Game & Map Screenshots 12

@Halloween-Jester I like the first screenshot. I wonder, though, if you could make the HP/MP bars a couple of pixels deeper? When I first looked at it I thought: What's with that big 8 at the end? Then I realised that it was 2 zeros, one on top of the other. They are so close it looks like they are one numeral.

I'll be honest, if I had to look at that shade of green in the second screenshot for much of the game I'd probably give up. It is far too acidic for my eyes.

The font in general was too big, messing up my item descriptions! So its been shrunk


And if you think the green is bad, wait until you see the blue!
Yes, this is certainly one of my struggles with this. Red is a colour you can see at a high brightness just fine, but the others are eye burners.
I came up with the idea to set the colours at the same value as the grey


But everything felt too dark, so I thought what if it was just the walls and floor? A compromise that allows me to keep my high values in the form of accent colours and prevents the burning of ones eyes!

Buuuut I've discovered that my values are off. I have two greys instead of one- 117 & 127. My yellow is 255 R & 252 G instead of 255 for both. Darn it!

Don't have much actually changed or made about my project yet, far from having an actual thread of its own yet, so thought I might just show some here. Mostly still figuring out what terms I want to use for things, and trying to see how I might do hand drawn portraits and such or if I should just try pixel art for now. At the very least, try not to have to resize things so much. Lastly, well, I like pink, but I wonder if I shouldn't try to make my own custom border/menu stuff, but I think I might shelve that for later.

@BloodyKun I really like the concept for your title screen, interesting and visually well balanced.
It took me a moment or two to work out what the terms in your menu were referring to. I'm still uncertain what 'stage area' might be.

@BloodyKun looks sweet!:kaoluv: The portraits are adorbs! I wud maybe look into font stuff, "bravado" and "tricks" squeeze into their spaces in a quite uncomely way?

Thank you both for the feedback!

Stage area here refers to formation and, since i plan on making this sort of a stage play in the form of a video game, I kind of thought it might fit for the battle screens in particular to be involved with having concepts like "stage left" or "stage right". but I'm also still deciding whether I'll want to have a side view or front facing view.

And yeah, I hadn't realized the engine would try to shrink larger words to fit in the allotted space for them, lol. I've been mulling over just finding shorter words to use, but if I can figure out a different font, that might help.

Thanks again! I really appreciate having other eyes on this stuff.

@BloodyKun I think there's also a plugin option for subbin' in icons if you can't find shorter words. I just forget what/where... :kaoswt:

Sewer map I've been working on for my post apocalyptic game. There's still a lot of stuff missing but at least I can finally show something new.



Full layout so far

Not sure if what i'm doing is bad or if i am missing on anything, I'm still learning atm. i mainly use Dall-3 and Midjourney to get some decorative stuff i put in tile sheets.
i added a layout idea i had, for people to see what i sort of meant. do i need to add anything more, are my maps to big or small? I'm Trying to go for an RPG with a turn based yet Terraria inspired progression system.

@vilereaver41 I merged your thread with the Game Map & Screenshots one. It's pretty hard to see your screenshots with all the white space. Also the AI tiles stand out a lot as they don't match the rest of the tiles at all.

@vilereaver41 I have very little experience mapping, but if you are just starting out and you made those maps from scratch, then I think you are doing pretty good. I agree that it is hard for me to really see details. Maybe if you cropped the white parts out?

One thing that stands out to me is when a particular asset is used quite a bit and it doesn't change. For instance, you have a log that seems to be used in several places as a crossing for water. Which is cool. But that log appears quite a bit on one map at exactly the same angle. It might look better, and less noticeable, if you made slightly different versions of the log. Or perhaps use it less?

There are a few other things that caught my eye, but there are much more experienced map folks here who can offer better advice. Overall, I think you are doing a good job and I only hope that my initial maps are this good.

@BloodyKun I really like the hand drawn appearance of your screenshots. I also sort of like the color scheme because it is different. The words starting in lower case sort of distract me because it is unusual, but not necessarily bad. And the misspelling of Paladin would bug me unless it was evident that you were doing that on purpose for a particular reason. But I really do like the overall appearance.

@vilereaver41 I want to add my voice to what ZombieKidzRule said about needing to vary your tileset a bit when you are using the same set for a large number of maps. However, you need to ensure that the tiles from different sources blend together. You have RTP trees in the main, but also another tree in a different style.


In this instance it doesn't work because there is a different in perspective and shadows. The RTP trees, like all RM tiles, is slightly top-down, what is often referred to as 2.5D perspective. The non-RTP tree appears much closer to a straight 2D perspective and has no shadow. On the Resource threads you will find a great many trees which would fit with the RTP trees more closely.

You will also need to pay attention to perspective in another way. Here is a snip of part of a map


Starting at the front of the cliffs you have a cliff height of 1 tile. This moves without interruption to a height of maybe 4 tiles, it's difficult to be certain. It could be 5. If you want to increase the height of the hill, which is a normal thing to do, you have to show by what stages it does so. I don't have time to do a mock-up to show you, but here is an example from the editor of an old game of mine:

You have to show how the cliff gets higher by having distinct levels which increase. As a separate issue, the back cliff on the left - it looks like the base tiles are straight rather than curved corner ones.

Next, if the hill has increased by that amount, you woul not be able to see the whole of a tree so close to it. At most it would be only the top of it peeping over.
Then that enormous grey/blue rock formation. Unless you want to suggest that it is e.g. a meteorite, you cannot have a rocky outcrop that colour in a landscape where all the rocks and cliffs are brown. It is also too big in comparison with the hill. I noticed that you have a couple of smaller grey/blue boulders elsewhere. They don't match.

Hey, thank you for the feedback! Sorry I hadn't replied earlier For some reason I hadn't received a notification and missed this. With how some things have gone today for me, I wouldn't be surprised if it's really just more that I'm getting old. Already over the hill and all...

I'd chosen the word "paledin" as a sort of a pun, I guess? With how Ruckus' helmet is a bucket, or pale, and he's sort of a knight. Thought I was being a little clever, but maybe I should wager it may come off to many as just a typo lol. Thank you for pointing that out. And I get what you mean about the use of lower case words. For me, I guess my subconscious reasoning is I didn't want anything to be too rigid or sterilized, but that's kind of hard to explain. I may end up going back on that as I progress, especially now I've thought it might hinder players who don't get a grasp on all the systems because of it.


Thank you for the info! I'm sure it would be easy enough to find, but just the knowledge that there are such things is useful. I'll admit, I don't know much coding myself, and am a bit hesitant to get into all kinds of plugins, but learning about a few that may be useful might go a long way to reaching where I want to go.

Well, I'd feel bad for just spamming this topic without posting anything of substance, so I'll include a couple more screenshots. Hadn't really taken any advice yet, simply messing around with what terms I might like better, messing around with colors and such; thought I might go for a red menu to simulate curtains, but thought bright red was too bold and dark red was too depressing, and still pink is my favorite color so I decided on more of a watermelon flavor. Not sure the health shows up great on it...maybe I might go with green instead?

More noticeably, I updated the portraits a bit. Still have the old ones, so I may switch back, but I had a tough decision last night on deciding whether I want everything to be drawn on paper or on tablet. Learning about how sprite sheets and animations work in this engine, I decided I'd rather just go all digital, much as I hate seeming to take so much longer with digital. I'd set out to actually do battle animations and sprites first, having roughed out some small sketches, but then I had to troubleshoot my tablet and find out why it wasn't working, then Corel Painter was giving me issues and I ended up reverting to a previous version, and well, I should really not get into a rant now, but needless to say by then I was frustrated and thought I'd rather spend my time doing something a little less daunting.


I think I spend an absurd amount of time trying to render stuff, and don't spend enough time seeing how the bigger picture turns out. Think I definitely ought to go back in and brighten everything up. I guess I really just love contrast and heavy black lines. Bo is more my usual style, and she's meant to deliberately look intimidating here compared to the others, but it's a bit much and doesn't really match most of the vision I've got in my head...and it's just kinda hard to make them out lol.

Think I'll probably wait on a more significant update to give if I decide to post more in here, but any feedback is welcome! Sorry I haven't left any for anyone else in here yet - I really just don't feel very qualified. But I'd like to offer good luck to all you working hard on your projects.

EDIT: and you know, I only just noticed Ron's portrait is a bit off kilter, too. Man, I need to pay more attention. Or be less tired while I'm doing this stuff.

@BloodyKun I think the new portraits look great, and changing the wording on the gauges makes it look a lot clearer and crisper.
Could I make a suggestion? People with colour blindness may have difficulty adequately distinguishing between the pink and the blue because they are very similar in intensity. Perhaps make the blue a little stronger by deepening it slightly?

Thank you! And good catch! I'll note that down for stuff to do. I'll admit, I don't know so much about color blindness, so that's something to take into account. Nowhere near the same thing, but being autistic I feel I kind of owe it to others to not actively cause unnecessary stress. I'm all about that zen mindset in general, and hope to make this game pretty cozy for everyone.

@BloodyKun You know, that is a tough one. I like both versions of your portraits and it is hard to say which one I actually like better. Although I am drawn (pardon the pun) to the hand drawn versions for some reason. Maybe because it is different from a lot of other games. But they both are very cool.

So I guess whichever version fits into the overall visual aesthetic of the game.

Even with the other things I mentioned, I think ultimately is all comes down to what best reflects your vision of what you want to express visually.

And I would just mention the same thing with the word "captian". I could find that in the Urban dictionary (which might be what you intended), but I immediately assumed it was a misspelling of "captain".

Your screenshots really do look awesome!

The battle scene/system for my current project, 2-BIT EXPLORER. It is basically the same as the one in my previous project, but in this one you can switch weapons, the enemies have different battle phases, minions and status effects. What do you guys think?

@Gensun, is the brown-haired person holdin' a crucifix that works like a flashlight...? Everythin' looks pretty cool!:kaoluv: Chara designs are nice, palette is okay... altho some parts maybe lack a bit of contrast? Like, cud you test an alternative background colour for Friend Bot's portrait background? :kaoswt:

Also, the building looks very spare of detail, but I'm guessin' this might be a design choice or a WIP? Or does the cone of light reveal more detail as it sweeps over? Overall I like it quite a bit!

The "crucifix" is a smartphone light, and I'm not sure what is the issue with the portrait background color or the contrast anywhere else

To my eyes, the portrait background colour jus' looks a li'l bit too close to the robo friend's lightest colour. :kaoswt: Cud be my eyes, but I wud test with another colour, maybe in the brown range? Or just get another opinion. :biggrin: