Monday, September 11, 2006

Cute Pixels ...

Cute pixels from Indigo Art...
I really like how he did amiga-like tiles for a "green level". Just using 32 colours for the whole stuff. Very efficient. The "ground", for instance, is mainly using colors #966d42 and #b68e50 with a "back" colour that has a more "purple" taste: #774953 ... That nicely allows you to do shadows of trees (hidden branches,etc) using #623551 and #392232. Another thing i like much is how the grass is given a "curvy" look by using only two-pixel bar of #c8d551 (yellow green) over #7fbc43 green. The effect is even reinforced using a nice blue-green (#197c3e) for grass shadows (as well as back leaves that can even pick #335955 and #304942). and #f5f08d gives the shiny pixels where grass catches the light a bit more (and there aren't many of them, as you can see...
De biens jolis pixels venant de "Indigo Art" ... j'aime vraiment le style Amigaesque de ces blocs pour une "green zone". Et tout ça sur moins de 32 couleurs! chapeau. Le sol, par exemple, avec deux teintes et un fond tirant sur le pourpre, ce qui donne bien mieux que les teintes habituelles pour les ombres des arbres, etc.
J'aime bien aussi le look "courbe" de son herbe, avec une barre de 2 pixels plus clairs au milieu, renforcé par un vert plus jaune pour les reflets et un vert-bleu pour les ombres...

Maybe you wonder why you've had that many #rrggbb color codes in the previous paragraph? that's just because it's lunchtime and i need to take notes of all those values until i have a "palette editor" for my DS-based "pixel factory" ... Another trick i like quite much is how the ground itself is given is given a rounded shape (thanks to layer transparency, of course), and how Dan Fessler has been using a pretty wide "suspended grass" to break the monotony... I tried something alike to add some snow to castle walls in some blocks of mine a couple o' days ago, but i was clearly using too small patterns, making them "unguessable" for the player.

Ah, vous vous demandez pourquoi tous ces #rrggbb dans la version anglaise? c'est les codes de couleur. On est sur le temps de midi et je prends note de tout ça en attendant d'avoir un éditeur de palettes pour ma DS. Autre chose qui donne bien dans les blocs de Dan Fessler, c'est le look arrondi du sol lui-même (grâce aux pixels transparents) et la manière dont les touffes d'herbes suspendues sont utilisées pour casser la monotonie. J'avais essayé de faire pareil dans le "chateau enneigé" que je dessinais il y a quelques jours, mais apparament, j'utilisait un motif trop petit, et on ne voyait pas de la neige, mais juste des erreurs de dessin.

Note, too, that the whole "ground" pattern is pretty large (40 pixels, actually) ... that makes me thing i was unhappy with the fact the nintendo DS has 8x8 tile size and that most of my previous pixart on the PC was using 20x20 blocs ... since it takes a rather long time to make "good" tiles for ground, etc (i mean, tiles that can be repeated smoothly in both dimensions), thinking all that previous work was "lost" made me rather frowning... but as i was looking at that grass more closely, it just appeared that we had light-pattern repeating, sometimes at the edge, sometimes in the middle of the block ... which suggested the actual block pattern wasn't Nx16 but something more built out of 8x8 tiles directly. And after i counted the tiles, my mind suddenly reminded me i should practice maths in base-10 more often :P 8x5 == 40 == 20x2.

Et si on y regarde de plus près, le bloc de terre et relartivement large (40 pixels). Ce qui me rappelle mes précédents spritesets sur PC (avec le GameMaker) qui utilisait des blocs de 20x20, alors que la DS fonctionne avec des "tuiles" de 8x8 ... Tout ce travail perdu? ce serait trop bête... Alors que si on en colle 2 l'un à côté de l'autre, ça donne 40 pixels, soit 5 tuiles (oui, je sais, je devrais réapprendre à compter en base 10).

There are still two things worth of bloggin about those blocks. First, the grass has a shadow, which suggests it's bushy and falls over the ground. Second, the "ground pattern" itself, despite looking random, is given some inherent coherency by the "tall rectangles" shape...

The general aspect of the map has something else pretty nice. It gives you a depth feeling. I think with a bit of tweaking, we could easily have a Bilou game where you can just "fall off" from one platform to the one below (which isn't actually "below" you, but rather more "below and a bit closer to the player" ... That'd be just more natural than a mario-like level design).

Deux autres choses à blogger à propos de ces blocs. D'abord l'ombre de l'herbe, qui suggère un aspect un peu "buissonneux" et qui retombe par-devant le sol. Ensuite le motif du sol lui-même, qui malgré son apparence aléatoire, possède une sorte de "cohérence" grâce aux formes généralement rectangulaires et verticales ...
La construction de la carte elle-même est assez chouette. Elle donne un effet de profondeur grâce au sol qui devient plus uniforme, ce qui -- avec un rien d'ajustement -- pourrait mener à un jeu Bilou où il est possible de se 'laisser tomber' d'une plate-forme vers celle qui est en-dessous (en fait, pas vraiment en-dessous, mais plutôt "en dessous et un chouya plus proche du joueur. Ce qui est plus logique que les designs "à la Mario" avec des blocs qui flottent dans les airs).

Oh, and before you click on another page, just have a look at those so-amiga-stylish golden coins ... #ffffff:#faf078:#efbb1c:#d07c28:#ab4625 made it pretty well, no. They remind me of "fury of the furries" game ^_^

Et juste avant que vous ne partiez vers une autre page, jettez un oeil à ces pièces d'or si typiquement amiga-esques ... Elles me rappellent 'Fury of the Furries' ^_^

original artwork found on http://www.spriteart.com/indigo/ ...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

holy cow! Thats my site!

I randomly decided to do a google search for "pixel art indigo" and found this. I must say, this is quite alot of information about things I never really thought about. :) I feel flattered you'd go into so much depth into studying my website design. To say the truth, I really got lazy on it. I was planning on making it more detailed with an actual working minigame on top. But time isn't something I have much of.

I also loved "fury of the furries". Great game :)

cheers,
Dan Fessler

PypeBros said...

since then, he moved to http://danfessler.com/portfolio.php :)

@DanFessler said...

hahaha I can't believe you've saved this. I've continued to do game programming to this day, though mostly as a hobby (competitions, jams, etc). More recently I've been shipping a bit of production code at Zynga and Manticore, but it's not my primary responsibility.