Hello Wonderful people at Pixel Joint :)

I'm working on a top view mech game, and I'm going to do some art dump here. I've been a programmer for around 20 years, I don't consider myself much of an artist, however I need to dabble onto pixels as the artist I was working with has parted ways. So, (bold incoming) ALL CRITICS WELCOME :) and please do know that this is my first actual work with pixel art.

Today - I'll post the chassis' for the robots. The robots will have separate parts : legs, chassis, arms weapons, shoulders weapons.



I made all these today + some weapons, but not showing off the weapons yet, just looking for some crits & comments :) .

( In case the link doesn't work : https://s17.postimg.org/8vqkg89en/chassis-wip.png )

Completed the shoulder, and worked on a couple of cars.

I'm thinking of replacing the last two cards and could desperately use some comments & constructive criticism on improving them :) .

The cars look rather flat, which hurts their readability. I can't tell which parts of the cars are projecting upward (towards the viewer) and which are not.
Add cast shadows to objects to help the forms read. In addition, I'd ease up on the dithering, and go for clearer shapes instead. Gradients don't really read like anything.

I think the robotey parts have the same problems, but it's less noticeable because the viewer doesn't know what to expect and reads them only as shapes rather than as objects.

eishiya & quake - thank you so very much for your input :) .
Sorry for the late reply & update - I worked on a different game ( doing programming :P ) and didn't get much time for the graphics.

I've done a few shading variations and I'd like to ask which one you think would fit best, and possibly why.


There are a few limitations I am following : I need to use 4 variations of red, and any variation of white/black/grey. This is because the :
- red parts will change their hue/saturation for different teams/factions.
- preferably less to no-white since the entire game has a dark/night theme
I'll post the entire general look soon so you can grasp an idea of the game's aesthetics.

Since the mechs were a bit too small compared the car sizes, I've remade them at nearly a double scale. Took me a while but I've had quite a bit of shading practice. I know I'll need to redo some of those, please let me know which ones desperately need remaking and what am I doing right ( if anything :) ).

Here's how they look now compared to their previou version :

Hey Eishiya :)

Thanks for the input. I resized them from small to large, however I recolored them entirely ( every pixel ) , so they shouldn't be blurry. I did heavily use dithering so that may give the blurry effect.. not sure :) .

I'll change the first chassis to be regularly pillow-shaded instead of pillow lit, thanks ! :)

Since the game is in 2d, and there are 50+ objects in the scene, there won't be proper lighting, so I'm improvising the shadows with .png's . That's why I would've considered the initial lighting I had on the chassis' to be good enough.

Would you happen to have any recommendations on what type of lighting-painted-on-sprites I could use and would fit properly to my game ?
I believe pillow shading is fine, but I'm very open to suggestions :) .

Hey Eishiya :)
Thanks a ton (again) for the answer, that's exactly the advice I was looking for.
"If your sprites rotate and you can't use shadows to clearly show their forms" - that is exactly my case.
The matter is : I have never done a paintjob before, not even certain what it means or if there's a pattern to it, if there's a specific method. Then there are the 4 colors limitations of red - for team-color representation. I can raise that number if that's a necessity.

Anyhow, I've had an attempt at what you mentioned regarding the planes that make up my objects and here is how it came out compared to the pillow shading version :

Use the paint jobs to show the form. Yours are all treating the ships as flat objects. Stripes of paint would look thicker where they're close to the viewer, and thinner where they're further away.

Here is a literal egg with stripes on it (I am counting the golden strips too), seen from more or less above. See how you can still get a feel for the egg's 3D form from just the way the stripes vary in orientation and thickness? That's what a paint job on your ships should seek to achieve.

Also, as I've mentioned before, try to make your ships a mix of curves and flat/straight areas. Having them be just one or the other looks boring, especially with the frontal light source. If you can't create interest with lighting, then create it with shape and form.

With the black/white stripes the effect is subtle - the upper stripes arc up, the lower ones arc down, because the camera is looking at the middle. Your chassis are larger and presumably have more complex shapes, so you could have this effect more exaggerated, and more complex shapes created by the paint.
I was imagining thicker, outline-less stripes that ran across the flat areas rather than along the edges when I made the suggestion. Having paint along the edges does nothing to show the form, the edges are already clear.

Have you looked at the sprites in GTA2 and other top-down games involving vehicles?

Their approach is to shade everything according to its orientation. Surfaces directly facing the player (up) are lightest, surfaces facing away are darker, depending on their orientation relative to the view plane. Then they toss in some specular highlights to make things shiny. Your pillow shading achieves a similar effect, but the difference is, the vehicles in GTA2 have way more interesting shapes than your mechs. This is something I keep mentioning - a lot of your readability problems stem from the boring shapes. You have some good silhouettes, but within them, you're not playing with the surfaces and details enough.

As for the sprites you posted, I think bottom left and top right are the most effective.

As for pillow shading and 3Dness - if it looks 3D, it's probably not actually pillow-shading. For example, the top left image is pillow-shaded, having shadows around all the edges, even though there seems to be nothing that should be creating the shadows around the grey lines. The bottom left is also pillow-shaded - the shadows on the round part near the two rectangular blocks don't make any sense, you just seem to be adding shadows wherever there are lines. The GTA2 examples above are not pillow-shaded - they're lit from above same as your sprites, but the shadows make sense with the forms being depicted.

Hello again - thank you for all of your feedback so far :) definitely a lot of interesting things I had to look into.
I've been working on the buildings and tried mixing a top view style combined with a bit of Dodonpachi style. I've scratched a lot of attempts and put together a few samples for opinions and feedback.


The first view is for when illuminated, the second one is the one mostly used (for night without illumination).

Some of these are of different styles, just added them so you could compare better. Also I'll modify the paintjob on B.

Which is the one you like most and what recommendations would you have ?

Haven't posted in a while, so I'd like to showcase some progress. Some help and/or advice is as always welcome.
Buildings :

Some Units :

Top Down projection is cheesy, I suggest avoiding it, unless you're making prototype, where graphics is unimportant. Even earliest RTS games, like Dune 2, used oblique or isometric projection. I know of only a few commercial games that use pure top-down (GTA1-2 and Mageslayer), and they all look meh. Take no Prisoners, while appears top-down, still shows characters from an angle.

I would like you to help or write constructive criticism but what I can only say is:
NICE :D
Your vehicles reminds me those from KKND game.

Well, I would like to to talk more about Indie game Development rather that graphics (exactly about marketing) because I wish to become one.

About top view: In my opinion I must watch demo first to be sure is the top view of isometric is better for your project.