a false start on another game idea, we settled on our current project, MageMaze, a turn-based tactical puzzle adventure game. Two years later, we're still working on it and it's come pretty far. There's a light at the end of the tunnel, and we hope to be done this summer. I've done just about every piece of art in the game, which has been a blast! While I still work in the games industry, I now do a lot more management than hands on work, so it's fun to get to work on the actual assets again. And to make something that's for myself, completely unrestricted by market concerns or business needs.

Working on the game has been a challenge. We've had our busy periods and our slumps. The two of us live 8 time-zones apart so communication is always a challenge. But in the end, we're pretty proud of what we've accomplished so far, and it's a blast to do something indie, even if it is limited to my spare time. (and practically ALL of my spare time! )