Critiques and suggestions are welcome.

Hi I'm Bacrylic and aslo the acting art director for Squaretale.





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Updated

I've since been working on my character's animation. Found some contract work so my efforts have been split, but I'm back at it for the moment. Here's some stuff I haven't posted here yet.










      

Thanks for the recommendation. I was using gyazo, but it still seems to be showing some artifacting on a smaller scale. I'll keep working on that, but its cleaner than what it was.

Did you replace the image? The artefacting is different now. This is much better and clearer than before.
This type of artefacting is inevitable in an animated gif since your game has more than 256 colours, but GIF palettes only go to 256. You could post a second, non-animated screenshot to give a better sense of the actual look of the game. Save it as PNG to avoid compression artefacts.

Stop saving it as a gif, save as PNG xP PNG allows for 24bit colour.

Feedback seems to be scarce

Good stuff all around. I'll answer in order.

As far as what I mean by style, I mean my personal take and approach to design through the pixel art medium. You kind of answered that yourself with the 'taste thing' comment.

I've amended some details about the game. Up top.
This area scene is supposed to feel reminiscent of the scene from the Pagemaster where the kid is riding his bike in the rain.(Environmentally anyways, our guy isn't gonna ride a bike)

I see what you mean by it being hard to read, and making the character stand out. In game, the camera will be pulled in closer to focus on the character. The background elements are there for any camera pull-outs to try and give a sense of scale. Trying to make him look small. Which I think needs some work.

Closing in on the character may bring him more readable, but I kind of want to have that same effect from this far back. Which is why I posted from this angle. When we see the environment I want the player's eye to catch everything, but still feel drawn to the character. Still thinking of solutions for that.     

Clarity over realism is good. Though I guess my aim is to find a balance over both. The realism factor changes over the next few scenes, but the current area is intended to feel like a dull, urban city. Intentionally.

I agree about the flatness. I'll see what I can do about the volume of things. I have options but sense every thing is pieced together and not a whole image, I only have a few work arounds for that. Shadows over casting objects from the trees for example, may not be an option.... So much agreement on the leaves thing. Thats something I'll work on. Not sure what you mean about over shading on the wall.?.? I'd guess you meant maybe its too bright considering the weather. In that case I'd agree. Overall it should be a darker scene.

Back to the taste thing. Yeah, it looks like the grungy pixel noise is more or less building into my style, sorry. The cleaner approach may not be in the books for me, but I could clean it up on some elements to make the composition as a whole not feel so noisy. That might help bring focus to areas that have more focus.

Thanks for the feedback!    

With the walls, I meant that you have rather distinct directional shadows and highlights, whereas in this kind of weather, the only shadows you'd get on relatively flat objects like walls are ambient occlusion shadows (e.g. cracks, tight corners, anything that'll keep the ambient light from getting in).
With the leaves, I think the problem is just that you're not leaving any part of the tree in shadow. Here is a very rough edit that just gets rid of your highlights in some parts of the tree:

 I think that adds some volume, without adding enough contrast to look like there's strong lighting.
(I would've made it a link instead of embedding but the forum refuses to cooperate.)

Re: "heartless" sprites
You had a nice cel-shading look in the big art, but then made the book shadows noisy in the pixel art? Any reason for that? They looked quite nice with sharp shadows. There's no texture in the books to warrant that kind of noise, the pages are just paper.

What are these sprites going to be, exactly? They look like (rather rough) pixel renditions of the concept art, and don't look very optimized for being sprites in-game - the colours don't read very well at the smaller size, the highlights are too prominent and placed in a way that flattens the forms rather than giving them volume, and they all seem to have differing light sources - in a game, you want something consistent.

Currently working on making a tileset for our forest scene in the demo. The trailer is gonna be put on hold for now.

Did some work on my inkling during comiccon. Not the best work station, so it still needs some work but people seemed to dig it.




Starting the gauntlet attack.

Your game looks great! I like the details and lighting on the grass. The rain effect is majestic! I love it!

Really trying to nail the whole tileset thing for this forest level. Was having trouble with making different tiers of grass, so on one of my tests I did this ground and stone look. I like it the most out of what I tried. Maybe its because it flattens the area that the player will walk on. Idk.




I intend to try and add more grass, and some alpha decoratives to make things more green. Suggestions are welcome.

I hate to offer character design critique this far along in your project, but I feel like your player character looks very...uninspired? It looks like a design that would be used for a side character NPC instead of a main character. If I was looking for a game to play, it doesn't look like a main character that I would enjoy playing as. Of course this is a rather subjective point, but I think it is worth consideration.

I do see that there seems to be a transition into a more fantasy type world. If there was some sort of character transformation and you spiced up the character design after that transition into the fantasy world, I think it could help the aesthetic of the game...since it's also a bit jarring to have someone in modern casual clothes using a stone sword in some sort of enchanted forest.

As for specific animation critique, the only particular thing that really bothers me is the idle stance for the sword:

With this stance, the sword is completely off his center of balance, and this would make anyone fall backwards (unless the sword weighs nothing). I would recommend changing the pose to either have the blade resting against his shoulder (though the blade may actually be too large to do this), or holding the sword at the ready.

I do, however, quite enjoy the monster designs for the "book monsters." They are quite imaginative and I think that if the same creativity was applied to the main character it could make a huge difference in the overall feel.

IMO