Mark of the Beast

red moon

Member
Interesting Mugi, what tool is that?
It seems like its averaging color variants between colors?

When I move the image over to editor it is broken down in this way and still abides by the 3 color rule. It's how I did all the sprites for Lost Souls and i did not encounter any issues there in translation.
 

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Mugi

Member
that is 5 colors.

light blue
medium blue
dark blue
black
pink (transparency)


transparency takes one of the 4 colors too, it's not 4 colors + transparent
it's 4 colors INCLUDING transparent.

my tool is the graphics design studio for ps2 games. it's a paint program tailored for low color (16/256color) graphics.
 

red moon

Member
Interesting, thanks I will check it out.
I am using 8 bit painter to draw everything out and photoshop for assembly. I tend to worry about the color correction in Nes Maker. The background pink was just used to represent whatever background is present. So this is closer to what it really is.
 

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Mugi

Member
yeah, that would work. It looks like the mockup i got on the previous page too,
the reason i pointed this out was because that way there will be no black outline on the character and the face will indeed be transparent.
it's not really an issue if you use really dark backgrounds but it's one of those things you want to keep in mind.

the whole reason of the transparency eating one of the 4 colors is why i gave up using outlines on my character designs completely.
2 colors + outline + transparency just isn't enough detail for my taste :p

if you go through my game's wip thread you can see some quite creative use of some palettes in some of the stuff i put into the game (the seamless 7-color portrait image on the titlescreen for one)
but it really is hard. x.x

sprites is really the one main thing im struggling to get done for my own project. the background graphics turned out so good that now im 100% screwed trying to make sprites good enough to work with it lol.

as far as the program i use goes, you can forget checking it out i suppose, you have to be a registered ps2 developer to purchase it, which costs several thousands of dollars per licence.
 

red moon

Member
Hmm, now I see what you are saying... the transparency is in additional to the black edging...Which doesn't matter for trap environment tiles since there is no transparency...black is black in that case.
My mistake!

Darker looks better in most cases unless I used black in place of blue and do a bit of tracing.
 

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Mugi

Member
generally what i try to do in such cases is to make the overall sprite a bit lighter (use more light and medium blue) and only really carefully shade with the dark blue while using it as an outline too.
that way you will sort of get an outline while maintaining nice shading.

in the example of this particular sprite, you would have to change the arms to be the medium blue color and outline them a little with the dark.

my HUD is drawn this way, and depending on the situation it can work really well.

hudtypes.png
 

red moon

Member
And your backgrounds look amazing for sure!

Having 1 additional color does make quite a difference.
Thanks for the specifics on this, I will adjust my creature stuff to lose the black outline since my background environments are dark anyway!

It is quite the challenge with one less color now. Lost Souls had smaller sprites and the 3 colors + black seemed to be okay. My backgrounds were brighter there as well, so the black did some of the separation work.

I'll take a look at the info you pointed out too, I want to enhance the title and backgrounds to get more life into them. They feel quite flat and I can do better lol.
And you are not screwed, your game is coming along really well, its amazing all the details I've seen in the water movement and background shadowing, parallax and stage select...I'll dig in there and find some answers. Thanks again.
 

Mugi

Member
no problem.
i just felt like pointing this out before you actually design an army of creatures and THEN notice you used one color too many.
I've been there, trust me, its not fun :p
 

red moon

Member
Yes, I see what you mean. Combining the deep color into a shadow makes it double down on having to perform both and It would require more precise execution.
 

Raftronaut

Member
ooooh

This project looks terrific!

Personally I prefer the Red title screen by far between the two.. The lavender appears to me more melancholy than ominous, which looks great, but maybe less for the horror theme game I assume you are trying to make...

BTW the trees on the title screen? PRIMO, great job!
 

red moon

Member
Thanks Raft, its coming along slowly! At least I am looking at 50 screens and trying to lock it down to that number, we'll see! And I'm glad you like the Red, I am going with that one at the moment; but want to look more in depth at how to do something more complex once I get further along.

And Mugi, I do appreciate it...that would have been stressful once i realized they were all one color too many! It's funny I did not do that on the last demo but I believe Its because I started with the characters, then did the background tiles. I did the opposite in this case, and must have been stuck in 4 color mode!
 

Raftronaut

Member
I admire the quality of pre-planning you've gotten yourself into here.

Do you have much previous dev experience? Seems like you have method established here ;)
 

red moon

Member
Thanks Raft!
I'm trying to be smart and plan ahead whenever possible to chip away bit by bit. Literally, haha.

And I do have some experience with game development. Good guess on your end!
I've worked on some rpg and turn based strategy games here doing environment art, level art and level design. This is my first 2D experience. I've always wanted to create creatures, players, sounds, music, determine difficulty...the teams are big, so I've never gotten a chance to get involved in those aspects.
 

red moon

Member
Last night I did a pass on removing the extra color from all the enemy sprites to get it down to legal levels.
Here is the first take on the sea creatures and wolf creature.
These humanoid sea creatures fared better than expected, the wolf creature took a hit in shadow depth, so I added some addition edge lighting to it which helps a bit.
 

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red moon

Member
Here's an assembly of the others with some color experimentation through in. I usually lock the final colors in editor and keep it loose at first.
The fish/men hybrid where most difficult since I wanted a colored piece of clothing.
 

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red moon

Member
One more batch of sprites I needed to configure. The villagers and base player. I added a couple skeletons in as well.

Currently, I am in the sprite organization phase in the editor. Building all the palettes and assembling sprite sheets so I can test varying combinations. Right now, I am trying to squeeze enemy placement, trap placement and enemy/trap combinations on a screen by screen basis for all 18 titlesets.
 

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red moon

Member
Thanks Dale!

I am making progress slowiy, I've got the 1st zone in along with enemies that move and do Damage and the player walks, jumps, climbs. I still need to add frames to the walk animation and set an idle state for the climb to stop the animation cycle.
Next time, I'll have the walk and attack (1st pass) fully animated with enemy walk and spit projectiles. At least...I hope I will!

https://youtu.be/uXXsfIl-l8c
 

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red moon

Member
Thank you Dale, my goal is to update every few days to track the development and get feedback from you and anyone else here!
 
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