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[FrankieSmileShow]

I got art! Ive been working on lots of tiles and art recently, for a low rez game with few colors, that is horror-themed. It began from a very short game I made as a gift for a friends' birthday last month (we are horrible nerds we give each other games like that for our birthdays) Heres a screenshot of that old version, gives a good idea of the visual style:

You can get the short game here
Its just a few minutes long, its not really all that fun. But I ended up really liking its visual style so I decided to start a whole game out of it.
I was using 16X16 tiles in that version, but after looking more closely at Castlevania 3's clever tile usage, I was inspired to switch for a smaller 8X8 tile size and go with that.

Anyway, I'm working on the tile set right now, I think its where most of my problems will lie. I usually made larger and more detailed tile sets for my stuff, making different tiles for every possible situation. Working with much smaller pieces is a new thing to me! Like, instead of drawing a large wall and drawing some wall pieces with cracks in it, its more like drawing just one wall tile and drawing a multi-purpose "rough rock" tile or two, and use those in concert with black tiles to draw damage and cracks in the walls instead, and also re-use it later as a rock, as debris, as a cliff face background piece... It makes for way smaller tile sets, but on the other hand, the making of the maps themselves gains a pretty different, weirdly creative approach. (I dunno if that wall of text made sense sorry heh look at frankie all talking to himself how silly)
Heres the current, incomplete tile set:

I'm thinking of putting some building rooftop silhouettes I could use to draw the background in a evil city level, and some more vegetation tiles maybe. Im sort of approaching this new project a bit backwards, making art before even having any clear idea of what the levels will be heh.

Also heres a few enemy sprites I drew a little before working on the new tile set:
swamp abomination


Conquistadore skelleton

Rat man

Evil tree stump

Skelletal cultist


Some of them are very dark here against a white background though! Is there some tool in the forum code that allows to make zoomed-on sprites somehow? Or do I have to manually scale up the sprites for them to be readable here? That sorta sucks...
(EDIT: thanks for the tip Sparky!)

[The-Imp]

Oh my god these are made of win, and horror.
 

[Loren Schmidt]

Oh, neat!

I love the rat man's tail wiggle as he lands. I like where you're going with the approach to tile reuse, too. I've never done anything with tiny versatile tiles like this, and I'm totally intrigued.

P.S.- for resizing, you can do this:

Code:

[img width=32][/img]

Where width is your image's width times whatever zoom factor you want.

[FrankieSmileShow]

ok thanks for da tip Sparky, though firefox does some nasty pixel interpolation with it, it looks pretty blurry...

Also I make the games with Game Maker, and im having lots of problems working with such small tiles with GM's room editor! I wish there was a zoom there, its very difficult to work with otherwise. Even reducing my resolution to 800X600 its still pretty tricky.

[William Broom]

I think what you can do to solve that problem is, draw all your sprites and tiles at 2x scale, for easy editing, and then use views to scale them down when the game is played. I assume you're already using a view for scrolling, so all you have to do now is make the view's port in-game half the size of its port on-screen.

This should work, but I believe there are some limitations to it if you're using surfaces or functions like draw_line. Some of the more experienced GMers round here will probably be able to explain it better than me.

[Xion]

Oh man, Frankie, I have always loved your animations, and that rat man is just frucking luverly!

[cmspice]

Those animations look great. I'm questioning that shade of blue for the background, I think something less saturated would have better atmosphere but maybe that's just me (I'm pretty tired right now).

[Hempuli‽]

Oh darn, you're awesme. I remember watching yer art at PixelJoint, and I loved it. Especially those avatars, they're rad. :D These pixelations are also cool, but *sigh* Mozilla resizes and blurs them annoyingly.

[Craig Stern]

Awesome! I love the swamp abomination and the rat man. 

[Biggerfish]

That swamp abominations walk is so great. I love you and the work here.

I second the suggestion for a less saturated blue though, if only slightly.

[KennEH!]

Conquistadore skelleton is awsome, along with the rest. Can't wait to see more.

[michael]

 >:O

godddddddramnit theis is amazing

i dont really like the main guy, though. but i havent seen him in motion

[JLJac]

Awsome stuff! Did you make that avatar of yours to, looks like kinda the same style?

[FrankieSmileShow]

Thanks for them' comments heres more:

thats the protagonist, a king whose name I havent thought of yet:


working on the idle, attacking, jumping and hurt animations now.

JLJac: yeah I made it, its my face! Glad you like!

EDIT:
Slash attack done. Ill retouch it later, right now its sorta raw

[Loren Schmidt]

Yay, a progress report! Keep up the good work.

*sigh* Mozilla resizes and blurs them annoyingly.

Yeah, I hate that. It was fine until version 3.0. If anyone finds a workaround, I will be forever in your debt.

[___]

GOD DAMNIT FIREFOX STOP RESAMPLING MY PIXELS

[Gainsworthy]

Ah, we remember your old avatar. The one with the Tentacle. I see you've continued the trend nicely. That Swamp Abomination is something else all together, though. I'd love seeing a game like this.

Also:

[El Moppo]

Yay, a progress report! Keep up the good work.

*sigh* Mozilla resizes and blurs them annoyingly.

Yeah, I hate that. It was fine until version 3.0. If anyone finds a workaround, I will be forever in your debt.

Windows.
Windows Internet Explorer.
...
*Ducks for cover*

[JLJac]

I was going to suggest downloading another browser, but going that far
(Well, I actually use IE and it works just fine )

[El Moppo]

lol. Everyone bashes IE all of the time, but, it seems to work just fine for me though.
Now... Safari. O_o
*Shudders*

Anyway.
I'm not getting this off of topic though.