I am using sprites from http://www.spriters-resource.com/ very often for animations idea, just my example. I guess its alright if u re using them for reference, you need to learn to animate stuff which you dont know. so its helpful when you need "specific" animation.

Still working on the walking animation, but in the mean time i've tried to make my old base isometric (tried to being the important word here):



Unsure about the head atm :/

Also my attempt at some isometric tiles with both new and old bases:



I'm in the process of slowly (very slowly!) trying to learn coding, so these might one day be of some actual use.

Some simple units and animation for the map, was really constrained by the size, but tried to emphasise readability.

Hardest had to be the horse (1st and 2nd column).

I also think the separations are too much.
If you want the grid to be visible, why not make your tiles "worse"? Tile artists spend a lot of time trying to eliminate the grid, but you need the opposite. For example, you could reduce detail level at the edges:

You wouldn't even need to do this everywhere, probably just the grass, and maybe make the path tiles a bit blockier. Everything else would have an easily visible grid just thanks to those and thanks to the fact that they're all squished into 16x16px squares. Plus, you could (and probably should!) have an overlaid tile "cursor" or somesuch during navigation, to help make the grid even clearer. The GBA Fire Emblem uses both a grid overlay for range, and a cursor for the currently selected tile:

Because it has these grid-highlighting tools whenever the player needs to be aware of the grid, it can (try to) erase the grid in general, which makes the game look prettier when the grid isn't needed.

With how you overlay a grid over the terrain in that mockup, I don't think you need the clear boundaries in the grass tiles. As I mentioned, your other tiles reinforce the grid plenty, and with that overlay, even at a lower opacity, the grid is clear anyway. So, you could focus on erasing the grid with the grass if you wanted to. You could also make some of the other tiles that are just on solid green also blend into the grass tiles a bit.

I would have expected the rivers to impede movement, it looks weird that characters can stand on the banks. I'd make it so that there's a little less ground on the sides of the river-tiles (so that they don't look like a character could stand there at all), and make them obstacles. That would also open up your game to the possibility of units that can cross or navigate water, which could make for interesting gameplay.

Your palette lacks the airy fairytale feel of Fire Emblem, but you can certainly build what feels like a continuous, naturalistic world with it and with your tiles, and you probably wouldn't even need to expand your palette. I think the key thing is to have some maps that aren't as compressed as your example, and to have multiple grass tiles that you can use together. The grass tiles can all use the same palette if you want to keep the colour count low, they'd just use those colours in different amounts.

I think a simplified grass tile would work well with your other existing tiles. If you want to do a more FE-like naturalistic look, I think you'd need to make your other tiles more textured.

Those don't look like grass to me. If you're trying to simplify, why not take the same approach that you did on the dirty paths, with mostly a solid colour and some sparse indicators of texture?

GBA games were 240x160, so that's 15x10 tiles. If you're making a game to be played on PC, you will probably want a different size, something that'll zoom neatly into the most common resolutions. Making the game 16x9 tiles or some multiple of that should make it easier to scale for 16:9 screens, which are the most popular among gamers. You could also have the game not display an even number of tiles on the screen.
Lastly, don't forget the UI. Will it overlap the map? Will it be somewhere off to the side?

The black outline on the grass looks weird. Why is that there? Why have such a difference in colour between the grass tiles and the green behind the trees and rocks? I think the overall lighter look is good, but the inconsistency seems arbitrary and weird.

The dark green dots don't look very grassy to me. Why not use short vertical strokes that look more grassy? They wouldn't be to scale, sure, but nothing in a game like this is to scale xP

Here's another re-pixel, with the darker grass colour, but you can easily mess with that:

You could also have multiple grass tiles for some extra variety, many games like this do. I kept the grass tufts off-centre on the tile because that prevents things from feeling too symmetrical, and it also gives more room for variety in different tiles.

I think you can have a 5th grass tile that doesnt have any grass blades at all on it. Kind of like link to the past's grass. Its looking better though.

I think it feels cluttered because you're needlessly separating a lot of stuff. Try having a border just on the outside of each character's info area, and maybe around the close-up. Getting rid of the borders could allow you to put related information closer together, or make the text larger and more readable.

I got some responses on another forum saying that my poses could be better so i re-did the attack animation in the hope that it's more fluid and dynamic/less stiff (previous version next to it for comparison's sake):



I realise the legs are pretty bad, i looked in the mirror whilst replicating the pose/animation, but without a reference in the way of a picture, i sort of ended up winging it.

Edit:

Hopefully the legs are better now:



Also tried more foreshortening of the arm and sword.

I'm still working on re-doing the animations, but im wondering right now if i need to make my finished products less "detailed", right now i usually do a fair amount of AA on them such as this:




I''ve seen some really impressive spritework that don't rely on AA or at the very least uses it sparingly, that concentrates more on clusters than AAing.
Without AA:



I was thinking of using it more for limbs, rather than armour (only when it needs it).

Also for actual content here's a revamped bow animation, with old one for comparison:

 

Indeed, it's becoming a more and more interesting study on animating in the use of weapons.
I love the latest bow animation mod. It feels soo natural!

A quick zombie-like enemy animation:



Tried to go with a herky-jerky unbalanced idle-animation sort of similar to the zombies in metal slug (although nowhere near as well animated or smooth)

Edit:

Bonus attempt on a troll animation:



It was originally the base for my previously-mentioned Zombie idle animation but i really love the idea of this lanky, unco-ordinated creature that is really awkward and doesn't really have full control of it's limbs in the same way humans might.

Main inspiration is the Baldur's Gate series trolls:



Probably end up re-working this one totally, the arms at least and definitely changing the legs to make it look less human-like.

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, hopefully everyone's had a happy Christmas!

Been slowly working on small map sprites, with two forms of idle; one before a unit has taken an action and one after:



I'm hoping each unit looks different enough to be easily identified, I'll probably have to re-do some though.

I've also been trying to re-do my old two-handed attack animation, but im struggling because i can't get the arms to look like they're not defying some sort of anatomical law:



I used to have the torso turning and showing the back, but i realised although it looked good it wasn't actually possible without the legs and waist completely turning which is difficult to actually perform in real life and difficult to properly animate the swivelling of the waist, without forcing the viewer to "guess" as to what's happening, not even getting into the fact the feet would have to move and im still very bad at actual movement.

Thanks! I appreciate it.

I'm looking into reducing the amount of units, whilst making them look more unique and distinguishable. At some point im going to create an image showing a timeline of some of the units and their designs (and their changes) such as below:



Phew! That's alot of changes, although i liked the orange, an important lesson i learnt from people in this thread was to keep a unifying, singular colour to make units easily identifiable.

The design/re-designs get a bit boring/bland near the end when i sort of decide what ultimately the body type looks like (unless i radically over-haul it again), with most of them being minor comestic changes.

Hopefully this doesn't sound too big-headed but i feel actually sort of proud about the progress; I used to do way too much AA back when i started but now i feel more confident about sticking with clusters and flat colours, both of which makes it easier to animate and less time consuming.

I'm just hoping my progress and stuff i make is still as good and interesting as when this thread started.

Thanks to everyone for following so far and supporting me, be it with advice, comments or otherwise!

I mentioned in my PM that I think the black outlines on your background tiles hinder readability. I think you should use lighter colours for the outlines, and perhaps on some objects, you don't need outlines at all. Here's an edit illustrating both of these possibilities (with your original for comparison):

The colours I used on the boxes might be too light and contrast too poorly with the grass, but I think everything else still reads well, but is also low-contrast enough not to clash with the characters. I also think this feels less busy overall.

You maaay have gone a little overboard, yes. It looks nice and is readable, but it also lends your world a pastel fairytale feel. If that's what you're going for that's great, but if not, then you certainly have room to darken things.
I personally think your lineless approach looks good though. It also gives you more room to play with detail and silhouette.

I think there are still some minor readability issues where characters overlap dark objects. These could be solved by avoiding such dark colours in the background (except on tiles that aren't likely to ever be overlapped), or by keeping characters' heads simple and light.

So a really quick update and question; I've played around with the colours in hopes of making it less pastel (it wasn't my intention to go that route, although i do like it):

1st attempt, everything made darker:



2nd attempt, everything but the walls and carpet



I know it's a very small change in the scheme of things, but i just want to make sure what others think of it before i invest anymore time in it.

A few questions;

Are the units still readable?
Are the items still readable?
Is the background still pastel? Not too worried about the items right now.
What's your preference 1 or 2, and if so why?
Is it still too light, or is it way too dark now?

Thanks again for the reply Eishiya!

In regards to the wall, i tried to down the contrast, darkened it slightly.

I also changed the doors, put an outline on items that (hypothetically) are interactable; doors, potions and chests.

Reduced shadows on the gravestone, made shadows on boxes more consistant.



Apologies for the rash of posts with very little change, just want to sort out the colour/readability issue, once it's dealt with I can get back to other things. Thanks for the patience shown, Eishiya!

Hey AshCrimson !
First of all, let me salute your work. The amount of dedication you put into this project is remarkable and we can clearly see a great progress as the number of pages grow.
Probably the longest WIP thread i've seen here - I hop around from time to time and your thread have always been in the 1st page for years. Hats off to you

So I thought I would add my 2 cents hehe.
Here's an edit I made to illustrate the following points :



1 : sprite design and readability :

When working with such small sprites, readability is key. Here are some important notions for readability : silhouette, contrast, pose, proportions.

a. Silhouette is the big point here. We'll take the legionnaire as example.
On your sprite, the spear is kind of hidden in the sprite, it doesn't clearly stand out of the silhouette and it's a real issue when you want the player to immediatly understand which character it is. (same goes for the viking guy, the axe is hidden in the sprite).

b. Proportions are important when defining which features are important in a sprite.
Viking for example again :
what defines the viking in your design ?

The beard, the axe, the boots and the armor type.

The eyes ? not so much. The leather strip that holds the shoulderpad in place ? meh.

You need to find what is important in your characters' designs and emphasis on those elements. Don't hesitate to give yourself room for that (bigger torso, bigger head, smaller feets, proportions.).

c. Pose, don't really know how to detail this point. Use strong poses, these guys are at war, fierce, they don't bend their knees, they don't lean back. They stand up, fierce !

d. contrast, you pretty much nailed it. The tiles are more subtle now and it makes the sprites pop out. I lowered the contrast on tiles even more on my edit to really emphasis on the sprites. I think you found the sweet spot for trees and mountains (yes I edited mountains, couldn't help it xD)


2 : volume and perspective :

I like the idea of the characters standing on a base, reminds me of warhammer. The thing is, on your sprites the bases are kind of squashed in the bottom of the tile and the perspective doesn't match the top-down-ish view of the tiles.
It looks like you are struggling to keep the character within one tile, but it's overflowing. So let it go ! embrace it.



In my edit, the circled base is more top-down and actually centered on the tile ! I feel it's important for constistency.

And it even let's room to show a few stats, and the selection box makes more sense now.

--- totally unrelated : this is a test for different stroke sizes :



Considering HUD, I don't really get why the fight window isn't full screen. do you really need to show what is happening on the map during the fight ?



Here you are showing a close up that isn't even a closeup since characters are the same size as the sprite. So at this point why don't you make them fight directly on the map ?

Also, why are the characters in two different boxes if they are supposed to be next to eachother ?
It works in advance wars because these are big scale combats with helicopters and missile launchers shooting from afar. But here it's humans engaging close combat.
Fire emblem is a great exemple on how to manage this :



Oh, and framing. Why are all the HUD windows framed into several different mini HUDs ? It kind of clusters everything up and messes readability.

If you look at the fire emblem example, you'll notice that the frames are thin and different elements are not separated by a gap. Their resolution is actually smaller than you engagement HUD, but it's more readable and they even had the room to have a bigger font.

Overall, I feel that you need to summarize things and focus your player's attention on what is important at any given moment.

I hope this has been helpful, keep it up ! I always enjoyed seeing new post in this thread and hope I will see more :D

Decided to re-do the attack animations with the new style one without units nearby and one with, for readability's sake;



Added blurring, added a frame or two of delay after the attack, in hopes of giving it more impact/weight, whilst keeping it's smoothness.

Frostpumpkin; I really like your edits of both the units and UI, but i'm loathe to copy them, I'm trying to put my own mark on them. If you feel it's too close/not different enough let me know and I'll change them more.

Still re-doing the UI, this is where it stands at the moment:



Cruder then the previous version, but I'm trying to cut down on superfluous boxes.

The animations won't be as flashy, nor require as much movement as Fire emblems, hence the small size of the actual battle screen. Also i am not sure whether the UI and battle will take up the entire screen like Fire Emblem's or be like a previous version of mine (below for the example) where the map can still be seen:



The reason for this is because I'm still not sure exactly what the "resolution" will be, how many tiles can be seen on the screen. I honestly have very little experience with this sort of thing, so any input would be more than helpful.

The map above is 8x16 32x32 tiles (512x256) and because my tiles are so big, compared to say FE, it means less screen can be shown, and because I'm still unsure of how big it is, it means I can't really decide on a UI or Battle Scene style for the time being.

I also still want the sprites to be readable, without having to upscale them too much, of preferably, not at all.

Why are the units animated to shrink and grow?

Hey Ash ! feel free to use my edits however you wish.
You did a good job on that spear man, I do think it's more readable than mine at x1 - you nailed it.
I do agree with eishiya. The combat screen in these game is here to show more detailed sprite and fancy animations. If you don't plan to add those, just go for the in map combat.

Considering the idle animation, Surt has a point. It's a bit too much at this point. It can be very subtle movement on the chest - just to add that tiny bit of animation that will make the sprite pop out of the static map.

I think that motion is better since you're not breaking anyone's limbs anymore, but yeah, it's too animated (and a bit unbalanced). You probably don't need much (if any) limb movement at all for a continuous idle animation, focus on breathing.