here is a screen shot from my action adventure game shadow fox. Our goal is to make the longest and most polished game on the xbox live indie games channel I understand there is a memory limit but we hope to have a computer release is the game is too big or to get a contract with Microsoft. I will try to post music from our game here also.

Looks good, nice artwork. The character looks like a bunny or something. Did you guys use a pen tablet?

thanks. yep we use a pen tablet. Yep the character is a Noakita (or fox person) one of the jokes in the game is that the other inhabitants of the world are always saying that they don't look much like foxes.

Now if that were real-time lighting, that would be so awesome!

Btw: you can save space by re-implementing something like a JPEG 2000 de-compressor for your sprites, instead of using DXT1. It's more work, but lets you cram in more artwork.

You can also store artwork in a slight down-resolution, such as 960x576, and run an edge-enhancement filter on it at runtime in a pixel shader; again, to get more out of your available storage for backgrounds etc.

jwatte:

Now if that were real-time lighting, that would be so awesome!

Btw: you can save space by re-implementing something like a JPEG 2000 de-compressor for your sprites, instead of using DXT1. It's more work, but lets you cram in more artwork.

You can also store artwork in a slight down-resolution, such as 960x576, and run an edge-enhancement filter on it at runtime in a pixel shader; again, to get more out of your available storage for backgrounds etc.

our engine and editors are pretty powerful and do allow alot of compression. this shot is basically tip of the iceberg.

Cool. I just got a pen tablet so that I can draw my own sprites and stuff. It's kind of hard to get used to. I'm ok at drawing stuff, but it's kinda tricky to color everything and make it look good.

I'd like to see more screenshots :P

When starting to use the tablet, stick with it and keep using it for all of your mousework. Doing this will help you get used to working with it.

BTW: Great artwork, would be good to see some video footage.

Its not bad.

 I've got some feedback if you'd like it and a paint over I did.

The scene feels very flat this is mainly because the lighting is not well defined additionally you should focus on the form a bit more. you'll see what I mean in the paint over.

Its all rather blurry, It appears you applied liberal use of the smudge tool. Thats fine for working the base values in but you really need to go back over it with sharper details. I don't mean cracks and stuff but you need to define the shapes and form. These are rocks, if this cave was made of flesh then it would look fine (more or less).

If you are gonna be using hd resolutions then you should take advantage of all those pixels so some finer details will really push the look. In the paint over I simple did filter render clouds, and then filter spatter or something. overlay that onto the rock and instant detail. (you should do some finer hand painted details as well tho).

Last thing I can think of is you should darken (or lighten depends on the situation) the objects as they get further away. This way you'll get a much better perception of distance mixed with parallaxing and it will look awesome.

And heres the paintover, its not perfect but you can see what I mean about defining the form to create a more 3 dimensional look. If you start out by drawing cubes and cylinders then go over that with rough values it will really help you.

looks good man i will definitely use these techniques and see how they look i always wondered how to achieve certain effects.

I agree with Yakra.  Stone can be very tricky, and you should be laying down some strong values at the beginning to define the major surfaces.  As it is it looks very smudgy, and admittedly a bit amateurish.  The shady bits can be added later when you've better defined your surface.

Noogy:

I agree with Yakra.  Stone can be very tricky, and you should be laying down some strong values at the beginning to define the major surfaces.  As it is it looks very smudgy, and admittedly a bit amateurish.  The shady bits can be added later when you've better defined your surface.

thanks noogy of course i did ask you about this last month  but you never got back to me.


I have a strong feeling Microsoft upped the xbla memory limit because Elysian tail would be really big to be a whole game.

anyways here is how the rock looks taking into consideration your input Yakra  and Dean


     


not as blurry and shape is more defined thank you guys so much let me just apply this to the rest of the level.

A definite improvement.

Throw in some harder lines where you really want to define an edge and some highlights. After that its just about pushing it in the details. Like is this rock wet? Throw in some reflected light. Maybe some cave moss even. Then of course when it comes to color for the base rock there's a lot you can do. imagine how the rock formed over time, perhaps the cave was filled halfway with water at one point you would see that in the rock, or maybe theres a salt vein in this cave so you could put bands of rock salt here and there.

Mackenzie Kelechi:

thanks noogy of course i did ask you about this last month  but you never got back to me.
I have a strong feeling Microsoft upped the xbla memory limit because Elysian tail would be really big to be a whole game.

I apologize, was it through email?  I recently had to reinstall everything, and lost a bit of mail in the process.  I'm still getting up to speed.  And Dust is actually pretty small right now... with around 5 times of temporary background art I'm still only at 150mb.

Regarding your updated artwork, it's a big improvement.  The artwork is still a little smeary, almost like a filter was being applied, but if this is a consistent style thing, then you are on the right track.  Never be afraid to be bold with value to define surfaces, as confidence will help you to give your backgrounds definition.

The limit for an uploaded ccgame is still 150 MB (50 MB for an 80-point game).

jwatte:

The limit for an uploaded ccgame is still 150 MB (50 MB for an 80-point game).

And in all honesty there should be NO reason a 2D game released through the Indie channel should be bigger than that. 150mb is a lot if you are carefully managing your assets.

Noogy:

jwatte:

The limit for an uploaded ccgame is still 150 MB (50 MB for an 80-point game).

And in all honesty there should be NO reason a 2D game released through the Indie channel should be bigger than that. 150mb is a lot if you are carefully managing your assets.

yeah this game has a lot of content i may end up steam releasing it along with the community game channel release I'm a fan of long and interesting games like odin sphere with lots of stats weapons and abilities also tons of replay value. 150 megs might be too small but our engine is amazing at compressing data, we built it from the ground up to handle these things. how is Dust doing by the way is microsoft helping you or are you still solo. I cant wait to win with my game in the near future not to be cocky but just thinking positive.

I'm really digging the background but can we see the player a bit more?

sure i will put a picture of all three