The Mana World Forums

It looks as if you recolored the cave entrance separately from the walls (resulting in a strange transition in color along the top stalactites of the cave entrance). I would pixling over the top stalactites using the color from the cave walls or you could try and match (or get very near to) the color using the hue editor in whatever program you use.

Part of being an artist is having your work ripped apart in critique. Learning to identify issues and being expected to fix them on your own is par for the course (often times with little direction on how to do so). Just think if I was Jetryl

Jetryl wrote: Looks like douche. No really - it looks unspeakably awful.

Jetryl wrote: You're scaring me - not because of the green, but because of the blatant disregard for good taste.

Jetryl wrote: I mean - grab a brush and start_Duck_pixeling already. Don't whine about "I'm not talented" or "I'm not as experienced as you." Bullshit - I didn't get good by talent

My criticism of TMW's look (not your set) is very much warranted, having a cohesive look is one of the most important things we can do graphically.


This looks great because its designed to work together




a single object from this alone might look great, but together it makes you want to rip your eyes out from your sockets.

In order to get the game design you are looking for I think you need to have a group of equally skilled/talented artists working together as a team.. every artist on here has a different style and influence, and everybody is creating with their own style.. Since a lot of little details describe a style, it's hard to have handful of artists who have different skill levels and knowledge and different style contribute to something with outcome being perfectly matching..

I guess it could be organized but it's probably hard, maybe there should be a TMW palette introduced since the coloring is main issue (difference in contrast and amount of colors used is a noticeable problem).. There's also dithering and other techniques that some artists use and some don't..

I think a big issue is in quality of the original work, there's a lot of things that are created really well, using plenty of colors and not even looking like Pixel art (some things might not be pixeled I guess) and there's a lot of beginners who are trying to help out around here, who can't really produce nearly as good work..

I'm not sure how this tileset is done Suikoden II tileset, I don't know if it's color reduction / resized digital art or whatever.. but it's perfectly matching, and it actually works with pixeled sprites.. I would suggest using either pixeled tiles or drawn, since both together isn't gonna work.

And I think there should be set rules on how things should be done, just to prevent having a tent that has 300 colors and perfect shading, and having a box or lamp next to it that uses only 2 colors - because the difference will be too obvious..

If an artist is aware that he isn't skilled enough and still wants to contribute I would suggest sketching or more experienced artist should make edits for him and he'll catch up eventually and won't need help

The Mana World's art problems in a nutshell:

• Inexperience artists won't contribute anything, because they get constantly criticized by experienced artists about quality.
• Experienced artists won't contribute anything because TMW accepts any sort of art from inexperienced artists without worrying about quality.

The Mana World's art solution in a nutshell:

• Every artist publicly swears not to have their feelings hurt if someone else edits their art - whether it has just been started, or whether it has already been shipped. After all, everything here is required to GPL (or possibly in future, CC) - nothing is frozen!
• No one is allowed to criticize any piece of art without doing at least one edit to improve it (unless the artist explicitly requested advice on improving it themselves).

Hi,

The Liberated Pixel Cup was a nice approach to bring a art pot with matching assets. They posted a styleguide (http://lpc.opengameart.org/static/lpc-s ... guide.html) and rated the art based on it. The result was a list of art (where the majority matches quite well (in my opinion)): http://opengameart.org/lpc-art-entries. At least I (as non pixel guy) found it a lot easier to modify those art with the help of the style guide and its palette. (Granted: I did not made *that* big modifications). But I think defining a good guideline could help a lot with quality (especially for the not that experienced people). Other option, if somebody wants to do a CR1, would be to use art pools like the LPC pool directly (like we did for our LPC entry: http://www.sourceoftales.org/screenshots.html (We won the cup btw )) and extend it.

(If anyone plans working on something like CR1, let me know. I would help then)

Regards,
Ablu

Interesting perspectives...just a question though...what is the status as regards the volume of players using the game? Are we losing players due to the old graphics, or are people choosing the game maybe because of the old graphics? I don't mean to say that there should never be better graphics, but when I looked at Wesnoth, I didn't understand where the perspective of that game being better than this one. Mind you, I've never played it online, but I don't like the way the players freeze until the talking's done. Surely, you must have meant the art work only...?

I ask about the player volume levels, because if the game's been around for so long, has there been a peak, and when was it? Are we still getting new players and keeping them, or are they coming in and going out? (I know it's a bit hard when you have oldies like me making newbie chars so I can have a few suitcases in stock )

Speiros wrote:Interesting perspectives...just a question though...what is the status as regards the volume of players using the game? Are we losing players due to the old graphics, or are people choosing the game maybe because of the old graphics? I don't mean to say that there should never be better graphics, but when I looked at Wesnoth, I didn't understand where the perspective of that game being better than this one. Mind you, I've never played it online, but I don't like the way the players freeze until the talking's done. Surely, you must have meant the art work only...?

I ask about the player volume levels, because if the game's been around for so long, has there been a peak, and when was it? Are we still getting new players and keeping them, or are they coming in and going out? (I know it's a bit hard when you have oldies like me making newbie chars so I can have a few suitcases in stock )

Wesnoth is a strategy turn based game so game-play isn't something one can compare easily. I mostly cited them because they had a similar start as TMW, But manage to be way more successful long term.

TMW Player numbers have been mostly stagnant in the 6 years I've been around (ranging from 40 - 100 online during peak hours). While game-play is more important than looks, I have little doubt that a cohesive look would help us long term. Many gamers judge a game by its screenshots before downloading it, people simply don't have the time to download every little game they come across (particularly those with little to no publicity). Humans generally make assumptions based on looks, They have an inclination to believe that if it looks like it was slapped together, it must play like it also.

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