Should I keep going with this?:


Sorry if it looks a bit empty, still trying to find right style for it.

Edit:



Edited by Relix - 01 May 2010 at 2:40am

Heart bar: I kinda want it to be from three to maxium of 20, just like in Zelda games. Would it help, if I made them smaller?

Mountains: I'm not sure if I understood, but I'll try something.

Sky/Clouds:  The picture helped, but could you clarify just a little bit more, please?

What about the moon, is it clear that it's a moon? You know how you can sometimes see the moon on daylight, it's supposed to look like that - does it look like that at all?

And I also noticed that I used wrong colors for the characters eye, I've to fix that too.

Heart bar: I was thinknig myself too, that it might be too big, I was originally going for bigger screen, but everything else looks better this way. I'll try to make them a bit smaller but if that doesn't look good, I'll just make them disapprear when you've full healt or after five or seconds after altering the healt values - like the healt bar in 3D Marios. Would that work?

Mountains: They're supposed to be mountais, I think I understood what did you mean.

Sky/Clouds: I really didn't understood what I should do with the pop out cloud. But maybe it'll look better once I change the background sky.

Edit:


I got rid of the darkest sky part, changed the hearts and mountains. Fixed the extra color in the characters eye and added more white to it. Didn't touch the cloud yet. The sky has to be tileable, so I did only three variations for the pattern.

I'm not happy at the mountains, I'll alter them more, but is this going on the right direction now?


Edited by Relix - 02 May 2010 at 1:37am

I made this edit yesterday but didnt post it.  Im not sure how much itll help but here it is

I basically made the mountains lighter to show they are farther in the background.  Changed the hue of the sky, made the hearts more zelda style, and I think thats all I did.  The hearts kind of suck but I didnt want to spend alot of time on them


Edited by r1k - 02 May 2010 at 9:45pm

ya feel free to use the mountain pallete.  Looking at my edit I think my sky is a bit desaturated too.  I just wouldnt personally go a cyan as yours.  Maybe try something inbetween mine and yours and see if you like it or not.

Mountains are looking better now, but pay attention to the shapes of r1k's mountains. they look a lot more natural, with their gradual slopes. specifically, the one to the left of the character is very odd and unnatural looking.

Also, the health bar looks okay, but I'll tell you, as a gamer, i would despise that thing. Trying to gauge how much health I had left among those 20 icons would really be irritating, doubly so since you seem to have it go in columns instead of rows (the 3 remaining health bars are on the left column). Seriously, cut those in half and make each one indicate two hit points (either they cut in half when hit, or the red part shrinks). As it is it's just too complicated to look at quickly.


To continue nitpicking; your character's pose is very off looking. She's leaning very far to the right, making it look unbalanced, and her right arm is just sticking straight out, which isn't a very natural position to hold your arm. I did a quick redraw to show you:


(click on it to enlarge it so you can see the differences better)

The red outline is how your pose looks, the middle one is my redraw, and the right is your original. This is a very Megaman X like pose, so you might want to look at those for a bit of reference. In short, I moved the arm down at the shoulder, changed the angle of the right leg (her right) so it was facing out a bit instead of just to the side, and the left leg I moved forward quite a bit to make her look more balanced. I also lowered the belt a bit to make her look less extremely bent over.

And your lighting doesn't match up either. On the blue sleeves and pants on the hair, and the back of the coat/dress/thing between the legs, the light is coming from the left. on the rest of it (hat, skin, green under the belt) it's coming from the right. You need to pick a side and stick with it.



Phew, that was quite a bit of text wasn't it? Anyway, keep it up!

The trouble with the hearts is that they don't look like two separate column. It just seems like a big jumble. They also seem to still take up far too much screen real estate, and could even obscure enemies approaching from the rear on certain terrain. Are you totally opposed to having them laid out horizontally?

except that in Megaman it's a single column, probably about a third of the width you have now, so it blocks a lot less, and it's easy to read how much health you have left by how full that bar is.

However, if this is just like all my mockup stuff in that it probably wont ever actually become a game, just practice for making stuff and whatnot, then feel free to do whatever you find most aesthetically pleasing to you.

Sorry, didn't mean to insult ya 

anyway, the character's lookin better now, as are the mountains.

I like that organization a lot better. the lack of the zig-zagging motion, while it is kinda neat, makes it a lot easier to read. What would be even better, in my opinion, is if you can code it so it goes right to left, bottom to top, so it would go by row instead of by column which it looks like you have now. Then make it so whatever the current heart is always is 'on top' of the others, and maybe a bit bigger, or brighter, something different about it to make it stand out. Then it would be easy to read exactly where your health is at.

another idea - instead of empty heart containers, what if they shrink to just small dots or something? that  would also free up the screen from  health you dont have while also still letting you know what your health is compared to the maximum. (Does zelda work that way? I forget.. guess i didnt spend enough time dying in those games ;P)

Mac OS X is UNIX. Has the official badge and everything. Funnily, of the big three, only Windows is completely non-standard (as in non-POSIX).

Edited by Hatch - 04 May 2010 at 1:09pm

I've been misinformed then, I guess I can support Macs afterall.



Can't see what did you do other than got rid of the outlines and some inner coloring...

Expect you accidentally (It looks accidental) made a nice slope tile. 

Yeah it was mostly a facial edit and some shading edits.

Okay, kinda hard to see.



That looks too bright, and not really the style I'm aiming for. I like the crates and ground texture though, just not the colors.

Still one exam left, so no mockupping yet.

Exams ended. I'll fix the moon and I'll change the way I did the cloud(s). anything else I should fix? If not, I might start animating the main character.

Here's a oldish and very quickly made animation for the bird , does the animation look right at all?


(It's kinda slow for some reason - also a white background in one of the frames, I don't have proper animation program...)

Also a conversation portrait for the main character:


The shadowing on the hat is abnormal, but it looks better this way, imo.

I've GIMP, but I don't know how to animate with it...
Anyway, like you said, i'm animating them form spritesheet ingame, so it doesn't matter right now. How do I fix the tail?

As for the eye...dunno...it's wrong, but it looks okay to me, you know? But I'll alter the shoulder pad.

And I'll post the newest version of the mockup tomorrow, kinda tired right now, didn't wan't to start doing it now.

(I hope too, I hate exams...)

Urgh, still tired so I only made a quickie showing how I'm going to remake the clouds, I'm not keeping the current clouds:


I also made the sky a little lighter blue. I want the clouds be at the mountain height, scrolling behind them. Then I'm gonna add some slightly lighter clouds in front of them.

I'll try that with GIMP...as soon I can.
I wish I could do more now.

My mind just blew up.

How I didn't realize this? >>

Here's a tiny update...I really should to rest a bit:


I didn't change the clouds yet. I'm gonna change the moon because I saw it today during daylight and it looks slightly different. Anyway, I think I'm "done" with the fields and I'm gonna do a forest mockup next, I need plants and all.

And I took the hearts of for now, I got too much negative feedback because of them ,_,  

Yeah...but I'm too tired to even get asleep, stupid exams >>



Don't worry, basiclly almost everywhere I posted that, everyone said the hearts suck - but they'll be back, I just took them out so people can comment on the other points in the picture instead of concerating on the hearts. I'm going to shadow the bottom row like you showed earlier. And I'll play around with the organizing.



Well, it's going to be a normal forest and you know...sometimes a forest can be spooky even on broad daylight.

Normal forest where I live is filled with big pine trees and they're pretty moshy and sometimes gloomy even in direct sunlight. Most of them have swamps in them.



Nah, I made a textured ground before, while it looked great as a standalone piece, in larger scale it just looks messy and with a simple pattern, it's easier to get rid of the grid. And with this simple pattern, it's also easier to make more variations of that one tile.

Actually, I could post the old mockup which is like from last fall:

The resolution was way too big, the character wasn't made by me and the ground texture...urgh. Compared to this, the new mockup is way better and more readable, don'tcha agree.

Edit:
Did a quickie scethes of the trees, the "Christmas" tree is really lame and I'm gonna burn it down. I actually like the birch, even in this quickie scetch state. I'm not sure what the last one is supposed to be, some random tree.


And here's this:


I removed the clouds, I couldn't get them to look right. I altered the bird a bit, needs a little work still.


Edited by Relix - 22 May 2010 at 9:09am

They looked funny moving, and someone on tigsource pointed that I already have a nice cloudline going there.

Should I change the bird back then? I really want it to be a raven, but I can't raven.

Tree's come in many sizes, this sized trees you expect to see near the borders of the forest (provided that it's not been cut down), and when you go deeper the trees are getting huge - so I will make different sized trees.

Here's a picture from taken my balcony: http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/2527/19092007009.jpg It's kinda low quality, taken with my old phone, but you should be able to see at least 4-5 different trees, birch and pine being the majority. So yes, I'm basing the forest on what I've seen myself near me, tall leafy trees, swamps in them (even that forest has a huge swamp in it) and boulders everywhere.

And the ground tile will be something like, tattered path and fallen leafes. You'll see.


Edited by Relix - 22 May 2010 at 11:52pm

Tried to fix the bird, now it looks like a ... dunno what it looks like...
Can you show what you meant with a picture?

Did the clouds like you said, didn't get to test how they look if they move yet, tho.

Started the forest tiles, I accidentally made all the bottom parts green, the green is supposed to be the swamp tile, the rest should be dirt brown or something greyish. The top part doesn't prolly look like anything yet, but it's a start (= lazy recolor).

Nice edit on the bird, and I agree, the third one looks just right, I'll try to make something similar.

And the clouds, I move em closer and dunno about the offsets, maybe for mockup reasons. They're tileable after all, so ingame they wouldn't be at same axis. And I can't really change the color on the midle layer, so I've just get rid off it.

And the trees...eh, they're still scethes and I'm gonna redo the midle tree. Nice tips thought.

About the birch though, some of them have "fat" trunks if they grow on area with tons of water, it's rare though and usually it turns out that it's actually two birches grown into one (I've seen some freaky birches...), so I'll make it slimmer.


And it turns out that I've still two exams left, one is tomorrow >>
So, expect a new mockup after tomorrows exam is over.

Edit:


I made the ravens head longer and slimmer, I made it's belly (or whatever) a little slimmer too. I made the wings a bit longer (the back wing might be too long?) and tried to make them more feathery. I changed the sky a bit, pure white isn't prolly that great, I've to play around a bit more.


So many unfinished things, so little free time...




Edited by Relix - 26 May 2010 at 5:24am

The bird looks okay, and yes, I agree that the white in the sky is a bit stark. Here's an image from one of my favourites that may help give you some colour ideas.

Hey, Relix - glad to hear from you. When I checked this yesterday, the image was broken, but it's working now, though I don't have time at the moment to say anything about it! There are a couple points to address, I should note, in the interest of full disclosure, but I really like your character still, so I don't think it should be too much. I'll edit this post later if there's nothing in between. Till then....

Okay, so I've seen a lot of advice on how to make a running character, but before that I had to learn to do it myself from scratch, and that has been the baseline I always use to judge the quality of further advice I find. For example, I see running animations that use many more frames than I feel are absolutely necessary, even though the result is very fluid. So how does a person know what technique to use?

Well, I'm basically a very economical kinda guy, and I say do it in as few frames as possible. Plus, you'll save yourself a ton of work just from the difference of a four frame repeat vs. a five frame repeat.

So the system I use hits all the major steps the eye wants to see in a run for the logic to make sense (think of them as keyframes). For example, if you wanted to show a baseball being pitched, it would be more important to show the frame where the arm was pulled back to the farthest point before the throw than any of the frames leading up to it - it's a stage in the throw we expect to see, and we can fill in much of the rest with our minds.

For running, I feel that the key frames are when (for one of the feet) the heel first catches the ground, then the next frame should have the foot flat and taking the body's weight, then the third frame should have just the bent toe in contact with the ground as if it is kicking off, and finally the foot is up in the air behind the runner. And in only these four frames we've seen the foot do everything that the average understanding of the foot knows about - that it stands flat, that it bends, that it has a heel in back and toes in the front - really the whole picture. Anything else, I feel, is just 'in-betweening'.

Obviously the opposite foot has to be ready to start its own four frames at this point, and while each foot is going through these motions, the other foot should be swinging forward and getting ready for action.

For your animation, you have the perfect number of frames, so you're good to go there (as far as my own experiences anyway!) but the two frames in which the one foot or the other is first flat and carrying the weight of the body (frames 1 and 5) have the foot too far in front of the body to realistically carry the weight. So try and put the foot, when flat, under the center of gravity, if possible.

Next, notice that you have the far foot spend two frames in the flat position (1 & 2) but only one frame for the near foot (frame 5), while the near foot spends two frames with the bent toe against the ground (6 & 7) instead of just the one necessary frame, as the far foot has (frame 3).

So if you want a silk-smooth, symmetrical, convincing animation, I would suggest taking care of these points first. A tip that might also help, is (if you have a program that can do layers?) to keep track of the location of your character's knees/hips/feet for each frame on a separate layer (all on a single frame for each leg, with the locations superimposed) and try to keep the distances that each point (hip/knee/foot) moves per frame to be about equal (more distance for feet than knees, obviously, and almost none for hips). This will do a lot to reduce any perceived jerkiness in the final product.

And if that's not too much work for you, we can move on to any issues that remain in the arms, or whatever, afterward, if you like. I hope it's not too much!