Advice on graphics?

What advice do you folks have on graphics? Mainly maptiles, especially houses and trees, I got some decent grass with 3 shades of green and the airbrush along with decent foliage using the same method, but am a bit worried on the trunks, size, etc. I need all I can get because I plan to have a lot of locations including caves, cities, forests, futuristic places, etc. I guess practice makes perfect, and I feel I'm better than I was the last time I used OHR, but the little things bug me like not getting a table to look right and give the appearance that it comes up off the floor, same with houses because I'm trying to draw a house and it keeps looking wrong. Even my hero graphics are lacking a bit, but I figured I'll periodically upgrade those as I get better. I also have trouble drawing backdrops to portional sizes that don't make the hero look like a midget and where the placement of the heros is just right. I plan to use some real pictures of my local forest on some outdoors battles, as the way the OHR handles pics has come a long way and now handles them pretty well. SparElric suggested using a timer on the real ones and standing around myself for those, but I'm still at a loss on the indoors ones.

Any advice you can give me is greatly appreciated. I'm sort of at a standstill until I can get some outdoors graphics going.

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First off, you should upload some pics of your current graphics so people can help give advice.

My personal general suggestion for everything is keep things simple, and consistent. Less colours, and details is sometimes best. Also be sure to keep stuff like shading consistent. For example always have the shaded side of the character, trees, objects be on the left, and the highlighted (light) side be on the right.

My advice on drawing well scaled battle backdrops is:
1) Make a battle formation, and hero sprites... etc in the editor
2) Enter the battle in game (at this point there will be no backdrop)
3) Screenshot the characters against the black backdrop
4) Open the screenshot in a program like gimp, or photoshop which supports layers
5) Delete the black backdrop so it's now transparent
6) Make layer(s) beneath the characters so you can draw your backdrop there. This should give you an idea of the scale the backdrop should be
7) Now draw the backdrop! This isn't as easy as it sounds, but if you have watched some video tutorials on basic one-point perspective drawing then you should have a decent starting point.

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Here, I whipped this up for you. I basically took my own advice and drew this up in a few seconds. If you have a good imagination you should be able to create tonnes of different variations of indoor scenes based off this template. It's even good for outdoor scenes, just get rid of the walls and blend the floor in to the scenery. I drew some extra triangular lines to show how you could easily build structures coming out of the walls.

If you want to make things even more complexed, add some try adding windows, curved lines, a hallway going off in to the distance. Anythings possible, this should be a good place to start.

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Also if your characters are in a small room, like a house then make the walls low so it looks like the ceiling is open (like the player is viewing the battle through the ceiling). And if its a big room like a castle hall, make the wall high to the top of the screen so it looks like the castle walls are much bigger than your characters.

Right now the light lined wall in the template is about 2x the heros height, thus it would be suitable for a house or something smaller. Any shorter height may be too short for an indoor scene but could instead be used to draw a short wall barrier, bridge railing, etc..

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I really appreciate it. That's a good idea about the small houses. Here are some screenshots, including the horrible backdrop and couch.

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Okay, I think as far as the battle backdrop goes you could just try redrawing yours to the perspective of the template I gave you and it should look more to scale. In my opinion drawing to scale takes lots of practice, and I too wasn't very good at this until just recently. I watch many many youtube videos on one-point, two-point, and three-point perspective to get things down right.

For your house I think you should avoid drawing it flat. Add a third dimension like so:



The left house shape shows how you can add another dimension, while the right goes on to show how you can add character to the house by making it leaky, asymmetrical, have certain features...etc.

Notice how I use less repetitive tiling, and instead focus on small unique features, and shape. Also notice how I use a solid colour for the ground/grass, then draw a few little tufts of grass here and there... Furthermore it is not necessary to outline everything in black, I do some features like the shingles, and wood panel as a lighter or darker colour. If I spent more time on this for my own game I'd eliminate the usage of black outlines completely and just use a darker green shading colour.

I think your battle animation is good. Maybe someone else is better suited to help you with that.

Your indoor mapping is good. It could use a bit more variation, and structure. The computer looks great, maybe move it up a pixel or two on the desk and it will look more natural. The desk is good, it has a different perspective than the rest of the room but I've seen this done before in games like earthbound, and I don't mind it personally.

I really like how you drew the couch and TV. It looks like you were attempting 2.5D perspective, which is a type of perspective often used in games to make the graphics appear to have an upward-and-inward bend. If your interested you should look more in to this. It would be cool to see a game done completely like this.

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Also if I may say, I don't like your choice of colours. I know it is natural to make grass green and wood brown, etc... but I think it looks nicest when game makers use a colour scheme in which all the colours fit well together. You could make the grass grey and the wood purple and still pull it off, all it takes is proper drawing of textures so the player understands that the house has wood panels, or the grey stuff is grass by the use of shrubs, and grass tuft textures. If you chose these colours in order to purposefully make your game that certain harsh colour style then I think it's fine though. I can't tell what type of game it is just from a few pictures. Sometimes harsh is great too.

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Thanks for getting me in the pixel art mood. I actually went above and beyond to make this due to the houses creepy feel:



I wish I could somehow do a similar fog effect in my game...

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I love that house!

Perhaps someday in the future the OHR will have transparency, but with some extra work it can still be possible to get a foggy effect with opaque pixels. I was recently replaying Faxanadu, and I really love how they managed to fake a fog in some areas of that game.

http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Faxanadu/Mystery_town_Victim

It was actually harder than I thought to find good examples of 2.5D perspective. I did find these for you though:

http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2ias6sh&s=7#.U9pcJYBdVYw

http://cdn.medialib.officialnintendomagazine.co.uk/screens/dir_373/image_37312_thumb_wide610.jpg

http://www.gamejournal.it/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Larochelle-LOZ_screen03.jpg

Notice how the buildings get bigger as they get higher up. In the first zelda picture it can only be seen in the bottom right building. Perhaps you may choose to go the route of certain zelda games and make certain buildings and objects in 2.5D.

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That's pretty neat! I was wondering if it may be possible to do a pixel-by-pixel modification in the game engine eventually?

What I mean is, write a script which scans across the screen one pixel at a time and updates each pixel to a new modified state (kind of like a TV rapidly scans across the horizontal and updates the image being displayed).

Right now it is possible to do this for instance with maptiles, but on a pixel-by-pixel level would allow for smoother effects.

Some things that could be accomplished with this:
-drawing fog using somewhat of a gaussian model to adjust the pixel brightness, by individually controlling each pixel the fog could be made to look like it goes in and out. Or even move across the screen.
-pixels could be shifted in order to create a glitchy effect. For example some horizontal rows could be shifted left or right by a determined number of pixels in order to make it look like the screen is F***ing up.
-You could even create the illusion of heat waves by making a script that slightly offsets a small row of pixels as it rises up the screen, kind of like the effect you get when you see stuff while looking over a campfire...

I'm sure this is a lot harder to accomplish than it sounds and possibly something that would majorly slow down the game, so I just wanted to check.

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Thanks for all your advice, man. I'll definitely apply it to the game. As far as what type it is, it's a Sci-Fi Fantasy that will involve time travel to the future where there's space travel, futuristic things, etc., and travel to the past where there's fantasy elements like wizards, dwarves, elves, etc. It stemmed from a debate between me and a friend over which genre was superior, and I said I liked Sci-Fi Fantasty, so in this world, the citizens are divided between the two genres, tensions are rising, and when the future is travelled to there's gonna be all out war because of it. I see what you mean about how the grass can be grey and the house purple, but in this case I'd rather the nature be green as usual in the present and everything look a bit normal and then in the future portion I could definitely use something like that. I'm definitely open to changing the house color and all the other colors, though. How would you suggest tweaking the grass? Also, when you said you didn't like the color scheme, did you mean the inside of the house too? I was kind of thinking about changing the carpet/wall color anyway. I already changed the hero's shirt color to match the title screen and not blend into tiles as much. Plus I like the new color.

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I think the computer desk looked off because it's shape is the opposite perspective as the tv and couch were.

As the couch and TV are trapezoids with their points far in the back but close in the front
like so
\__/
but the table is opposite, close in the back and far in the front
/__\

I honestly feel, though, that the only odd one out is that couch.

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Hmm, you've got a point there. I'll have to redraw that. So you think the couch needs reworking?

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Wow sheamkennedy, that is a really neat house!

Anyway, LogHeckTech, I have a few general tips that might help you out. I can't provide any graphical bona fides, though, so take all this with a grain of salt I guess.

1.) I would say that the airbrush tool is generally your enemy. You'll probably get much better results going pixel-by-pixel (tedious though that may seem) or just foregoing that airbrushy effect altogether. Instead you can create large patches of single colors broken up with tufts of grass (or carpet, or waves, whatever) and shadow as shea (can I call you shea?) suggested.

Check out how Mother 3 does it (and I believe this game has been given as an example before for graphical stuff around these parts).

No "airbrushery" in the grass, dirt, forest or sky, just occasional shadows and cracks / tufts. And it looks fantastic!

2.) Don't be afraid to make your map graphics span tiles. Your computer looks good but kinda squashed. If you had it drawn so that it overlapped the rug and even up onto the wall, it would pop more and you'd be able to fit more detail on there. The door looks a little squashed to me, too. It also helps to obfuscate the grid (i.e. makes players less aware that everything has been pieced together from a set of tiles) when stuff overlaps other stuff: you could have the couch creep up on the the wall a bit too and maybe have the top edge of the TV overlap the tiles above it so that the hero's feet are obscured when he's right up next to it.

3.) Whenever you finish a "graphic" (say a map, a sprite or even a hand-drawn image), try mirroring it horizontally and then looking at it again. I dunno if this is true for everyone but I've always had a difficult time judging the quality of artwork I have created myself. I've found that mirroring it helps me to have a more "objective" eye when appraising it.