I twittered you!

Hey man, these are brilliant. I read on your blog that it's cool to animate these and put them into a game, just wanted to let you know thanks for posting the actual sprites themselves here. I really can't wait to put these into motion!

 Hey guys thanks for the support! I'm the Lead Programmer on the project. We're fastly approaching the finish line! lol

 Thanks! Honestly i havent worked on this in quite some time, however the past couple of weeks i've been able to do some major updates to this lighting system. Describing it doesnt do it justice, but i'll give you a list of the features i've added:

Customizable lights with varying size and brightness

smooth shading with the help of artificial dithering

realistic dynamic lighting utilizing shadows and emboss effects

and in fact i've even been able to implement soft shadows, however it will be too slow for realtime lights, but great for baked in lighting!!

 This is an awesome work man. Curious if you wouldnt mind me borrowing the palette you used here? it looks quite versatile :)

 Thanks bud, i'm definitely looking forward to seeing this guy in action, hopefully the anatomy will read as well in multiple poses as he does here. Something i'll have to keep toying with til it's right.

 Thanks man, it was tricky getting him to look as defined as he does right now.

 Hmm so far you're the only person who's had any problems reading it. Of course it's also not in it's final stage, there still needs to be a whole background image for it to go on top of so maybe that will help some as well. Or i could just completely redo the whole thing.

EDIT: ah i see what you mean, if i'm going to use a different palette for this, the answer is yes, i plan on having a generic gameboy palette with the browns, then the game will take over the palette from time to time causing a shift in the colors, though there will never be more than 4 colors visible on screen at any given point.

 Haha chuck norris looks great dude, but i think you forgot the techno viking.

 I could have swore that was judge dredd. wouldnt be a tough edit. Looks great though dude :)

 That's pretty funny man, good color choice, like the way you did the lips.

 actually i'm sure it would work well for other pixel art styles, it will just require a little more depth for more colors. However with this gb palette it will be fine the way it is. and me and my artists/programmers are hard at work on the new features of the engine, both graphically and with gameplay. Visually the project will be similar to the style used by vpk in his original mockup, but far more work will be involved. And as of right now an entire tileset has been made up that will replace everything you see here, and the main character is being worked on, and has a complete character sheet made up. The story will be deep, there will be lots of creepy atmosphere effects and noises, as well as many things you havent seen in a game like this before. We plan on kicking contra in the ass with this game, so keep your eyes on it.

Also, bit of an addition, different art styles in general will require different lighting setups, should they require lighting. This lighting engine suits this current game perfectly, but any different game, or different art style should use it's own approach.

 I did mention the art this is based on was from vpk already. So far the work that i have put into this tech demo is repixelling the entire level 6 different times as well as repixelling the main character 6 different times, and the programming that creates the lighting functions.

And i'm not sure by your second question, what kind of different art style? Different pixel art, or different art all together?

 Haha actually this is just a screen capture from the current demo, i'll post another one here soon after i get a little special something something added to it lol. This next example should really show off the features of Hyperion's lighting system.

 hey check your pm's carnivac :)

 it's been brought to my attention that I should alert you guys to the fact that this artwork you see here is currently placeholder stuff, merely meant to show off the lighting ststem in place for the project. In fact the background is taken from a heavily modified mockup created by vpk for a gameboy demake of doom 3, which is really what got me inspired to create this project in the first place, and all the art you see will be replaced with original work once the project gets off the ground.

 yea it will work  with as many as I want, and in whatever shapes I want them to have, will be cool once I get fire with flickering lights lol. If you want carnivac, we can chat over yahoo or aim if you wanna know a bit more.

 i_d make this an animation but I'm not at home right now, but I will as soon as I can. I actually posted  this one in a hurry cuz I had to go  to work lol.

thanks for all the replies everyone. Didn't think that thid would be so well accepted. I've chosen 4 colors for the asthetic, but this would be just as easily done in 16 and 32 colors. In fact for the project an idea I had was to have the player choose in the start of the game whether to play gameboy 4 colors, or snes palette with slightly higher resolution. The lighting effect would be done the same way. I plan on setting up a project page on indie db once this project moves far enough along.. Again guys, thanks for showing all your support :)

 it involves lots of layers, but the effect only took about 20 minutes to program. However I still need to get shadows and whatnot working. This project would greatly benefit from an artis as good as yourself carnivac. I really envy your talents. :)