Advice on graphics?

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.

That Mother 3 shot looks pretty good. I especially like the house. I'll give the grass style a shot, but I think I may want to add a few extra tufts. I'll see if I can't make some of the fixes you mentioned here in a few. I need to take a shower and get some coffee going so I can focus. As far as the TV, how would that be accomplished with it obscuring his feet? Wouldn't it have to be part overhead tile for that?

Hey, I think these new screenshots of yours show a huge improvement. I think you're at a good point now where you can go on to build other aspects of your game. Of course you should always post screenshots of everything you do so people can give advice. I especially like the fridge, stove, and couch... all done very nicely.

The more you work on other areas of the games graphics, the more you'll get a feel for what you want as a graphical style overall. You'll probably come back over and over to different parts of your game to improve the graphics as your skills improve. This is something that is inevitably going to happen, and it is something I struggle with in my own game graphics. I strongly advise you to continue making more and more graphics in your game, without getting hung up on an area.

As for your hero looking flat against the imagery, try drawing your hero more like this:


I don't mean draw your hero like the players in pokemon, I mean draw your hero with more of the top of their head showing, and less of their face. Since your graphics are all draw from a semi-birds-eye-view position, you will also want to reimagine and redraw your character from this same position. Thus you will see more of the top of their head and shoulders... I think you get the idea.

You could try drawing an outline around each of the letters in the title.

Also, trying using yellow for the text instead of red.

Thanks, and yeah, I agree about the grass. I'm gonna try it both ways and see how it goes. One odd thing is that the layering doesn't seem to be doing what it did in the other map. On the other one layers 0 and 1 weren't overhead, but layer 2 was, on this one all three are not overhead. I wanted the top part of the house to be where you can walk behind it.