This looks really cool. I would love to experience this in some sort of helmet thing!

Thank you for posting that, very interesting! But what is the 'diagram colour spectrum' you refer to?

Hehe, sorry, I kind of made that name up myself, I don't know the proper english word for it, not the proper swedish word either I guess 

I mean the Color Picker window that pops up from clicking the suare icon of the currently selected colour, which is shown at the low end of the tool selecting window.
There you get a rainbow-ish slider to choose colour from and a diagram (might not be the proper word) where you choose the saturation and light intensity of the selected colour.
To the upper right of the rainbow slider there is another square that will split in half if you select a new colour and that will then show both the previously selected colour and the current colour and tone. So a good thing is to just glance at that split square and see how the colours match.
That is great when you want to put a completely new colour in the scene. Just Alt-click a colour that represents the overall tone of the image and then click the icon for that selected colour which brings up the Color Picker window and you are now free to pick a new colour and match it.

Of course it is good to check out some of the general ideas of how complementary colours play with eachother in teory, just to get a sense and advice. But just testing stuff and mixing and matching your own colours will give you an eye for things pretty soon I guess.
Of course it is a matter of taste too.

Hope I was clear enough 

Even without textures those latest pictures look really good, the colour choice with the more desaturated colours works really well I think.

What do you design those pictures with, an ingame editor, or a 3D modeler?

Thanks guys!

The story board images were made in Photoshop if I'm not completely wrong, but rickardwestman could probably reveal more details about that process...

Yes, they are done in PS. We have a basic grid to start off from and then I do a quick line drawing on top of the grid. After that is made I use the polygonal lasso tool and the paint bucket to fill the scene with colour.

I never use any pre set or primary coulors, I always pick up that diagram colour spectrum and choose from taste. There you can also see a sample of the colour you previously used and match your next colour to that. So then you get a feeling for how the colours play against eachother. After a while that goes super fast to do so I would absolutely recommend people to go that way when doing some initial colour passes.
When you have a bunch of colours in the scene I just use the Alt-key to colour pick. This is a short command that is superior to the erasor tool in my opinion. I rather re-paint something than erase it, in most cases.

Below is a quick workflow sample of the playable storyboards that we are doing now. We kind of developed this workflow while putting together our 2012 demo, missing some steps but you see how the finished background is matching up with the grid and all...

The problem is that your walls/background have shading and minor detail, while your sprite is very flat with no shading at all. Both of those are good styles, depending on your game. However, using a sprite with no shading and backgrounds with shading make the character look out of place and awkward. This is why everyone always says never to mix resolutions.

So, if you're trying to make a Link to the Past style game, I'd take a look at the style of their sprites and try to copy that style while still making your character original and unique.

Just taking my original sprite and adding shading to it might seem like a pretty lazy approach to your advice, but I tried to add more depth to the character and I think it actually worked really well.



Sigh, it's been a week and I'm still messing around with what the main character should look like.  I haven't even started animating yet.  3 months seems really optimistic for this game.

Character blends a bit better with the environment now. Alttp is one of my favorite games so I am really curious about where you want to take this.
For the character,
I can imagine that there might be some issues later on when you want to fight enemies and such. The sword seems kind of small, not in relationship to the character, but rather regarding the range when swinging it. Right now it feels like you would have to be really close to the enemies to hit them. I don't know, but that might be something you would want to test.
Also there might be the fact that your character is kind of small in relation to the environment. Maybe a smaller tileset would fit the character better. It kind of looks like your environment tiles would fit ALTTP but if you would compare your character sprite to link there would probably be a huge difference. So, maybe you want to have a look at thet too.

There is a lot of hard work into actually making a game, a lot of things that you at first thought doesn't consider really. And you will probably have to adjust a lot of stuff along the way. In our current game I finished two different resolutioned tilesets before we thought that we wanted to go in a completely different direction and had to throw everything away.
But I am sure that every change that you feel is for the better will make your game even better so don't mind that too much. And things usually takes longer time than expected. But you will gain a lot of experience from it andthis will make future projects go smoother and become better.
So just keep up the good work. I am looking forward to more updates!

Especially the cave scene looks very beautiful. Love the atmosphere!
I am not sure about the black rays in the mountain scene though. Do they have a purpose?
These last ones and the Gardener from the first post is my favorites so far.

Btw, Have you tried to have a tiny tint of some saturated colour on the lightrays?

Looking forward to more updates!

Have you tride making floortiles that are more quadratic in shape? I would prefer something like that. Of course it is a matter of taste
Keep up the good work!

Hm... I was going to avoid that because I thought it might skew the perspective, but upon second though I guess it wouldn't. I might give it a shot and see if it looks better.


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Sure give it a shot if you like, otherwise it still looks really nice overall. Might be just me.
I really enjoy the flat emptiness of your environments, atmospheric!

Last screen looks very nice! Good job!
Though, one thing that always bother me a bit is when rectangular squares are used for floors. I always get a feeling of looking into a brick wall instead of onto a floor.
Have you tride making floortiles that are more quadratic in shape? I would prefer something like that. Of course it is a matter of taste
Keep up the good work!

Right now you have the dark/black tileset behind the desaturated brighter set. In real life it would be the other way around, where things that are further away gets desaturated and have less contrast and kind of blends more into the background. Since you have it the revese way it might be harder for the brain to compute this background foreground relationship.

Thanks for the feedback. That is something we experimented with - the original prototype at TOJam 7 had the lighter colour in the background.



In the end it was just too limiting to work with 4 colours only and having two separate layers of interaction, which is why we eventually removed that restriction.

I'll give it a try reversing light and dark and see how it looks.

Yeah, I see how the 4 colours was a pretty tight restriction and I think you did a good choice going away from the game boy look to a wider spectrum of colours like in the more up to date screenshots. Though this 4 colour image you posted reads a bit better to me in sense of the relationship between the back and foreground level. Maybe the simple level design in that one is adding to that too.

Anyway I am sure you will figure it out. My concern was just that if the relationship between the back and foregound level wouldn't read as clear as you would want. Then the brain might be confused and subconciously not really keep track of which level you are on. I kind of saw that on youtube when a guy was testing your game and he suddenly tried to jump to a platform that wasn't in his current level and fell down and died. I kind of felt that he jumped intuitively and I think that you really want to avoid to have the player do mistakes like that. Maybe it is easier to keep track of this while playing the 2 player mode in comparison to the single player where you constantly toggle between the two levels.
Though, I really like the idea behind this and I am sure that either way the player will get in to reading the world pretty quick. 

Looked like fun and seems to have some interesting puzzles.

I just have a thought regarding the visual presentation of the platforms that you might want to have a look at. It is basically connected to how we see things in real life and how we calculate things in a depth perspective.
Right now you have the dark/black tileset behind the desaturated brighter set. In real life it would be the other way around, where things that are further away gets desaturated and have less contrast and kind of blends more into the background. Since you have it the revese way it might be harder for the brain to compute this background foreground relationship.
Maybe you have a reason for doing it this way, then keep it as it is, but otherwise I think it might just be a bit subconsiously confusing at times

Like the look of it otherwise and I bet you can get a lot of interesting gameplay situations out of that switching idea!
Keep up the cool stuff, looking forward to see more.

Looks good! Everything reads very well at this distance too.
The desaturated colours looks much better!
Good stuff!

Congrats and good luck! Keep up the excellence lovers!

That's Great Jackwhat! Love it!

@Ardbob

oh, its linked from conceptart.org, went there to check and got warned myself...
I'll take the link away asap... thanks

Is there a "nibble" attack? 

Hey!
Game looks really nice! I like the overall feel of the trailer. Good job man!
I just have some small feedback that you might want to consider. I don't know how rough this cut is so you might have thought about this yourself anyway.

In the very beginning of the trailer I kind of felt the shots to be a bit rushed, maybe it would be cool to extend the lenght to the opening shot where the character walks up to the blue outlined blocks a bit. I even expected som kind of interaction with the blocks.
Then when you get into the next shot of the character talking to the monk I didn't have time to read the text. If that is intentional for some purpose, leave it like that. But if you want people to read it you might want to extend the time for that, and if it is not important then I would suggest that you would consider leaving the text out.
I like that the pace increases during the trailer but having even more time on some of the beginning shots could add even more to the atmosphere I think.

Another thing that came to my attention was the screen "transitions" in the later part of the trailer, where you get that movement of the camera when the character is walking out of the screen and the camera is following him. All that camera movement felt a bit too much at times. The shots where the camera didn't move felt better to me. Especially when you had a cut in the middle of the camera movement and came right into another camera movement...
I love the screens where the flower explodes but I think it would feel better without the camera movement at the beginning and end of the shot for example.
Maybe it is just a matter of taste but in my opinion I think that to focus on what happens in a single screen could be a good thing.

Otherwise I absolutely love the feel of the trailer and all the cool characters and enemies and bosses! Great stuff!
Can't wait to see the finished version of it!

I absolutely love your sense of movement and speed in your animations. I am very curious about how that can be transfered within the game environment. If the game would be like an interactive version of your animations I bet it would feel really cool to just move around.
I myself would probably enjoy flying through the game without having too many obstacles in the way.
Maybe it would be cool to chase another character or something. Where you would try to catch that character but being one step behinde most of the time.
Maybe you also want to consider to have some feature where the player could shift from being in the foreground and/or the background, so even if it is a flat platformer you could choose different paths connected to the parallaxing depth of the backgound/foreground layers. I don't know if that made any sense...      

Otherwise I am really fond of the conceptual work and the african setting is very nice.
I am really looking forward to see where this goes!
Keep up the cool work!

@ rickardwestman- this HAS to become a game!

We'll try to finish Pavilion first I guess, then who knows what comes next...

Thanks people, glad you like those.
Always fun to try to cheat perspective and to ty to feel the room of space. That probably didn't make sense outside my head... too early here in Sweden...

the Webdings lettering are kind of underrated too, uglygood looking in some strange way...

Hey!

I am very fond of your colour palette, the colours go so well with eachother. Looks really nice!
Would love to see that battle system video.
How will you encounter enemies? Something similar to Chrono Trigger, where you see the characters on the screen?
Looks great, keep it up!

Update!

I love how they shoot, kill and then just turns around and floats away.