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General and Everything Else => The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff => Topic started by: troflip on July 06, 2016, 02:08:20 PM
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I'm redrawing several of my screens for my SCI0 project, and I'd like to get some feedback on what looks good and what looks bad.
Here's the first one I've redone. It's a dark cave in which you need to find a light switch to turn the lights on (otherwise you have to navigate a twisty path in the dark). I'm probably going to split it up into two screens... the top image is the new version (first screen), and the bottom image is what it looked like before.
If anyone else has any art to share, feel free to use this thread!
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Looks great. The boards just make me wonder about actors walking up and down slopes/stairs -- naively you'd expect standing on the left side and pressing the right arrow key to walk screenspace-diagonally...
Edit: attaching some shit for critiquing.
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I'm redrawing several of my screens for my SCI0 project, and I'd like to get some feedback on what looks good and what looks bad.
Here's the first one I've redone. It's a dark cave in which you need to find a light switch to turn the lights on (otherwise you have to navigate a twisty path in the dark). I'm probably going to split it up into two screens... the top image is the new version (first screen), and the bottom image is what it looked like before.
If anyone else has any art to share, feel free to use this thread!
Looks great. I'm excited because Cascade Quest is one of the two demo games I've wanted to see made into a full game, the other is Legend of the Lost Jewel.
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The ego in Cascade Quest looks feminine. Is that on purpose?
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Looks great. The boards just make me wonder about actors walking up and down slopes/stairs -- naively you'd expect standing on the left side and pressing the right arrow key to walk screenspace-diagonally...
It doesn't do that now, but maybe it should. I probably should have taken that into account when designing the level... i.e. make the boards either horizontal or vertical.
Still undecided if I want the player to fall off or not. They definitely fall off if they don't find the light switch, but right now I have it so the edges become hard boundaries otherwise. The problem is, I'm inconsistent throughout the game on whether walking off the edge of things kills you or not. I don't really like having to maneuver precisely, but OTOH it makes for some funny death scenes.
Edit: attaching some shit for critiquing.
Those images are super-crisp... are you developing an SCI2 game, or are they going to get downsized to SCI1.1 res?
I don't have much to criticize, it looks good. Shadows look correct, and the art style is "cohesive". I prefer perspective view to isometric though. And in the last photo, it's hard to tell what that is behind the small stools.
I'm excited because Cascade Quest is one of the two demo games I've wanted to see made into a full game, the other is Legend of the Lost Jewel.
It's pretty much a full game now. I think the demo was 4 screens or so, but I expanded it to around 50 or 60 several years ago - but never released. It still needs a few months of polish and fleshing out. And at least 3 more screens to wrap up the story. And also the story doesn't make much sense, so I need to revamp some of that to make it all tie together :P
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The ego in Cascade Quest looks feminine. Is that on purpose?
Nope.... I forget where I got it from, but I think it's a re-colored police quest ego or something. But I gave it bare legs (which is relevant to the story, actually). It's the legs that make it look feminine, right?
Hmm... maybe I should make the main character female... my game certainly fails the Bechdel test currently. The only female character is a goat.
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On a related thing to SCI0 Art, I can't make it myself, not for my main project or side project. If I even tried you would literally just get stickmen drawings and stuff, when I'm trying to make an authentic SCI0 looking game... How do I find SCI0 Artists to art for me?
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The ego in Cascade Quest looks feminine. Is that on purpose?
Nope.... I forget where I got it from, but I think it's a re-colored police quest ego or something. But I gave it bare legs (which is relevant to the story, actually). It's the legs that make it look feminine, right?
Hmm... maybe I should make the main character female... my game certainly fails the Bechdel test currently. The only female character is a goat.
It's a collection of things that make Ego look female: Slender curvy legs, short skirt or shorts, Parka / Jacket hiding breasts, black pixie cut and black pumps... But yeah, a female character seems to suit the game better.
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On a related thing to SCI0 Art, I can't make it myself, not for my main project or side project. If I even tried you would literally just get stickmen drawings and stuff, when I'm trying to make an authentic SCI0 looking game... How do I find SCI0 Artists to art for me?
Given how few SCI programmers there are, you likely won't find any SCI artists.
The biggest help for me as been finding scenes in games that are similar to what I wanted, and then trying to emulate that. Open those pics in SCI Companion and see how they drew them. I took a lot of inspiration from QFG1 and SQ3. LB1 is also really nice when it comes to dramatic lighting. KQ4 kinda sucks IMO.
I think (from what I recall when I worked on this before) I usually sketched them out first on paper, then drew them using that paper image as a tracing image. Although for this last one, I just drew it freehand from paper sketches (i.e. didn't trace) and then did a lot of adjustments.
As for character animations, those are really difficult. I have no idea.
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On a related thing to SCI0 Art, I can't make it myself, not for my main project or side project. If I even tried you would literally just get stickmen drawings and stuff, when I'm trying to make an authentic SCI0 looking game... How do I find SCI0 Artists to art for me?
Given how few SCI programmers there are, you likely won't find any SCI artists.
The biggest help for me as been finding scenes in games that are similar to what I wanted, and then trying to emulate that. Open those pics in SCI Companion and see how they drew them. I took a lot of inspiration from QFG1 and SQ3. LB1 is also really nice when it comes to dramatic lighting. KQ4 kinda sucks IMO.
I think (from what I recall when I worked on this before) I usually sketched them out first on paper, then drew them using that paper image as a tracing image. Although for this last one, I just drew it freehand from paper sketches (i.e. didn't trace) and then did a lot of adjustments.
As for character animations, those are really difficult. I have no idea.
I may just sketch and employ you. :P
What's your price? ;D
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Looks great. The boards just make me wonder about actors walking up and down slopes/stairs -- naively you'd expect standing on the left side and pressing the right arrow key to walk screenspace-diagonally...
Kawa, do you set the picAngle in these rooms? might make them a bit easier to navigate.
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Kawa, do you set the picAngle in these rooms? might make them a bit easier to navigate.
What does picAngle do anyway? That seems like something that's not documented anywhere. It appears to only be used for determining the distance between points and the visibility from one point to another.
Also, the SCI0 template game calls GetDistance and passes gPicAngle as the 5th parameter, but ScummVM looks at the 6th parameter for the angle (and never touches the 5th parameter). Bug in ScummVM? Or am I not reading it right.
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Those images are super-crisp... are you developing an SCI2 game, or are they going to get downsized to SCI1.1 res?
I basically just rendered them, because I misplaced the earlier copies. They're meant to be downscaled like the garage pic.I don't have much to criticize, it looks good. Shadows look correct, and the art style is "cohesive". I prefer perspective view to isometric though. And in the last photo, it's hard to tell what that is behind the small stools.
It's a little restaurant/bar thingy. Needs more props in there.
Kawa, do you set the picAngle in these rooms? might make them a bit easier to navigate.
They're not even in the game proper yet, but perhaps I should. These and the player character's living room are after all equally isometric in nature...
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Doesn't look particularly feminine to me. The ego looks like the SCI0 template ego with bare legs. The jacket just looks like a hoodie.
As to sprites it would be nice to have a repository of different SCI0 and SCI1.1 views. Might not be completely kosher, but we could take ones from existing games as templates. We could have community competitions to add to the repository. It could help attract potential game designers if we had enough stock resources that they could use to not have that obstetrical to game creation. Gumby did a sound FX pack a while back that could be added to the repository. I could also mirror it on the Wiki.
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As to sprites it would be nice to have a repository of different SCI0 and SCI1.1 views.
That was kinda the plan, heh...
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What does picAngle do anyway? That seems like something that's not documented anywhere. It appears to only be used for determining the distance between points and the visibility from one point to another.
According to SCI16/SYSTEM, picAngle is "how far from vertical is our view? 0-89". That's all I got out of it.
Edit: it certainly doesn't seem to affect joystick player movement...
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From what I can gather, it is supposed to specify how much you're "looking down" on a scene, as opposed to looking across. It only affects how the y distance is measured.
As the pic angle approaches 90, y the distance between things will approach infinity.
So 0 would be straight down (and dy would be unchanged), and 89 would be nearly straight horizontal. Looking nearly horizontally at something (89 degrees), stuff that is 1 pixel y away from another thing would actually be 57 units away (per GetDistance kernel).
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So the best and/or easiest way I can think of to ensure a character will in fact walk across those boards "properly" would be to detect standing on the edge and handsOff until they reach the other end.
But enough theorizing about angles. Let's review artwork! Here's something I've been mucking with for CTxCB:
(http://i.imgur.com/FlNgQif.png)
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But enough theorizing about angles. Let's review artwork! Here's something I've been mucking with for CTxCB:
It looks very professional! Makes me miss a 256-color palette, lol.
Can you export it as an animated gif so we can see the animation?
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It's not even in view format lol but okay here's a gif I whipped up just because I respect you.
(http://i.imgur.com/ZiEGROb.gif)
But of course it looks professional -- it's view.000 from Codename Iceman with the color depth cranked up. Not unlike how I used view.203 to make my Catdate sprites.
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Lol, thank you for the effort! Thought it was already a view...
But of course it looks professional -- it's view.000 from Codename Iceman with the color depth cranked up. Not unlike how I used view.203 to make my Catdate sprites.
Well, you up-colored it quite nicely.
Attached is the second room of the cavern sequence...
Hmm... I think the light bulb should be more transparent instead of grey...
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As to sprites it would be nice to have a repository of different SCI0 and SCI1.1 views.
That was kinda the plan, heh...
At one time I was working on an SCI game which was an arcade-style 'chase' game where the ego would just be chased from room to room. It was sorta supposed to be a showcase of a 'view library' that I was building up, views created from existing games. Wasn't taking existing view resources, but made new ones from the pics of games (a tree here, a bush there). See screenshot below, those I all pulled from the KQ1 remake.
About to go on vacation, maybe I'll pick that project back up.
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Here's the last scene I was working on in KQ2SCI before stopping. Unfinished but you can see where it was going.
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For some reason the palm tree looks funny, but I can't put my finger on why... The shading and segmentation are nicely done... maybe it's the shadow? It doesn't look quite correct.
The trees look like they have a lot of zigzaggy scratches on them... on one hand it approximates featured bark well, but it still looks funny. I need to do some trees like that in my game, and I haven't found a way to make them look good yet.
I think the low res/palette EGA stuff really benefits from stark contrast and dramatic lighting. I think that's one of the reasons Laura Bow looks so good.
Now I'm looking to improve my bushes.
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The sun's position is a roughly 1:00 shadow position. Usually light comes from the top left and is longer but in KQ2 the light seems to come from the top right but more centered so shadows are shorter. Not that I'm any great artist with all kinds of insight. I'm just guessing. If it looks wrong it looks wrong lol.
The trees are definitely made up of zig-zag scratchy lines. That's why I depend on dithering because it looks atrocious in undithered mode, as you can imagine. There's probably far too much detail than is necessary but it really looked good at the time. All the other trees I made in the game are made the same way. KQ1SCI has a much cleaner style artwork that I just can't bring myself to emulate. I wish I understood art more.
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The main thing wrong with the palm is that light is that the light direction does not match. Look at the shadow from the tree vs the shading on the trunk of the tree itself.
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Not that I'm any great artist with all kinds of insight. I'm just guessing. If it looks wrong it looks wrong lol.
Well, this is a feedback thread :P
The trees are definitely made up of zig-zag scratchy lines. That's why I depend on dithering because it looks atrocious in undithered mode, as you can imagine. There's probably far too much detail than is necessary but it really looked good at the time. All the other trees I made in the game are made the same way. KQ1SCI has a much cleaner style artwork that I just can't bring myself to emulate. I wish I understood art more.
Yeah, your trees look much better dithered. Weird thing is I was looking at some old videos of Sierra games, and you can't even see the dithering. The colors blend nearly into a solid tone (like they were undithered).
Art is all about practice. Also, I'm pretty sure the KQ1SCI artists are working off reference drawings. It's a lot easier to get the shading right with a pencil and then try to emulate that with vector commands, than it is to do it with vector commands right away.
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Here's a work in progress for Catdate.
(http://i.imgur.com/lGJmF5N.gif)
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She looks skilled with the broom. Only thing that look a little weird is the upper hand motion seems to travel two pixels at once... it could be smoother with an in-between frame halfway between the two positions.
If it's just a one pixel movement (it's hard to tell w/o loading it into Companion), then never mind my feedback.
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I assure you, it's a one-pixel movement. I could go with keeping it there for more than one frame though...
Also, did you really not recognize the character?
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The main thing wrong with the palm is that light is that the light direction does not match. Look at the shadow from the tree vs the shading on the trunk of the tree itself.
Ah yes. I see. So that shading should just be mirrored.
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Here's another one. The top image is what it looked before, the bottom is after my redo.
I think the tree and sign look nicer, but I'm not sure about the rest. I think the stylized trees/sky in the background might look better in the first one. Thoughts?
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Agreed. The stylized background is better, but I like the new tree and sign.
Somewhat improved (I think) certain janitor:
(http://i.imgur.com/lZx40A5.gif)
And a "new" character, shown in-place:
(http://i.imgur.com/dkAK7Be.png)
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Ahhh.... it's Roger in (feline?) drag. He even kept his purple shirt.
The new cat person looks great. The tail cuts into the bar stool a bit - but I think in cat world, chairs would have grooves for the tail, so that makes sense.
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The new cat person looks great. The tail cuts into the bar stool a bit - but I think in cat world, chairs would have grooves for the tail, so that makes sense.
Didn't you see the scene on page 1? Those stools have no grooves. Still, I can see why you'd think so, and I think a single strategic pixel might make the difference.
Also, it's Template Guy.
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I'm actually saying in catworld, stools *should* have grooves. And catnip should be illegal, but easily available on the black market. Backstory...
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Fortunately, you have no editorial power over the Firrhna Project 8)
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Very nice tree bark texture, troflip! I think the first background looks better as well.
Nice sprites, Kawa!
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I basically traced the tree bark from this image:
http://www.bentler.us/eastern-washington/plants/trees/douglas-fir-trunk.jpg
Didn't come out quite like I wanted, but it's not too bad.
Now I'm redoing the room where the red cavern/walkways joins up with the "basement":
Top image is old, bottom image is new. Still haven't filled out a lot of the details in the bottom image, but I think the lighting is more dramatic at least. Not super happy with the boulders at the bottom. SQ3 has some really nice boulders on that reddish planet.
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Damn that looks neat.
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I think the top one looks a bit better actually. I know you said the bottom is unfinished though.
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Interesting... what do you prefer about the top one? The smoother gradients between light and dark? Better-looking boulders?
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I guess it's the lighting/shading. I like the messy dithering effect. Also the straight black between the steps makes the lighting look much more contrasting like it's a really dark place with a weak light source.
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Your avatar?
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Huh?
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I don't think a lightsaber could be considered a "weak" light source :3
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Oh lol.
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Huh?
My post of
Your avatar?
was supposed to be a response to Kawa's
Also, did you really not recognize the character?
which was the last post of a page. I did not realize that there were more posts on another page, so I did not quote Kawa. That is one reason that I do not like how this board dumps you out of a thread if you reply. Had I realized right after posting I would have deleted it or added the quote so it would not have been such a non sequiter.
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lol okay no the sitting cat person is Template Guy.
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"Final" version (bottom)... still not totally satisfied with how it looks. Rocks on the ground have been changed to look more like what might have fallen from the walls. Stairs are higher contract, and slight details added elsewhere.
Unlike MI, I'm not a big fan of the spray paint tool, but I might touch some places up with it.
Or move onto the next challenge, which is to make this outdoor scene look better. It's suppose to represent a mountain you are to climb, but the dirt gullies just look plain and silly. Somehow I have to make this look like an actual cliff/mountainside.
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Utterly unrelated but hey it's art, here's something I made to celebrate the upcoming Starbound 1.0 release:
(http://i.imgur.com/ln9xhkD.gif)
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Troflip, maybe don't use the spray tool but at least draw a bit of a (perhaps slightly jagged) ellipse of light spilling out onto the floor and walls at the bottom of the stairs there with a dithered palette colour between the light colour and the floor colour (red/grey). As it is it kind of just looks like illuminated walls. I do like the layout of that image better than the older one.
As for the new image, the colour contrast (brown/gray) is probably the worst offender.
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Troflip, maybe don't use the spray tool but at least draw a bit of a (perhaps slightly jagged) ellipse of light spilling out onto the floor and walls at the bottom of the stairs there with a dithered palette colour between the light colour and the floor colour (red/grey). As it is it kind of just looks like illuminated walls. I do like the layout of that image better than the older one.
Except I can't use dithering, since I'm undithering ;-). 136 luscious undithered EGA colors. That red at the bottom of the steps is already red/black. I agree with you that it looks weird that the red ends suddenly though.
I mean, I can sort of dither the undithered by using the spray paint tool actually.... (like I was in the original pic)
Kawa: the character looks good, but maybe needs more contrast? Haven't heard of Starbound, but it looks cool.
Next bit, old and new again. Pretty happy with how this turned out, and that's good because it's the opening screen.
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Dithering the undithered...
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Dithering the undithered...
Breaking the unbroken. Row, row, fight the power.
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I like it. But I guess I'm in the minority on that...
To be fair, the messy dithering reminds me of normals on a texture map where the light shines on certain parts of the ground. Makes it look rough and uneven.
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Doesn't look particularly feminine to me. The ego looks like the SCI0 template ego with bare legs. The jacket just looks like a hoodie.
oh, btw, my ego is not the SCI0 template game ego. Different numbers of cels, etc...
Pretty sure it's a modified version of the PQ2 ego.
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That reminds me. I was supposed to make an SCI1+ Template Girl.
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Two more comparisons... old on top, new on the bottom.
The first one is supposed to represent a path coming down from a mountain off screen to the left, and a glacier on the right.
The second one is supposed to represent a glacier below some cliffs, and an apparently inaccessible pass at the top of a gully. I'm not too happy with the look of the cliffs in the new version.
I'm not really happy with either of the new versions, to be honest. I mean, the one with the goat has definitely improved, but it still looks weird. I'm having a hard time finding the right color palette.
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This color scheme feels a little better to me.
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Perhaps it's the shading on the cliff face that's a little off. Seems to straight and polished. Maybe make it a bit more jagged?
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Top one is the original. I really don't like the brown and green shades together, and I'm trying to redo the scene.
I ended up with the middle (the trees are supposed to be mossy) - but again the color palette seems wrong.
So I changed the colors around and I think I like the bottom one better. Thoughts? I wanted the trees to be green and mossy, but I could not find a color combo that worked. And I'm no longer tied to using realistic colors, since they end up looking kind of boring. But they shouldn't be *too* unrealistic.
The bottom two images are of course unfinished. I need to fill in a lot of detail and rocks and stuff. And change the orientation of the signboard on the right so it's more on edge - it looks weird.
Oh, I'm also trying to emphasize that the forest is a little dark and mysterious, and the bottom part of the picture is supposed to be a bright parking lot (hence the brightly-colored side of the trees). And the log on the right is supposed to be suspended high in the air - should become more obvious once I put in shadows and bushes and stuff.
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So that's what you added undither mode for :3
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Looks good. I like the last pic best as well, but it doesn't portray that mossy look you're going for as well as the second. Maybe put the moss in a kind of green/brown/grey tone in patches on the trees? This is one of those instances where dithering would actually make it look better and closer to what you're after, IHMO.
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Yeah, I gave up on the trees looking mossy I guess. Just couldn't get the colors looking good together.
There's nothing stopping me from dithering the undithered dithered graphics though. Just requires a lot of carefully-placed pen commands :P
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"final" version... now all that's left to do is redo the other 3 screens that need redoing since I changed the style of this one....
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I think the grass is a little bit too acidic looking, but I understand the look you're going for. Probably best you can get. Looks great!
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I agree about the grass, but otherwise looks really good.
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The reflections on the car's windshield and windows look unnatural. Overall the car look like an attempt at dithering a photograph of a car which differs from the hand-drawn style of the rest of the picture.
You can get some ideas by looking at the plethora of (hand-drawn) cars in Police Quest 2.
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Thank you so much for all of your feedback!
Yeah, the grass is weird - I'll try to find a slightly greener color that goes well with the rest of the bit. I'm trying to depict brightly-lit grass. And I'm no longer tied to realism :-)
The car is indeed a trace of a real image. Good idea to look for cars in police quest.
This is my next work-in-progress. Still need to put in bushes and details. I think the rocks in the center look great, but out-of-sync with the rest of the image, so I may need to redraw them. They're (as you might have guessed) a bitmap-to-pic thing from some clip art. Boulders are surprisingly hard to draw.
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Something tells me actual car sizes are somewhere between mine and PQ2's.
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Grass color changed, and Subaru replaced with Forest Service SUV...
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All very nice upgrades. :) Except for the undithering regression. :( Still, it looks good. I might suggest a bit of black outline of the rocks there just to match the rest of the scenery. Kind of looks like they were pasted on top. Even if it's just on the lower edges of them. Grass colour is much better, as is the new truck.
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Decided to pull my Thrawn view attempts to the public here, might as well get more use out of this art thread so others might follow suit as you're the only one who's done it yet. Trying to get side views right. It's remarkably more difficult. The face especially, but also the body. It's just not looking as nice and polished as the front/back. Maybe because there are more subtle details in the form structure? I kind of modeled the head style off of FOA sprites.
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Like last time, the body looks a little too straight. And something's wrong with the head, but I can't tell what... maybe it's too thin? Or maybe the nose needs to be higher up the face.
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Did some changes while referencing Roger's body from SQ1VGA. Hopefully his skeleton looks a little more anatomically correct now (spine aligns with neck and feet) and he's not as fat. I think this makes his head appear a little more correctly proportioned. If I move his nose up it meets his eyes, though, which looks very wrong. As it is his eyes, mouth, and hairline are aligned to his front view so the positions I think are the best they can be...or maybe I should just remove the nose and mouth altogether like SQ1VGA's Roger. Although, my sprite is larger and demands more details as a result.
Before (right) and after (left).
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I was thinking more like this:
But I'm not sure if that's any better than what you have already.
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Like I said, his eyes are aligned with his front view. I see what you mean, though. His head does seem a bit large, but the dimensions are at such a point that the pixels are too large to shrink it without it looking too small and too small to remove that much detail anyway. Check out the Indy FOA sprites they're more or less the same.
How about this?
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Or this following your example. Maybe it is better and the alignment doesn't matter...here's all 3 side by side.
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Well without the nose it looks pretty weird. I agree with you that the head really wants to be halfway in between the two sizes to look good :-). One second I think the middle looks better, then I think the right one looks better! I'm not sure what to suggest...
[edit:]maybe if you make the head wider, it would look ok? dunno..
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I think the one on the left overall is good. I don't know if the nose is really that necessary on the character on that one sprite, but I think it's excellent overall.
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I showed it around on Twitter and I got three responses all with votes for my original version in the middle. Two of them by artists (one a pixel artist). So I'll take that to heart as professional opinion and stick with it for now. If this ends up in a game I'll see how it looks later on. Thanks for the feedback though, guys.
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My main weakness with backgrounds is indoor rooms. I feel confident drawing bushes and the like, but furniture will always confuse me. Does anyone have any tips for drawing indoor locations?
Included an outdoor and indoor room from my game to illustrate the point. I drew inspiration from LSL for the outdoor bits, and have studied the art from SQ3 as well, but it hasn't really improved my furniture/clutter skills.
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Not bad. More often than not you'll find that it's the lighting/shading that affects the realism factor more than the geography and shape of things. Pick the spot(s) where the light source(s) is(/are) coming from and draw in your shaded areas accordingly to the best of oyur abilities. Take special note especially of Sierra bg's and how they incorporate shading. IMO that's the best way to do it. Even an unrealistically shaped and disproportionate object can look good or even real with the right shading. Google some shading tips and then try to apply it to your EGA backgrounds. There are some neat dithering tricks you can take advantage of between two colours for some good shading that can portray lighting and colour in interesting ways you never thought of. But try to avoid flat colours on everything. That's what can make otherwise good things look like a child's drawing. And try not to outline every object with black.
I'm not an artist. This is just what I've tried to learn on my own. My advice may only be scratching the surface...or there may be something even better you can do. In my experience, though, shading is everything.
Even for your outdoor image there, you can put shadows of those bushes underneath it. And even a small shadow of the curb on the pavement, depending on where the sun is coming from.
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For indoor scenes you're going to need a good understanding of perspective so that squarish objects are nicely aligned. I think that's why the desk and bookcase look strangely-shaped. The bookcase, for instance:
- has shelves that appear wider in back than in front
- the shelf guards (? the thing in front of the shelf) "shrink" at different rates as they recede
... the mat has a strange shape too. I think all these problems would be fixed with proper perspective (1-point perspective in this case).
The walls close to the camera look too tall too (maybe it's a tall room though, I dunno :-) )
What would probably help is drawing the image out on paper first, take a photo of it, and then use that as a tracing guide in SCI Companion. I always draw the scene several times on paper first until it looks like I want.
Your outside scene looks a lot better (especially the bushes are nice), probably because perspective doesn't matter as much with more organic things like plants. But... there are still some obvious issues:
- The sidewalk chunks are different widths
- The yellow road paint doesn't use perspective lines like the sidewalk chunks do
- The sewer... is that supposed to be a sewer? I'm not sure what you're going for there.
The grass in the cracks is a nice touch.
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I think for indoor scenes, LB1 is a really good one to study. Both for proper use of perspective, and great lighting.
You can see that the lines in the room mostly all vanish to a single point. But they aren't perfect, the right side of the carper doesn't quite line up correctly. It's close enough that you don't really notice though.
Whereas in your image, the perspective lines are kind of going everywhere (they don't meet at a single point)
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The beauty of vector art: you can draw those perspective guidelines first, do the actual room art, and remove the guides utterly. Noone'd know they were ever there.
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Yes, I can't believe I forgot to mention the vanishing point. That has helped me tremendously in drawing my own rooms. Do that.
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Thank you all very much! I did a quick trace-over sketch using perspective techniques and it already looks way better. I'm on a cell phone right now but when I get internet again I'll post a re-draw. :)
And yeah, the thing in the outdoor scene is meant to be a drain. I wasn't sure how to do it, and frankly I can remove it since it isn't crucial to a puzzle or anything. I just put it there for added detail.
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I decided to give my redraw a different color scheme as the bright colors didn't really suit the scene, so I did more browns. Sorry for the cell phone photo, but I'm really happy with how this came out in relation to the old one. Higher quality will be posted when I have internet
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Omg, that's like a million times better! Huge improvement :-)
Only think that looks a bit weird is the sign at the bottom left, but that's easy to fix.
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Beautiful! Much better! It's amazing what just a bit of simple knowledge can do.
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Thirded. This is really good!
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I officially hate bushes. I just can't make good ones. I know these ones are terrible :P
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I promised higher quality when I got internet, so here y'all go. I'm super happy with how this turned out! Thank all y'all for the amazing advice :)
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Like my teacher once told us in my first and only art class I took (just to finish high school), "People say they can't draw, but what they really mean is that they don't draw." Everyone can do it to some degree. And I believe that for everything. That's why I have so many hobbies.
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I guess I'll draw bushes on the way to work today.
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Looks awesome, claude.
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I guess I'll draw bushes on the way to work today.
Diving while drawing? Tsk, tsk.
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Lol, I don't drive to work (or dive)...
I think one reason I might be having so much trouble with bushes is that they rely heavily on shading, and most of my drawings are line drawings.
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Lol, I don't drive to work (or dive)...
I think one reason I might be having so much trouble with bushes is that they rely heavily on shading, and most of my drawings are line drawings.
My technique is to think of the bush as a clump of balls or bubbles, and squiggle the outline and shade accordingly. It might help to draw a bunch of circles for your construction lines, and scribble rough shapes in the corner of each circle, depending on where your light source is, for shading. (Try connecting shapes that are close together; shadows tend to "clump".) Then you can spray tool over it to give the illusion of leaves.
I recommend studying LSL3 for bushes. That's how I learned mine.
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Lol, I don't drive to work (or dive)...
I have a couple of keys on my keyboard that don't register unless I strike them a little harder than the rest.
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Lol, I don't drive to work (or dive)...
I have a couple of keys on my keyboard that don't register unless I strike them a little harder than the rest.
That's an amusing mental image, though. Maybe they work at a secret underwater evil science lab?
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My technique is to think of the bush as a clump of balls or bubbles, and squiggle the outline and shade accordingly. It might help to draw a bunch of circles for your construction lines, and scribble rough shapes in the corner of each circle, depending on where your light source is, for shading. (Try connecting shapes that are close together; shadows tend to "clump".) Then you can spray tool over it to give the illusion of leaves.
I recommend studying LSL3 for bushes. That's how I learned mine.
I tried drawing them based on circle shapes once, and this was the result: https://twitter.com/IceFallGames/status/760922407997575168
Kind of ick...
I have a couple of keys on my keyboard that don't register unless I strike them a little harder than the rest.
The C on my keyboard needs to be hit harder if the SHIFT key is down...
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It's been a while since I touched this thread.
Working pretty hard on my SCI0 project, but also dabbling in some mini-projects in AGI.
This is an alien for one of those mini-projects, "Doors". The alien is as of now unnamed, and won't be walking around, and I haven't decided whether to animate him or not since he'll just be standing in one place.
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It looks good... it should have some kind of idle animation, or at least head movement maybe. You did a lot with a few pixels though!
I'm trying to figure out how to draw better (or more varied) cliffs. The examples below are "import bitmap to pic" undithered EGA from some I found on the internet. Wish I could draw something like that...
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That's quite an effective palette with those light pastel colours!
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Yeah, it works really well with pastel-y desaturated colors.
Here's another I imported from some game I forgot the name of...
If nothing else, it gives me ideas for palettes that might work well..
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Super Cauldron (http://amiga.lychesis.net/update/2015-06-27/SuperCauldron_Ending.html)
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Quite gorgeous! For those first screens I actually thought at first glance it was an SCI1.1 background and that you were playing with colour cycling for animation of the waterfalls.
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Beginning of my attempt to make cliffs that look something like the stuff I posted earlier... not satisfied with anything yet...
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Heh. Already got me beat~
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Came across this in my Facebook feed from Steve Ince. Not that it is a solution directly in the Pic editor, but it could be used to make a tracing image or to scan in for an SCI1.1 Pic. https://www.facebook.com/Anatolyreza/posts/10208954828525634
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I thought about implementing something like that in SCI Companion... wouldn't be too hard, I don't think. I haven't bothered yet because it's mainly useful for scenes where most objects are aligned along 3 axes (generally human constructions like houses and such, which I am not doing much of).
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Nice! It's still valuable to make sure everything is lined with the vanishing point/horizon line. In SCI you can easily make vector guidelines and then erase them again when they're not needed. Even natural and organic looking objects can be placed and sized appropriately.
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In SCI you can easily make vector guidelines and then erase them again when they're not needed.
You could, but what is nice about how he did that in the video was how easy and quick it is to use on the fly. Short of that though, vector guidelines would be a reasonable way to to it.
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Did something else yesterday. Using Thrawn as a base I made another character from the story, Captain Pellaeon. I like how it turned out. Imperial uniforms have a slight green tint to them I think but I figured straight gray was close enough, otherwise I'd have to alter the main 64-colour palette which I don't really want to do unless I absolutely need to. I could try, though. Might make for an interesting vibe throughout the game. I added a comparison pic for the closest resemblance I imagine Pellaeon visually. I picture Pellaeon a bit older than in this image so a full face and a bit more body weight is the look I was going for in the sprite. And also the original (but slightly refined) Thrawn sprite which was used as the base.
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You captured the mustache really well.
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That was honestly a real challenge. It took me a while to accept that I had to add a third pixel on the side views that "curls" it downward as I thought it might look too much like a handlebar moustache. But in such low resolution it really isn't so bad.
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Slight subtle edits to the front view to try to make him appear a little older by making him a bit beefier, but not overweight which was a tricky balance to strike.
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I'm redoing the opening scene of my game. The original "redo" is the one on top. I've made other variations with different color palettes. Which looks best?
I was trying to go for drab fake wood paneling, but the results ends up being... drab. I've noticed that the most impressive "EGA" art uses less-realistic colors.
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It seems to me the stark lighting from the sun through the window and the spotlight casts from the ceiling lights calls for the darker walls (as in black in the shadows). I don't really like the teal walls and purple floor in the top left because it makes it look too much like the CGA palette (which I really dislike) and also makes the room look dumpy and dingy...unless that's the intention. The teal colours give it a damp feeling somehow...So with that in mind, either top right or bottom left. I prefer the bottom left for some reason.
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Thanks for the input!
Yeah (I will reveal now), my preferences are the bottom two. I need to force myself to use black for shadows a little more...
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Yeah, if you're going to use elements like light beams you need to have at least some black present otherwise the room looks TOO well lit where light beams wouldn't make sense. Dynamics = good.
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"Final" version, with some perspective fixes too...
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Looks great!.....you know, except for the undithering. ;) :P