Another vote for Game Maker here, especially if you don't have a lot of programming experience. I stopped using it after a while, but it's a great tool to get started on gamedev, because it provides so many useful tools with it - tiling, a good level editor, even something to draw on.

And it's not just a dumb point-and-click thing. You can do some pretty serious programming in there (at least as far as games, go, heh).

Don't think all these tools are going to destroy your freedom too much, because they aren't. Even RPGMaker can do some cool things - like To the Moon. To the Moon is a fantastic game.

Right now get an easy program and focus on learning the important things - what makes a game fun, how to properly design levels, art, etc to make your game enjoyable. You can get on the hard coding stuff later, it's not as important.

Hey people,

I was wondering whether you guys have had your share of GIT/Mercurial/etc tutorials around here. For those that don't know, this kind of software works with your code - it's called version control. Every once in a while you make essentially "checkpoints" in your code, so that if you screw up, you can go back to a previous version without a lot of work. And you can make branches to work on multiple details in your code at once, and then merge them later. It's really nice if you're working with someone else on a project.

Anyway, I've got some experience, and GIT is free, so I'd be up for doing some screenshots/video/whatever tutorial if you people are interested. It's really easy to learn, so it won't be super long or detailed or anything. Maybe someone with more experience that I have can supplement the basics I know, too.

Otherwise, carry on.

[edit:]

Getting people to mod your games is a very tricky path. It is beyond being just normally successful. If you want to make a living the better bet is just to make a good game.

You need to make smaller games. The "dry up" of inspiration comes from committing yourself to a project way too large, getting bored part-way through, then not understanding why. Start super small. Be small and robust. Super, duper small.... really, really small.

p.s. Be small.

edit:

Getting people to mod your game requires a growing community. For that you need:
  1. Regular updates.
  2. A good game.
  3. A way to communicate with players, and a habit of using it.

Minecraft is a good example.

Thank you toast_trip!

Thankfully I'm not yet at a point in my life where I need to make a living with my games. Right now I'm just trying to make them as good as I can and hoping people will play them.

I decided to follow your advice and start on a really small project with a simple world and a simple story. It feels really good to be doing things again and to have my feet under me. It especially feels good to have the entirety of the game' s story and design figured out before starting.

I'm going to take a hiatus from my previous game until I have more experience and it's natural to know where to go with it.

Thanks again!

minnow is absolutely correct. Shades tend to be more purplish/blueish and light more yellow/green. As a reference, take this tree from the tutorial I linked:


See the purple? It's everywhere. Hard to miss, really. It feels very awkward at first, and I'm still reluctant to hue-shift extremely like that, but it does give a very nice image.

If you want some help with the texture, I usually do really small "pixel rocks" for my small sprites, but some people prefer bigger rocks and stuff. It really depends on what setting you want your game/art to be in.

Here's what I'm working on now, for reference. It is much happier and lighthearted than what you drew, but you can get a feel for what I was talking about, at least, with texture and getting the color to darken:



It does sort of take away from that simple style you have right now, though, which I also find appealing.

I started with two adjacent colors from one of JWK5's palettes and then added a darker shade to the "dirt". Took a third color from a nearby region on the color wheel for the dead trees. However, I did have trouble with finding a sky color that I didn't hate.

Thoughts?



EDIT: Derp, ignore the "palette" in the corner. I had started planning on making the typical grassy tiles and then decided to make the colors much different.

I like it so far! Reminds me of Terraria's corrupted areas. Why is the darker color to the right though? Also, keep in mind that the ground should probably get darker as you go further down, because the sun doesn't reach those areas quite as much (or at all, really). I really like the outlines of the trees you've got there.

Hi! I got here by following your signature. Who knew people actually clicked on those links?

Anyway, I really like the change in graphics you did from your first few screenshots to your second one. However, the tiles feel extremely repetitive. I can see where 'the grid,' or when one tile begins and the other ends. this is mostly due to that big boulder in the center/left of the tile, but other things, too. Also consider using one or two more tiles to vary it a bit.

OK, now, scenery. I like the whole winter wonderland thing. Reminds me of the Doctor Who Christmas special episode this year (also: angel). I think you should consider though, and not enough people do, why there are floating islands. When I go outside, and walk around, I see no floating islands, so, you got to think, why does my game get to have floating islands? Now, floating islands are pretty cool if you actually explain them. In one of my RPGs (tabletop, not video game) we had floating island cities, which would travel around the world and had culture, universities, restaurants (one of which we owned!), and etc. These islands were kept afloat with magic engines, and they slightly drained the mana energy of whichever region they seemed to be over at the time. So, you know, give some context for the floating islands, because they're cool but it's kind of hard to accept that they exist 'just because,' although we've seen them so frequently in games that that does sometimes happen.

The snow is awesome. The falling snow, I mean. Looks really good. Consider desaturating your background a bit (the one closest to us), because it kind of blends in with the player.

I think that was all I was going to mention. I'mma go click notify and follow this because  looks cool.   

don't hate yourself too much

Very important, actually, though may seem silly now.

By the way, the book is coming in ebook format, soon, for those who asked.

Oh, this is good. If it's a reasonable price I'll get it!

One thing I'd like to mention, that perhaps won't be talked about so much, is looking at other people's art, and trying to understand how it works.

I remember, when I first started, I looked at a grass tile and tried to make sense of why things were shaded different ways and so forth, and then I made my own right next to that one, sort of copying the style but also doing my own thing. Then I would zoom out and see why mine was different from theirs, and fix things with mine, or keep it, or whatever. If you'd like, I can give you a ton of my art that you can look at. I'm not the best, but I've kept a lot of things which may be useful for you, and it may be a good starting point. PM me if you want.

I think it's important to work on the details because that's what'll set you apart. It may be easy to say, "Oh, well, if I only do 8x8 tiles, and then do a 4x zoom, it actually looks decent without me having to practice," but you didn't learn important lessons. After you've worked with things in detail for a while, though, do feel free to make your games minimal looking - it's indeed less work, it gives it a more "indie" feel, and it's very useful for competitions, because it takes less time!

If you ever get frustrated with something, get help, both here and in other communities. The communities that have most shaped my art are:
Teh Practice Topic (smallish community of friendly and close-knit people): http://s7.zetaboards.com/Teh_Practice_Topic/index/

and

Pixelation/Way of the Pixel: http://www.wayofthepixel.net


This is the best pixel art tutorial in the world, and it will give you an idea of how to fix your colors and palettes: http://petesqbsite.com/sections/tutorials/tuts/tsugumo/

Lastly, practice! And have fun with it! That's different for different people. Some like to do portraits of people, others like to draw whatever's in front of them, etc. I really like doing mockups for games and imagining what the game would be like. Especially tiles. Tiles give games such an important feeling.

I don't see what all the fuss is about. PixelProspector is a great site, and they did it for free, and hurrah, and all those things.

But it's not like these other Venus Patrol people robbed $100k from random people walking on the streets. They set up a page for donations, with promised rewards, and people thought that giving them money was worthwhile, so they did. There's no reason to be pissed - it's how capitalism works. That includes, necessarily, the risk that the site wasn't going to be done. So even if it's never completed (and it definitely doesn't sound that way) that was (or should have been) counted as part of the price. Same as if I give my buddy a loan for a certain interest rate, that rate should cover the fact that he might not give it back. And if he doesn't, it's my own damn fault for giving it to him.

Besides, I see no "smug asshole" behind brandonnn there, he seemed like a nice guy in his post. I haven't seen him before, but still.

Stop ranting. What happened, happened. Besides, this is just a thread to try to find out what happened. Ie, why is the site not up? Not, let's all bash on VP!

People wanted to give them money, and they did. Let's hope the site goes up, for their sake. But no need to light your torches.

Chill and be happy that you're not in this mess

Not quite on par with all of you guys' problems, but I need to unload a bit so here goes.

I've become disillusioned a bit with the game I've been making for two years. I believe, and so do other people, that the game is fun, and I've enjoyed watching people's faces betray their emotions of anxiety, frustration, happiness, whatever, when playing it. Most importantly, I laugh and have fun while playing it, and that was what drove to start making it in the first place.

However, I don't think I have the skill to design the game, to put it all together. What I have right now is essentially a very smooth, polished prototype - a mechanic with 40 pretty cool, challenging levels, but no story, no sounds, no cohesiveness, so to speak. I'm mostly a programmer, and I dabble in pixel art, and I can sort of put some levels together if I try, but rounding-off the edges of a game, creating a branching narrative (which I do have the ability to do with my engine, now), uniting the entire thing into one experience - I have no experience nor talent in the area, I don't think.

When I ask for feedback on how to improve the game people don't tend to offer design suggestions. I've gotten, "fix this bug here," "improve the graphics," "add some sound effects," and etcetera, which are fine suggestions, and things I can certainly do, but it feels like whenever people try the game they stop about halfway through because they fail to see what I want the game to be - by no fault of theirs, since I haven't been able to shape the game in the direction I want.

I added all these (to me, cool) things, like being able to program your own things into the game through a mod interface, and texture packs, and so forth, but it feels like nobody cares because I'm still the only one changing anything. Why have mods if I can actually work with the source code, you know? And I don't blame other people, it's just that I wish I could give them something that they would want to mod, and that they would have fun with, and I don't seem to be able to do that.

And so I've been putting working on my game off for a while, and I've even started working on mockup art for another game, because art is really cool in that I can just draw it and people will say, "Oh, good job, I can see myself playing this," and I don't have to do any design, story, or whatever that I can't seem to do. I really want to finish my game, but I just don't know what to do anymore. It's like the game feels finished but it's not done. I've tried making a feedback thread here and elsewhere and I've gotten some good responses, but I feel like none of that will make anyone want to play the game more, which is essentially what I want. I want people to play it and like it and share it with their friends.

It's not my first long project. I've worked on games this long before. But this time it feels like I can never finish, and it almost makes me not want to even start making another game either, because what if I spend a long time on that too, but am also unable to finish it? May be just a phase, but I almost feel like I want to stop making games. I feel terrible, since it's been something I've always liked from the beginning - both the good times and the wild crazy bugs that I've still not been able to fix and the weird programming errors caused by using a > instead of a <. I don't know.

Summary: Writer's block, but for games. First time it's happened to me, and I'm a bit depressed and I'm not sure what to do. Right now I'm concentrating on work and getting ready for school and procrastinating on working on my game. Although I still play it from time to time.

Mostly what's been said by everyone else. I played a while until I got bored. The game has some very good graphics, and it feels smooth, which is good.

The game itself isn't very original though, and the enemies do start to feel a bit repetitive.

I wish I could have different gameplay modes. For example, I've never been much of a magician in RPGs. I prefer to charge everything and punch/slash/bite/tackle all my enemies. Felt kind of sad sitting back and smashing everything with ice crystals instead of going in and bashing everything with a warhammer, you know?

That's looking a lot better! That was actually what I was talking about, yes. Sorry about not being more specific.

Right now it seems like it jumps too gradually from the (gray brick?) top to the rocks at the bottom. What I mean is: If this is a city, they probably would have packed the rocks down on the first layer (so gray brick on top, then packed rocks, then loose rocks, like you have now). If this is an outside area, why are there gray bricks? Is this a road in a jungle? Keep in mind the setting when drawing whatever, so that stuff matches.

Those are some really nice clouds and moon. I don't know what the colorful stars are but they look cool to me.

I really like the top of this though. Very calm. Reminds me of Cave Story a bit, but I'm not sure why. 

Yep, this is looking great! Keep making great stuff!

EDIT: Just another thing. I noticed that the shading is the same in the top layer of dirt as in the bottom one. Shouldn't it get darker? Why are the sun/moon/lights illuminating that dirt at the bottom just as much as the dirt on the top?

Lookin' good! It's a bit repetitive, I've marked the places where I noticed it most:



As this isn't top down, I have to ask, have you thought about differentiating the top from the bottom? You could have stalagmites, for example, or big rocks at the top with packed earth and small rocks further down. Just an idea.

The animation feels very jaggy. I've examined the animation on Photoshop, and I've found the flaws.

In the middle of the animation, the character rapidly moves 2 pixels up (frame 3), which doesn't look smooth at all. The hat also jumps a pixel over it's default position some place in the animation (frame 3 and 6). Unless it's super important or something (for example, an intended cartoony feel), make the hat stay on the head.

Other than that, I think the animation is pretty okay.  

Cool thanks!

I made those changes, I do think it looks a bit smoother:

But I don´t understand what you exactly mean with the error related to the feet?

I dunno. Something about when the foot goes back annoys me, but I don't think I can fix it with the number of pixels I have.

Mockup for a 'collect all the things' type platformer im currently working on

This is really simple and good and I like it a lot.

Not really. It doesn't have good hue shifting and looks too monotonous

Yup! I'm pretty new at hue shifting so pardon the problems with it. Could you help me out by giving an example of how to fix things?

The monotony is my fault for using the ground's colors for pretty much everything else 

I'm also working on the animation. Here it is at 2x:

Been at it for 2 hours still not quite happy with things, especially his left hand. I can't seem to get that to work the way I want it to.

I'm mostly a programmer but I'm sort of resting now and trying to draw up some art because it's fun and relaxing.

Hello!

I'm working on a small mockup for who knows what reason, here:


I decided to begin work on the main character and his walking animation:


(2x)

I'm having a bit of trouble with the feet but I don't know if it's able to be fixed (and any other issue I may not even be seeing). Also, any general critique is nice, whether of the animation or art. And fixes. Fixes are nice for learning.

Thank you!

Currently working on a mockup, have sooooo far to go. But hey, at least it's more than just tiles now!




EDIT: Update:

Thanks for the feedback!

Yep, I'm going to work on sound effects soon (Java has a thing for hating sounds, but I'm getting around it with the LWJGL and OpenAL). There is music, actually! I just last played it on mute and forgot to turn it back on before giving it to you guys. 

It's in Options -> Mute -> Off.