Astro Dash 8-Bit Smash [Updated Aug 19 2012]

2 Marcus 2 Ravens

Hello, land of artists. I come before you to humbly ask for criticism on my pixel art.

A friend of mine and I are working on a simple, 2D platformer called Astro Dash. I'm working on the music, design, and a wee bit of code, which I think I can handle fairly well. I am also, however, trying my hand at pixel art, which I am absolutely clueless about.

It should be said that I am not much of a visual artist. I studied cinematography in college, but I haven't really drawn anything since high school art class.

I am desperately determined to make this work, but I know I'll need help. Big time help. So please, any help at all would be very much appreciated. Brutal, but helpful is best!

So here's some samples of what I've been working on.

The star of the show: Astro Dash


Some evil robits!




A terrifying space slug!


Some tiles. The tiles are the worst part, I think.


This isn't actually intended to be a level, but just to see what everything looks like on screen. Turns, out, it looks bad. This is a problem!

2 Marcus 2 Ravens

Just for fun, this is one of the songs we're hoping to use. It is literally the first chiptune I ever made (with a bit of cheating in Mixcraft). I've got several more I'm working on, but this one is my favourite and the only one I'm fairly certain will be in the game. I'll post more as they get a little more fleshed out.

http://youtu.be/j_jyg-g-lGw

Iruka

Pixel art aint easy, but I think your not doing so bad. Biggest issue right now is a lot of your colors/details are vibrating. For your larger tiles, try to mute the textures so that the player is focusing on the sprites. Look at some old games like metroid and metal slug, and see how they prioritize detail and color.

The little robots are pretty cute!

2 Marcus 2 Ravens

Thank you! It's good to hear I'm not butchering it completely. I know my colours are all wrong when it comes to the tiles. I wanted some bright ones, and so I threw a bunch of different colours on to see what I preferred. Turns out, none of them, really. I'm pretty clueless when it comes to colour. I think I know what you're saying though. I'll give it a shot! Can only go up from here.

Also, this is something I need a little creative advice on. I was talking to my friend/partner, trying to figure out a real direction for the art, and we want it to be very 60's B Science Fiction movie, with all the ridiculous robots/monsters, and silly interiors and colours. I think the evil robots give that vibe, and I want to run with it. Trouble is, I'm not sure what that entails, really. Muted, pastels come to mind. I want to capture how old technicolour has really dull blacks, but I don't want the image to be too flat.

Angel_of_Bacon

Expanding on what Iruka said:



Also, unless there's a specific gameplay reason to have all different colored tiles around the walls, I would suggest not placing a bunch of colors in there randomly; it's probably going to better to have a set range of colors you can work within per level to keep the overall read nice and consistent, with a little bit of variety thrown in (ie: the first zone of Sonic 2 is 90% bright green and brown in the FG, dark blue and green in the BG; second zone is grey, yellow and blue in the FG, red in the BG, etc.) That way you can save colors outside of that range for interactable elements like ladders/spikes/moving platforms/crushers/switches- places you want to draw the player's attention to.

2 Marcus 2 Ravens

Yes. This is what I needed. Thank you! I'm going to give this another go and post what happens.

The random mess of colours for different platforms was meant just to see which ones I liked better, not to actually have them all present in a final product. I should have clarified that. But, even if I only kept one or two colours for those platforms, it would still be a mess. That Sonic comparison is something I can wrap my head around, which should help me sort that out. Only one way to find out!

2 Marcus 2 Ravens

Okay, so if I keep the colours of the robots/monsters about the same, I should darken the backgrounds and mute the colours/textures, right? Because the characters are pretty bright/vibrant, and they'll pop better that way. So the platforms themselves, regardless of colour, should be somewhere kind of in the middle? A bit darker, although nowhere near as dark as the background, and still fairly vibrant?

I'm thinking I want to keep some of the almost laser looking detail on the part of the platform you actually touch, and do something completely different for the big swathes of ugly colour/detail that makes up the rest of the platform. Does that make sense? I'll try and do a mock up, but I'm pretty slow at this sort of thing.

2 Marcus 2 Ravens

Alright, so I was playing with colours and textures and was definitely way over my head. So I decided to make everything grey and see if I could get the basic result I was looking for to establish some kind of foundation to build upon. Once that's set, I'll start experimenting with colours and details. I've adjusted the colour of Astro Dash and the other robots so they pop a little more. The slime monster is unchanged, although I need to tackle him next (I just done forgot about him, honestly). The platforms are darker and the background is much lighter, but I've run into a problem.

As is, certain parts of the robots are fading into the background a bit too much because the background is too dark. If I lighten the background, other parts of the robots start to fade instead. I tried playing with the colours of the robots themselves, but they need that range in tone or else they just look...wrong. Or at least, when I try it they do. Any advice on how to tackle that problem? Having something other than a grey background would likely be a start, but other light colours were causing me similar grief.


60sTest4 by TheMagnumDash, on Flickr

Also, I have no idea how to get this picture to post directly onto the forums without being way too small. I tried photobucket and it didn't work, and now I can only seem to post this thumbnail from flickr, where the full size image is. Clearly, I don't expect you to go to flickr to check this out, so does anyone know how to fix this?

Zombiemambo

Looks like the blocks used in the foreground and background are a different resolution than the sprites. It throws everything off.

2 Marcus 2 Ravens

Zombiemambo wrote: »

Looks like the blocks used in the foreground and background are a different resolution than the sprites. It throws everything off.

Oh shit, you're totally right.

I doubled the size of the sprites to see how they'd look bigger on the screen and totally forgot to update the other tiles. I just did a few sample tiles at the same resolution and it already looks much better. I still don't have tiles or colours I'm happy with, but that fix is making a lot of stuff I tried look way better than it did before. I'll post pictures soon.

Thanks!

2 Marcus 2 Ravens

Hello everyone! I've been busy lately trying to work my way out of unemployment so progress has been slow. But! I've got an update here I'm pretty happy with. I think it's way ahead of where I was.

Here's a little mock up of what the direction I'm thinking of going. Any ideas? Criticisms? Is it better or worse than before? Be as harsh as you want.



Okay, I did a few tweaks and I like this one a lot better.