Virgin pixel art tileset attempt - Updated with in-game screens (4 aug 2010)

Walls, blood splats and ground texture look very good, but the metal bolts are far too "catchy". Make them smaller and less bright so they "melt" a little more into the ground tile.

Thanks for the comment. Edited:



[Edited by - ruben tan on August 16, 2010 7:58:30 AM]

Pixel by pixel is like pulling teeth in Photoshop, IMO

Also, the wall looks like it's floating above the floor,but otherwise pretty good.

I like the art style. Though I am not an artist I do have an appreciation for it, and I like the fairly consistent style in the tileset and character sprite. The ground tiles seem somewhat different in style to me, but I wouldn't be able to begin to tell you how to change it so take that criticism for the little value it's worth.

Overall, it's pretty good for someone just getting into pixel art.

Keep up the good work and don't let anyone discourage you,
-Wynter Woods

EDIT: looking back at the edited picture, it looks much better. Must've been the large bolts.

Looks good, my only suggestion would be to get rid of the the drop shadow under your wall tiles. It makes them look like they're floating above your floor as Prinz Eugn said.

@Prinz Eugn

I agree that the wall looks floated. I'm not sure what to do to make it "stick" to the ground though. I thought shadowing it was the way to make it stick, but on second glance apparently that wasn't so.

@zerotri

Thanks zerotri. The large bolts did look awkward after Fetze pointed it out.

@prh99

I didn't remove the shadows, but rather changed it to 60% opacity with overlay blending. Does it look better? This adds an additional problem though... of how do I perform overlay blending in code.



Don't think it looks better though. I suspect it might be the hard 1px solid black line on the bottom of the wall, so I went ahead and softened it. Below is a comparison:



What do you think?

[Edited by - ruben tan on August 16, 2010 7:24:26 AM]

I think that maybe it's a problem that the floor tiles under the wall pieces are clearly the same floor tiles as everywhere else. So the pattern repeats under the walls which makes the walls looks like they are loose elements placed on top the floor, rather than growing up from the ground.

Try giving the walls more definition by breaking up the floor tiles to get an edge up to the wall.

Quote:

Original post by ruben tan Thanks for the comment. Edited:

Much better. You should try to keep all your background tiles below a certain brightness threshold so that only the foreground elements (players, NPCS, interative props, etc) pop out to the player.

@Promethium

I'm not entirely sure how to do that, to be honest. Right now here's how my engine draws the map:

Pass 1 - draw all ground tiles
Pass 2 - draw a cloud layer on top of the tiles to break the repeating patterns
Pass 3 - draw blood splatters layer
Pass 4 - draw all entities (shadows, characters, walls, etc)
Pass 5 - UI elements

Here're the five mockups:











Do you mean more variations on the base tiles? Like some with cracks and so on?

@Daaark

Noted, thanks for the tip!

[Edited by - ruben tan on August 16, 2010 7:19:23 AM]

Hi guys,

I've coded my engine to automatically generate walls randomly. While the generator is still a very basic generator, the wall selection algorithm is pretty much completed, resulting is these shots:







I guess the tileset turned out to work pretty well. :D

[Edited by - ruben tan on August 16, 2010 6:59:52 AM]

Added unanimated character sprite and a monster sprite.



As well as a mockup of the fog of war:



[Edited by - ruben tan on August 16, 2010 6:46:48 AM]

I second Prinz Eugn's suggestion: the bottom and side of walls should be exactly aligned with floor tiles. This means, of course, thicker walls and/or smaller tiles; shadows can be overlaid on adjacent tiles.
In the current state of the graphics, the player might think he can squeeze between adjacent walls (e.g. locations marked L-NE and L-SE in the first mockup).

Since being a wall or clear should be an attribute of tiles rather than of corners or edges, you should add tiles for walls over 1 tile of thickness; they would allow you to replace the clumsy square holes seen in the level demos with proper thick walls. For reference, the interior/starship tileset in Starcraft (I) does thick walls right.

The rivets in the floor tiles are extremely large (comparable to the character's hands!).

The solid black (or gray) outlines don't seem a good match with the dirty and desaturated style of the walls, and they are inconsistently applied.

The stained floor tiles look strange: real stains do not cross walls, but your stains do.
Proper stains should be multiple decals, carefully clipped at room boundaries, rather than a coherent large one; but I doubt the result would be worth the effort.

Okay I messed around with dodge/burn in photoshop just to give you an idea of what I'm going to mention:



I modified the little center square room. I think one reason your walls are disconnecting from the floor is because you make an obvious dark edge at the base of the wall and then you have lighter highlighted areas running along the base... For what reason, I'm not sure.

Walls tend to be dark near the base... This is due to more shadow filling in the corners between the bottom of the wall and floor. So by actually darkening the bottom half of the wall, and then further darkening the shadow on the floor, you get a nice transition and it comes off as more gritty and dark.

Also I feel like your floor overall is a bit too bright. The floor should be pretty dark in comparison to the walls... Just to have the little bit of light on the walls be the strongest point in your scene. The upper "ceiling" part of the walls should also be rather dark. In fact, you could probably get away with them being nearly black.

I also agree that you should fill in those center squares of wall with a thick wall tile. It looks odd seeing a totally inclosed wall with empty space in it. You have to look at it from an architectural point of view... you wouldn't build an empty enclosed space.

As for the floor tiling... you gotta do more than just put a cloud pattern over it to break it up... actually break it up. As in make some tiles cracked, or broken. Insert maybe another type of floor and blend it with the cement tiles. Maybe areas covered with wood paneling? If not wood, at least a different type of cement... Maybe just cement paths without bolts and tiles. You could also line the tiles at the base of the walls with an edge of sorts. Like a runner going around all the wall edges. That might also help tie the walls to the floor.

Notice how this wall has a clear indicator as to where it connects to the ground?

Great comments.

@Konidias

Your example makes it really clear. I'm working on a new set of walls, but as of now it's gonna take some time. As for the floor tiles, yes, I had a randomized tileset for it actually, with 10x11 variants. Here's a video showing the randomized floor tiles in action:

">Floor Tile example

On a sidenote, I've gotten a bunch of character animations up:









[Edited by - ruben tan on August 16, 2010 6:34:46 AM]