Game & Map Screenshots 12

Fair enough. Here are the same maps with the lighting swapped

I also like the shadow ones, but perhaps if the character model isn't shadowed then that makes too much of a contrast? If the walls also aren't then its more of a mix, i dunno :p Unless you want the character to stick out ofc.

Shadowed wall tops, all the way. Non-shadowed stands out way too much IMO. It also doesn't make sense to me why they wouldn't be, since - even though they aren't a part of the wall that the character can see - they're still part of the scene, not outside of it like a user interface of any sort.

Looking good though :kaohi:

@KawaiiKid I've merged your thread with this one, the best place to get feedback on maps.

I think it looks generally nice. My two thoughts would be:
- Things are very lined up. If you look going up the left wall, along the bottom wall, and also horizontally in the upper half, lots of stuff in straight lines. Maybe make the middle table and the lower right table not be in the same vertical place. Or make one of the lamp/table/barrel on the left not be in the same horizontal place. Stuff like that.

- There's a pretty large open space in the middle of the room. If I were an innkeeper, I'd have another, like, four-seat table set up a little up and to the right of where the PC is standing.

Decided to make infographic type things for the game's portfolio rather than just have text on a page. I think it looks nicer this way, and is easier to show around rather than just plopping a wad of text down.

@KawaiiKid That certainly looks better than just an ordinary text dump. I do, however, have a query about the font. It looks nice, but is probably a nightmare for anyone with dyslexia. Even if the player doesn't have that, it is still quite a difficult font to read.

I've had mixed responses with font, as I use it for everything including the in game font. I always really liked it and thought it added a lot of character to the game. It seems some people like it, and some people think it's a huge hindrance. I would like to get more feedback on it, maybe it would do me some good to have a poll to see if I should keep it or not. Although, I don't see too many games with very different fonts, so it's probably for a reason.

@KawaiiKid, I'm kinda with @Kes on this one. Readability is a really really big point for me, like, yo prose can be all kinds of awesome and if yo font's hard to read it'll still come off as poopy. :kaoswt: Maybe keep yo fancy font to the titles and subtitles, and find a more readable font for all the non-title text?

Overall tho, I like yo infographic idea! :wub I'm a sucker for a great infographic!

What do you guys think about this? I find it's a good middle ground of keeping the fantasy feeling of the text, but giving it much more readability.

I think you had a good idea about a poll. I really like font that is different, but there is a fine line between looking nice/cool/game appropriate and being difficult for some people to read in the short or long term.

Because that is something too. Something might look good for a while, but then get really old really quickly.

Maybe choose 5 different fonts that you really like and think fit in well with your game and then make a poll to get feedback?

@KawaiiKid I think that's an improvement, but I think it would be better to follow zombiekidzrule suggest and create a thread with a poll. Choose at least 3.

these are screenshots for my game i work on in my free time called Pinocchio's Leech! definitely not a finalized version in these pics, but the main character is a prince who leaves the castle to partner up with a demon sword and go down the route of evil and bloodshed or redemption depending on your gameplay...

Looks like a nice poster to share. Is this in-game though? If it's not it's great besides the font complaints others have had. If it's in-game, it might benefit from being split up into a multi-page thing for extra interactivity and bigger text. Don't know if you have other picts of the same character, but you could even add a different picture on each page to make it dynamic, if not, just having the static pict with a page scroll would look pretty nice.

I agree that the original font had some specific letters that were poorly constructed - notably upper case "A" and lower case "H" (whoever thought making the top of the "H" point forward was a good idea shouldn't be designing fonts :stickytongue:).

I think this one is much better.

@clayathan That's a nice bust for the dialogue boxes and I like its positioning.

As for the maps, I hesitate to say anything because it's not an aesthetic I use myself and so I'm a little unsure of what the conventions of it are. But I think the first map is far too big. You have a lot of empty space. The furniture at the top does not feel as though it is against the wall but somehow stuck out in front of it. That might be part of the aesthetic, but I think it looks odd.

@clayathan I agree with @Kes about your map. The wardrobe especially looks strange with its current placement, it appears to be in the middle of the floor rather than against the wall.

The same is true with the bed and with the barrels in your second picture - I'd expect them to be at least partially overlapping the back wall.

The open space is primarily an issue in your first screenshot of the bedroom. That's a big open space that I've never seen anyone have in a bedroom. You could make the entire room smaller and still fit in the furniture you currently have, or put something else there like...a table?

I'm not sure what the objects along the bottom wall are, but I'm guessing a couch and a chair, so apparently this person entertains company in their bedroom. So they might use a table with seats around it. Or just a little circle of chairs facing each other for people to sit and have a conversation looking at each other.

There's also a lot of empty space on that desk against the west wall. It also seems improbably large, like a person wouldn't be able to sit on that ottoman and actually be able to reach stuff on either end of the desk.

I agree with a lot of your post but I don't know about this one depending on intention. Decor looks rich-person-y and having a desk with a lot of empty space save a book could convey things about the occupant.

A person in a rich family that doesn't quite vibe with the rich trappings, didn't pick the furniture, but they don't have any intention of decorating it. It also draw more attention to what is on the desk and its importance. The person has minimal personal effects but there's a book given prominence.

Thinking about it, everything being a bit too big can actually convey a sense that the player is small, and I don't mean the physical sense, but a feeling of inferiority or that things don't fit.

Or maybe I'm waaay overthinking it, but I have seen games with the things are overwhelmingly big to promote a sense of inferiority aesthetic, and the character design here gives me that kind of vibe, too.

I'd say, thinking about it from that perspective, the thing that's off in the bedroom is actually the windows for being so square.

@clayathan I am generally less critical of visuals since I tend to look more superficially at things like this. I spend a lot of time in my regular job scrutinizing things for inconsistencies and discrepancies, from photos to written documents, so when I look at art or play games, I tend to try to turn that off and not look too hard.

With that said, while I agree with the previous comments that the bedroom might be a bit large by normal conventions, I have definitely see larger in real life and it doesn't strike me as being an issue. In fact, my wife and I owned a house where the master bedroom was probably twice that size, easily, with unnecessarily high, vaulted ceilings. The master closet was almost as big as some bedrooms. I'm not sure why the builder made it that way, but we rather enjoyed it. We had an entire sitting area away from the bed. I was easily the size of two master bedrooms.

And we looked at another house fairly recently when we were buying again with a bedroom a little bigger than the one you made.

Which is why the size of the bedroom doesn't immediately strike me as being too big.

I can't zoom in, but something about the night stand looks odd. I can't tell whether it is supposed to have legs and the space underneath looks strange or if the front is solid and that space still looks a bit odd. Perhaps I just can't see it well.

But a more general comment, it looks like you might have made all the art yourself. In which case, very nice!

@Kes @ATT_Turan thanks for the feedback! i tend to agree about the empty space, it ends up being a problem when you're pixeling stuff yourself and still in the early stages of deciding how to map things, or what exactly you want to pixel for a room. for example, i knew i wanted a custom bed and diary for the protagonist, but i haven't pixeled any other bedrooms so far, so i have meager resources and ideas... i'll definitely keep this in mind when i go back to spriting, i think a couch is a good idea! i also remember wanting a throw rug but haven't sprited that yet, either. (the bottom most sprites are back views of tall cabinets, but those should probably be 2x2's, now that i look at them)

@ZombieKidzRule tyvm! the space underneath the night stand is supposed to be books. i think they're overlapping the bottom of the night stand too much though, so i might put more pixels between them and the night stand to make that more readable

@Htlaets oh, the big square window is a sliding door to a balcony... but now when i look at it, i wanna make it have a more obvious handle so it's clearly an interactable door, so thank you for pointing that out xD