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[EdFarage]

i think he mean the level of detail is weird, like, the character doesn't have as much detail/shading as the background.
though this is normal on traditional cartoons, you just need to blur the background, like the trad. cartoons do

[rj]

if i blurred the background i guarantee it would look like an absurdist mess

mostly because everything has aliased hard pixel edges. including the full-detail background

but maybe not? i'll try it, see what that does. it might be a color thing, too; perhaps the bg should have darker/more muted tones.

none of the characters or enemies have as much detail as the background, so! hopefully it will work.

who knows! i'll figure it out eventually. lord knows i have plenty of time.

also hello, this game is still extant and i'm still working on it. updates soon?

[Slader16]

how do u change ur avatar every page refresh
also ur game is weirdly beautiful

How is this the first time that I actually noticed lol

[rj]

probably because you haven't payed much attention to me

[s-spooky g-g-ghosts]

how do u change ur avatar every page refresh

He hires a bunch of illegal immigrants to sit all day and change his avatar.

[Impmaster]

Oh yeah, I just thought that the character was very simple while your background was painterly. It's like if you put Mario in the Braid world or something. It's not bad, just a little off when I first looked at it.

[rj]

yeah yeah! i gotcha.

i feel like it will cohere better in motion! i hope so, at least.

part of the help with that is that the painterly backgrounds will have subtle cyclical and incidental animations, and ishmael will trigger a lot of that (kicking up sand, causing wind to rustle leaves, etc) and sound will help too likely

but i'm not here to fucking defend myself either so i do wanna try to make it work better as a still too

probably when lighting is added (shadows etc) it'll help too

[Quicksand-T]

I kinda like the contrast there between character and bg.

[siskavard]

The BG/Character image is odd because a lot of the BG colors are close to the same hue as your character, he gets lost a bit.

[quan]

i like this posting to follow

EDIT: Ishmael is a cool name

[rj]

hey


thanks

a new update's coming soonish; haven't had enough time to work on this recently because of Life Upheaval over the past few months but that's smoothing out over time now

[rj]

as promised, here is a soonish update!

9

it's music. that's it. well, and some light talks

firstly, take a listen to the music: click!

the process on this game has been slow to nonexistent the last month and a half due mostly to personal upheavals and school junk. that's slowly changing as i settle into things going forward but it did bump a huge dent in my ideal schedule. i still really wanna aim for april for a playable demo, but i can't promise that kind of stuff. anyway, we're still early, and i'm aiming for 2020 after all. several years! many many years.

ishab is weird because it's music first. the music is the most important thing, in my opinion, in setting the aesthetic of this game. i've been doing sound and music stuff for 10 years and even if my visual aesthetic is as solid as can be it won't hold a candle to the weird shit i can do with sound, so i want to play to my strengths here.

every visual tic + gameplay thing in ISHAB follows directly from the soundtrack's aesthetic. i want this game to feel as flowy as possible, even if it's a narrativey dialoguey thing. and a big part of that is by getting the player into a kind of meditative zennish state with music. there are going to be tons of full hours of music in the final soundtrack because i want the player to get into that zone you get into only after listening to a few flying lotus or boards of canada records at 3 in the morning totally alone. you gotta vibe with it, you know

as much as fez was sold basically 100% for the most part on the strength of its pixel art is how much i want this game to be sellable on the strength of its music alone, basically. just really damn fuckin' solid head nodding tunes with a lot of variety and surprises. right now it's been mostly electronic but once i get a reasonable recording setup again i'll be able to set up some really phenomenal organic tracks to layer with.

so yeah, music is important. more important than visuals, and visuals are super important. but music is super super important.

that is all. up next: more art, hopefully a new build to show off soon!

[Impmaster]

I like the style of the music, but i feel like it's lacking something. Like, when the sound fades out, there should be some really soft notes or something. I'm no musician, I just feel like it's a little too... simple? is that the word? not really, but it's kind of what I mean.

[tok]

follo. hi rj

[rj]

I like the style of the music, but i feel like it's lacking something. Like, when the sound fades out, there should be some really soft notes or something. I'm no musician, I just feel like it's a little too... simple? is that the word? not really, but it's kind of what I mean.

trust me when i say that none of these are totes done so far! these are just lil preview snippets! if these were "finished" tracks i'd agree totally. but no these are all wip

[Impmaster]

Oh ok then. I like the style then!

[oahda]

I spontaneously see no clash or nothing wrong with the character versus the background. Looks neat.

As for the other characters, tho, having seen your dilemma with the aliased lines not fitting as well for complex shapes, I'd really just suggest having everyone else similarly shaped to Ishmael. Colour them differently, give them different facial expressions, vary how fat or tall they are, and so on. Give some hair or hats. Glasses. Lots of little differences. I think that's absolutely good enough.

[Hana the Shrimp Chip]

what are you using to animate? looks pixelly but fluid.

[rj]

photoshop. frame by frame. a tablet

[TheWing]

Loving the graphical style here, have yet to listen to the music, so, um, can't wait to get home to my speakers :D

I quite like how the bg and character are different in artstyle, the background should have a bit more anti-aliasing in my mind.. the aliasing jumps out and into focus when the character should be the focus!

Keep up the damn good work, hats off and cheers o/