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Re: A Heart Gold Ruby Necklace

Posted: 29 Jul 2008, 03:48
by BadMrBox
Totally agreed with Rotonen here.

Re: A Heart Gold Ruby Necklace

Posted: 31 Jul 2008, 22:26
by Jetryl
The other huge issue is distribution of work. I submit that a game like this needs to achieve a certain threshold of items, or it feels unfinished. It needs something in the neighborhood of 7-14 or so items in each category, each of them distinct.

If you make more categories to fill, it takes more work to fill them. The quality of work also decreases considerably, since people have less time to revisit and polish (e.g. rework) things. My development philosophy is to have a small set of categories of art to fill, and then only consider adding more categories when that small set is filled. Only by filling up the small set of categories, can you tell that your team has enough drive to possibly take on another. If they don't have enough drive, you're still then in a good position, because they've still gotten your small set mostly done, which (IMO) is a lot nicer than having a ton of categories which have only a few items in them.
Rotonen wrote:Actually in this case the author of the piece in question is telling it is pointless and was meant as an inventory icon. And no, Dimond is not the author, she merely provided the concept and then retrofitted the piece on top of the playerset.
Yep.
Rotonen wrote:We don't want a lot of one pixel ornaments on the player. Sure, per se, you can make it look good in theory, but with a detailed armor, a fancy helmet, leg armor, boots, weaponry/shields wouldn't it be a bit overkill to throw in there a neck slot? A slot for a cloak/cape would go, but not jewellery.
The other reason I suggest unifying clothing parts, is that clothing interacts with and connects to itself. It folds and pulls on itself. Different layers of shirt and pant/skirt are interleaved together, and tucked in in interchanging order, or folded over each other. Belts and straps are tied into things. Pieces of clothing are sometimes tied together. One of the things that makes the sprites in the original secret of mana series (especially the later ones like SD3) look so good, is that they depict this fact.

If you don't do that ... ouch. You're tossing out practically *the* most powerful tool for making clothing sprites look decent.
Rotonen wrote:In most recent and succesful MMORPGs you cannot see everything a character wears by just looking at it, even in the 3D ones. You see the most dominant pieces of equipment and that's it. This is a deliberate design choice: you don't want to clutter the characters with detail. This is especially true in our case when we have a far more limited space to work with.
And the thing to note here is that this decision has also been affirmed by a ton of really, really good developers out there. It's more of a 'practicality' limitation than anything technical - it's similar to the reason, for example, that RPGs represent "large cities" by a group of houses that you can count on your hand. It's similar to the reason why, for example, Chrono Trigger used the exact same inventory icons for all items. With only so many component parts that can be recombined in different ways, you have only a small sweet spot you can fill before everything starts becoming redundant.

It's possible to make individual bits of inventory visible on player graphics this size, but it's almost guaranteed to be ... useless. They have to be so small, in order to not take up too much space (everything has to have enough room), that they're nearly invisible. Not to mention that at that size, they would be very difficult to distinguish - in fact about the only way you'd be able to tell them apart would be by color, and as you get anything over 5-7 items for any given slot, you're suddenly having "namespace collisions" for visual identification. Gee, is that player wearing the "orange earrings of fire", or the "scarlet earrings of regeneration?" Can't tell - definitely not when the player is running around.

This smacks to me as a somewhat "rebellious" design decision (against the status quo), but in light of the nature of the issue itself, it begins to look juvenile, rather than cunning. I'm totally sympathetic to implementing things that "the man" (e.g. commercial game studios) chose not to implement for marketing/business reasons. That's totally cool. But they didn't "not do this" for those reasons - they pretty much unanimously "don't do this" because it's impossible. You can try all you want, but you're pretty much doomed to a crappy result. Do try and defy what's fashionable in commercial games, but don't try and defy reality itself. You won't win, and it won't be pretty. Real life is not Gurren Lagaan*.


* save that drive and spirit for things that are really hard, but actually achievable. It does actually work there. You can kiss the sky.

Re: A Heart Gold Ruby Necklace

Posted: 31 Jul 2008, 22:35
by Rotonen
Jetryl wrote:The other reason I suggest unifying clothing parts, is that clothing interacts with and connects to itself. It folds and pulls on itself. Different layers of shirt and pant/skirt are interleaved together, and tucked in in interchanging order, or folded over each other. Belts and straps are tied into things. Pieces of clothing are sometimes tied together. One of the things that makes the sprites in the original secret of mana series (especially the later ones like SD3) look so good, is that they depict this fact.

If you don't do that ... ouch. You're tossing out practically *the* most powerful tool for making clothing sprites look decent.
We won't even get to that issue before we actually finish and most importantly lock down the playerset. After that we can start the actual work on item categories.

Yes, I'm going to pretty much only rant about the playerset until I can actually push us over the finish line.

Re: A Heart Gold Ruby Necklace

Posted: 21 Mar 2010, 20:03
by meway
Jetryl wrote:
Dimond wrote:Here is your version of my necklace.
I think I should of made the heart smaller... :(
amulet-heart.png
Any amulet is too small to be shown on the playerset. Amulets, just like jewelry in Seiken Densetsu 3, should only appear in the inventory UI.

So don't even try - there aren't enough pixels to draw that, no matter how good the artist is. I wasn't assuming you were - certainly not after seeing you draw the back of the chain.
I don't completely agree. I had no problems drawing a neckless on Dark_lord's avatar.

Re: A Heart Gold Ruby Necklace

Posted: 21 Mar 2010, 22:37
by Crush
This thread is from 2008. Please don't negro such old threads. It is very confusing.