Hey all, here's an update on some textures. All is still a work in progress. I'm working to make things a little darker, gloomier, and more realistic. Found some awesome Lord of the Rings Dead Marshes images I've also added to my reference and inspiration!



Marsh Grass


Tall Grass


Marsh Grass Tile Example



Edited by heyguy - 08 November 2014 at 4:14pm

Thanks Limes! Here are three different attempts at trying to be a little more suggestive. It's tough, I come from a traditional and digital painting background so I want push more colors on more pixel.







To be honest, I still kinda like my previous tile grass (which isn't in the style I'm trying to replicate) and I'm not happy with the two new ones. I'm going to keep experimenting though! I really want to create something minimalistic, pixelly and stylized like these games.


Crawl

Hyper Light Drifter

Children of Morta

Serpent in the Staglands

Sword And Sorcery Superbrothers

One more update for tonight! I think this grass might be the best yet. I'm still not satisfied with the style though so I'm going to continue to experiment. I think one thing that might improve this texture is another darker shade of green sparsely placed? Also, maybe I could create nicer defined blades of grass? Single defined blades curving up, down, left, right? Or less detail?




Edited by heyguy - 11 November 2014 at 12:46am

Hello all. So it's been a while since I've posted on  any new updates on this project! Thank you for the comment Limes. So I worked on this project for a little bit longer but I felt I still needed to collect more art style reference. I felt I needed to create some sketches and concept art for a more alien world/landscapes/marshes too. I think I might work with a magenta, brown and gold color palette. Any thoughts? So after collecting a bunch of reference, I now have some questions. I've added some pics to help me make my questions clear. I also posted this update in my thread on WayofthePixel.

I've also added an art style mood guide at the bottom. It's a combination of the art styles I wish my pixel art to look like. Like I've mentioned before, I want something stylized and simplified. Maybe a mix of texture-y Gameboy-ish RPGs with more colors, small player characters, large enemies, large environment sprites/props like trees, tall structures, ruins, caves, etc. I want to create an alien and surreal marsh world and I actually want to put it in Construct 2 for fun. I've come up with a bit of a story to the world to inspire the alien world. Here's the gist the the world: the protagonist is incredibly ancient automaton with a prophecy to fulfill that travels an old surrealistic, alien world with strange and intelligent flora and fauna. I'm playing with the idea of the planet being entirely a depressing marsh or swamp planet with appropriate flora and fauna.

One big question. Maybe it's dumb now when I think about it. Let's say I want this hypothetical RPG game to 2 or 3 different levels of zoom like a Diablo or PS2/XBOX Baldur's Gate. Can pixels and game engines handle that without looking weird, distorted, blurry or whatever? I want my game to have a high birds eye view like this. Awesome art from Pixel Joint.



So, of course, newer games with retro pixel art styles are pushing cooler effects compared to older pixel art games. By this I mean lighting, more tiles/textures, larger tiles/textures, more animations, unique styles, more particles, shaders, etc. I have a question on how to replicate some of this stuff. Specifically, for example, lets say I wanted to create small little patches or fields of glowing mushrooms amongst the swamp grass and dirt. A more broad question is what kind of tricks, smoke and mirrors, etc are games like Hyper Light Drifter Take a look at some of this images of Hyper Light Drifter, and Radio of the Universe. Take a real close look at Hyper Lighter Drifter.

Hyper Light Drifter



Radio the Universe


I can imagine the light rays in Radio the Universe being pretty simple. But How does Hyper Light Drifter create such artistry and non repetitive tiling to their scenes, tiles, objects, etc? Is it a lighting alpha shader that overlays a dithering texture over things? Do developers and artists add a vignette or some sort of camera layer to add additional dithering and texturing to a scene? Are they using very large tiles? Are there just more unique tiles? Take a look at these images from  Moon Hunters.

Moon Hunters



Are they using larger tile maps to minimize repetitious? I see lots of large swooping brush strokes. Are those stone floors sprites or overlays on top of the tiling textures? I know some engines have lighting and shadows. Dungeon of the Endless Ocean seems to have real time shadows and that looks really slick!

Dungeon of the Endless


Here's the art style mood guide I've been talking about. I want to create a cool style like these games. To the left, there's magenta, gold, and brown. Some of the colors I'm planning on working with eventually. I will start with gray tones I think.



Haha, so I think I'm finally done with this post. Thank you for reading. I'm going to take another crack at this project and post some new updates soon. So tldr. Still working on this project and making some changes. Curious in advanced techniques and effects like lighting, real-time lighting, overlays, bloom, shaders, camera layers/vignettes, and more vfx with modern pixel art games. Would like thoughts in my idea, color palette and art style mood guide. Can overhead 2d rpgs have a camera that zooms in and out? Will post work soon!



Edited by heyguy - 17 January 2015 at 2:48pm

Are you on Polycount too, by any chance? I saw a similar post about 'neo' pixel art there recently.

Anyway. Pixel art in its modern incarnation has far less limits than it used to. The NES had only a few kilobytes of memory, and (if I'm interpreting limits correctly) you were limited to something like 2 sheets (sprite and tile) of 256 8x8 images. So in total; 2*256*8*8 = 32768 pixels. That's roughly 180x180 pixels... but the NES had a screen size of 256 x 240, so you HAD to copy some tiles.

Nowadays, let's say 1 GB of memory? That's little for a PC, a bit on the high end for phones. That comes down to 20000x20000 pixels worth of imagery; 200 full-HD screens. So we could have the first Zelda game (9*16 maps) redone as one giant completely unique hand drawn map. And that's based on uncompressed BMP files that are (everyone here should know this) uselessly and ridiculously huge.

In other words, tiles are no longer necessary from a memory standpoint. Or barely, anyway. Only for making world and asset creation easier. But there are other ways to make a world efficiently.

If you want to have a path along grass you can make a tileset that nicely outlines the grass and the dirt tiles, i.e. the traditional way of pixel art games.

You can also just make a single grass tile and then make the road as a tileset, with transparency where the grass (or other material) should be. It cost more processing power to calculate 2 layers of tiles, but we can afford it.

Or we can make 1 tile for the grass, 1 for the road material, and then level creators can draw a road with a single stroke of the pen, like in many 3D games:


So why does Moon Hunters look like it has a lot of unique tiles and little repetition? Well, because likely it does. Because it can.

TFW your art shows up in a random thread next to Hyperlight Drifter and Crawl...

http://www.pixeljoint.com/files/icons/full/hexup1.png

^That guy has no place among the greats of pixel minimalism. I should know. I'm that guy.