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[empika]

Sure, there is a copy in the thread on the first page

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=34307.msg989042#msg989042

...just realised that that version is double pixel size. Here's the actual asset https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/alley_contrast_Background.png

[Tazi]

Ah, okay I tried out a few things like dither, and fewer colors on the lights, none of them seemed to work well.  

I think one thing that could work nice is something like the lights/shadows in Thomas Was Alone, with just one transparent color:




But I might be wrong, and of course, it's your game to decide what you like.  
But myself, I'd enjoy the bare pixel art more, without the lights.


One more little nitpick, I think the big snagging objects, like that barrel should have somewhat different color. Like you could use the black for the blue tones instead, it looks a lot better that way, and gives more of a 3D shape.  

[empika]

Ha! yeah, it's pretty difficult. I think I'll settle with what I've got for the moment. Thanks for trying though

As for the evnironmental objects, I definitely need to do something to make them stand out a little more

[beetleking22]

I really dont see any problem with that... It looks even more beautiful with that lightining.. Imo you should keep it... It give more atmoshpere feeling.

[empika]

Thanks beetleking22! Having looked at a bunch of other games over the last couple of days that also have similar lighting, I think I'm happy with it.

[empika]

And here's some more WIP. I've mostly been working on camera stuff, map portals and looking into Unity's 2d animation

I need to work on this rats behaviour, he's a bit twitchy at the moment. just need to spend some time tweaking the playmaker fsm though


And here's some camera/portal stuff

[empika]

Been working on some player animation when I've found time this week. Here's some rough WIP, obviously she won't be bald and the colours are just for blocking at the moment. It's maybe a little more bouncy than I'd prefer, but it's a good start

[empika]

Here's a slightly more cleaned up version I'd appreciate any feedback, my spriting is still in it's early days

[empika]

Thanks! I've studied (well, watched) a lot of animation and love frame-by-framing the old disney stuff. I have a few good books on the subject (richard williams animators survival kit and the frank thomas and ollie johnston illusion of life) so I have the basic understanding of animation, I've just never really put it into practice.

And yes, the legs are a little crazy, definitely need to reign those in Thanks for the feedback though, much appreciated.

[Tazi]

Honestly, the movement is nice and fluid, but it looks quiet like jumpstyle-dance.
Maybe his trunk should move less vertically, and the whole anim should be less jumpy by the character styling less in the air... dunno.

Another thing is, that you might already aware of: If you want to keep the graphics simple for advancing fast with the project, you should really make one naked human first, with all the needed movements, and you could use it as a template for editing out all the characters from it. I think that could save a lot of time. I bet what I'm saying is obvious, tho.

Good luck with this game! 

[empika]

Aaah, I not though of doing a template human, I just jumped in with my player character without much thought. That is a great Idea though, perhaps I'll spend some time today working on that

[Tazi]

Well, no effort lost, you can still create the template out from the finished human sprites. 

[empika]

Here's some nearly finished player sprites, I've still yet to do the diagonals but am going to save those for a bit as I want to get these ones in game first

[empika]

Over last week I managed to get the new player animations into the game. They are looking pretty good and Unity's animation stuff is pretty easy to work with. I've still got some weird twitchy issues when switching animation, although I think this is due to the animation blending.

I overhauled some of the foreground art and compiled it to individual objects. This helps order everything in the z axis so you can actually walk behind stuff now which makes it look a ton better.

Part of that overhaul meant redrawing the oil drum in the middle of the level, I forgot how big the player is, so it's ended up as a giant 5ft tall drum.

[empika]

Hey there!

So here's a mac and windows build of what I have so far. Arrow keys to run around, esc to exit.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/jack_move.app_0.0.1.zip
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/jack_move_win_0.0.1.zip

There's not really anything to do but run around, but this version mostly proves out the art direction and my approach to structuring/saving/loading levels as well as messing with unity's 2d animation and some other bits. There are some janky bit's here and there (the run up and down animations need to be redrawn as they look bonkers and there's some jitter on the oil drum that i think is a floating point issue) but other than that it's feeling like a good start.

[jonbro]

hey man! this is looking pretty great! I like the direction this is going. Looking forward to seeing out the game bit of it comes together of course :D

I agree with what other people are saying about the lights, they are adding a bunch of atmosphere, but I don't think they are working quite yet. I think there are a few issues in place, and maybe a few quick fixes.

- there are multiple light sources. Like the light on the barrel is coming from the right, but it is clear the light in the scene is behind it. I don't think there is a quick fix for this without redrawing your assets to match the light, or drawing your assets with hand done normal maps.
- the color temperature of the light might be off? see this chart for temps. You probably want high pressure sodium, but that will wash out everything else. Will get a hella dope inner city tower block feeling though.
- the resolution of the lights doesn't match the resolution of everything else. I don't know a good way to fix this unless you are running unity pro... I have some bad ideas of how to fix it tho, like pre building all your lightmaps into dynamic textures. Or hand painting them. :D Terrible terrible ideas.
- the ambient lighting (the pixels that don't have light hitting them) are a strange color. If it is late at night, they would be darker (or full black). I think the temp you have there is suggesting that it is just at dawn (kinda blueish, but light...) if that is true, you could push it harder by using the lighting chart above.


all the above should probably be ignored though, just make the game, and figure out the graphics later. It sure is fun to bullshit about graphics tho, isn't it :D

[jonbro]

wait a second, looking at the asset store thing you are using, it seems like it is using a texture to build the light, and then chopping out stuff for shadows. You could totally just swap in the correct resolution texture, and set it to point scale, and it would fix all your resolution issues! doooo it!!!

[empika]

Hey Jon!

Thanks for all the feedback, that's super useful.

There are definitely tons of issues with the lighting stuff, I'm still experimenting, but without wanting to sound lazy, I'm trying to get maximum effect from as little work as possible. Having to code and do art is a lot of work, so stuff like hand drawing normal maps for everything is kinda out of the question at the moment. While that would look awesome, it would also take forever, so I'm kinda defaulting to 'everything has light baked in from the top right', at least for the moment, I'm super intrigued to see what it would look like with normals.

As for colour, that kinda tricky, a) being colour blind, and b) it's hard to find a balance between dark enough and readable. It's pretty easy to change those values though, the ambient light is just based off the render settings. eg:



Aaaaaaand the lights... yes I could replace the texture, the problem is that the light texture gets stretched to fill the variable size of the light, so I would have to pre-bake a bunch of different sizes. I'm thinking of experimenting with a dithered alpha texture over the top, that would break up the smoothness a bit, I need to work out how to do that though (also hard to explain what i mean).

So yeah, lots to try and experiment with, I need to see how this will look with different environments too, like the bar I put in a previous post.

Other than that I've been working on getting the battle system up and running, lots of gui work.



That's looking a little too "smooth" at the moment, I'd like it to have chunkier pixels, but it's kinda placeholder stuff just to get something in there

[bustaballs]

Wow, I'm all over this. It looks amazing already. Keep up the good work!

[Bluefish88]

looks interesting!
is this JRPG? turn battle?