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[Bree]

That's what I figured I would be doing, except replacing GIMP with Photoshop.

[Eclipse]

Capitano face on the sprite is a little bit confused at my eyes... also having all his face covered has him lost that jaunty grin he has on the concept art.
It looks like a fat orange diglett in costume on the sprite

Also the concept art looks a lot more polished because the AA... it's strange to me that such big sprites that are clearly not ordinary pixel art lacks it

[Bree]

Yeah, I'm not sure if I should do the sprites AA or not, but I do agree that Capitano's face needs to be fixed. What do you all think?

[Eclipse]

Yeah, I'm not sure if I should do the sprites AA or not, but I do agree that Capitano's face needs to be fixed. What do you all think?

Dunno, maybe you should at least try and see how they look...

if you don't mind, an idea of Capitano based on your concept


now keep posting awesome stuff 

[Mipe]

This is awesome. You better see this to the end or we'll have a little Phantom of the Opera rehearsal. 

[Bree]

New Capitano sprite, based on Eclipse's suggestions:

And here's the next character: Brighella!

[The-Imp]

Cool, I can't wait to see more character designs!

(and adorable pixels)

[Jared C]

I love the concept, and the character designs are amazing!  Only thing I'm having problems with is the actual sprites.  IMO you should get away from the MS Painterly look, and start editing the sprites at a pixel-by-pixel scale.  The scaling down just isn't doing it for me.

[Eclipse]

wow i love brighella will Pulcinella be one of the characters too? is one of the most famous masks if not the most notorious one along with Arlecchino

[Bree]

I love the concept, and the character designs are amazing!  Only thing I'm having problems with is the actual sprites.  IMO you should get away from the MS Painterly look, and start editing the sprites at a pixel-by-pixel scale.  The scaling down just isn't doing it for me.

I'm sorry, but this is my first time doing pixel art- what do you mean by editing on a pixel-by-pixel-scale, or scaling down?

wow i love brighella will Pulcinella be one of the characters too? is one of the most famous masks if not the most notorious one along with Arlecchino

Maybe- I hadn't really planned on it, but we might be able to include him later. Our current plan is to have the zanni (servants, such as Arlecchino and Colombina) act as NPCs, and drop in occasionally to stir things up, either in random cutscenes or full-blown lazzi minigames. I think Pulcinella would fit in nicely with the others, but we'll probably wait until later- I'd like to try and avoid as much feature creep as possible.

[Eclipse]

Maybe- I hadn't really planned on it, but we might be able to include him later. Our current plan is to have the zanni (servants, such as Arlecchino and Colombina) act as NPCs, and drop in occasionally to stir things up, either in random cutscenes or full-blown lazzi minigames. I think Pulcinella would fit in nicely with the others, but we'll probably wait until later- I'd like to try and avoid as much feature creep as possible.

seems resonable

regarding the pixel art, i think Masna means that the sprites could look more polished if edited pixel by pixel, they have big outlines and almost nothing is made by single pixels, so they looks like "done with ms-paint" rather than stuff in canon pixel art.
That's also why i was saying that thing about the antialiasing, they don't seems pixel art sprites because the fact they have no pixel by pixel details and because they're quite big, so maybe they'll look better as cartoony sprites rather than pixel art stuff 

I'm quite impressed by the polishness of the concept art, if you want to use those as in-game characters too, maybe you could try for an unique style and "vectorialize" also the sprites

[Bree]

I might try that later, once I've got the main cast assembled. I just wanted to give the pixel art a shot first.

Hey, Malec, how's the work going on your end?

[The-Imp]

But I like the current style... It's charming! But a new take on it could be interesting.

But if you do try something with the graphics, don't do anything to gimmicky...

[Alec S.]

Hey, Malec, how's the work going on your end?

Pretty well.  I'm almost done with the contextual menus.  I just need to get it working so that menus can get menu items from multiple sources (ie. if there's a player to one side and an interactive object on the other, the menu will have interactions listed for both).  I also need to make items conditional (for example, if a certain character has a unique interaction with a certain object, then that interaction shouldn't show up for another character).  Once that's done, it'll be pretty easy to add abilities to characters.

After that, I'll tackle setup, and mini-game support.  Once all of that is in place, we should be able to start adding content.

[Bree]

Awesome! Do you have any set dimensions for your contextual menus? I could go ahead and start designing some menu tiles, to tie the whole thing together.

[Alec S.]

I don't have set dimensions yet, although I'm currently using 16 for height of each item, so I guess 16 by 16 tiles should work.

Also, I just got conditional items working.   

[Bree]

Okay, if nothing else, I can start work on a font sheet. How big do you think the characters should be, 13x13?

[Alec S.]

Yeah, that sounds about right.  Maybe 12x12? (just so that there's an even clearance above and below in a tile with 16 height)

[Bree]

Here's what I've got so far (12x12, by the way):



I'm not too certain about the color scheme, but how does the lettering look? I wasn't really sure what could be thematically linked and still readable.

[Alec S.]

Here's what I've got so far (12x12, by the way):



I'm not too certain about the color scheme, but how does the lettering look? I wasn't really sure what could be thematically linked and still readable.

Those look pretty good.  I think some of the letters are a bit too thick (E, F and S for example).