Work continues on katsu's journey. It's amazing how much a year an a half of development will give you a good dose of realistic expectations for your games feature set. Much like Hanford and Kai keep preaching, we've now got to that point where we no longer "think about what would be totally awesome to have" and instead focus on "what we absolutely must have"

So with this guiding light we press onward. We now have the initial prototypes of the first 4 levels. The game is running stable for the first time in a long time. One crashing bug, but it's a known issue, I just haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet.

We licensed fmod, I’ve never used it before, but I’m sure it's pretty easy to use. Someone who saw our game and liked it volunteered his composing skills and is making us a track which he promises will be done this week sometime.

The engine has Lua integrated as a scripting system and it uses allegro for rendering. I was checking the allegro site recently and I saw that Mac OS is now a supported platform. Since both fmod and lua are cross platform, there's a good possibility there will be a Mac port of Katsu's Journey. :)

anyway.. here's 3 new screenshots we posted on our site. There's still no interface art yet, that will come when i implement the item system. Which is next on the list of things to do :)


http://www.rainfallstudios.com/image/screen4.png
http://www.rainfallstudios.com/image/screen5.png
http://www.rainfallstudios.com/image/screen6.png

Looking good! :)

-David

Originally posted by DavidRM
Looking good! :)

-David

I concur :D

Lookin' gooood. I like the background tiles a lot. Keep us posted on its progress.

Rergards,

Nick

Originally posted by Dan MacDonald
Much like Hanford and Kai keep preaching, we've now got to that point where we no longer "think about what would be totally awesome to have" and instead focus on "what we absolutely must have"

That just made my day! It's hard to take my own advice, let alone get someone to take it!! : :p

I've been struggling this week through levels for my latest game, it's been a real pain. I keep wanting to work on other things (website, etc) but I know this is what I need to be doing now.

The game is looking great man! It has come a long way. Good to see you're keeping up with posting new information about it on your site.

~Hanford

Play the game Seiken Densetsu 3 for SNES, or look around for screenshots of it for inspiration. They achieve way more detail and much nicer shading in less than half your resolution and only 4 colors per 8x8 tile :)
I'm not trying to put your game down, of course these guys (Squaresoft) are well paid and experienced professionals...

[EDIT] sorry this was maybe a little harsh, see my post below

... sure *sounds* like you're trying. Those graphics may not be the Platonic Ideal of Art, but they're better than *most* of the graphics that I've seen come off this board.

If you knew the fellow at all, or visited the pixel forums yourself, you could judge that I'm fairly sure he is aware of Secret of Mana. Yes, it is regularly discussed as one of the greats of pixelwork. In much more detail and useful manner than your little "sd3 is way better dude" comment.

Now, *I* don't mean to be mean, but can we stick to criticism that's actually *useful*? Do you, for instance, think the saturation is too uniform? Or that the pink lumpy trees are rather odd-looking? Anything particular that you could suggest a change to? We're all grateful for helpful feedback and suggestions, but vague "x game is better" statements don't help anybody.

I do not know Dan personally and don't have anything vested in the success of his game, but it seems awfully snarky to me for a guy with three posts to waltz in and say "your graphics are l@me but of course you're not a PROFESSIONAL..." That's not a helpful attitude to bring to this board. Sorry if I'm out of line here, but this sort of thing bothers me.

OK, sorry, the post may have been a little harsh and short :)

here's what I don't like:
* Uniformity : it's painfully visible how the paths and grass are just one tile (with some borders) repeating endlessly..
* Character faces : i dunno, those T eyes look very strange to me, and the characters don't seem to have much.. "character"
* Overuse of primary colors like 100% red green and blue
* Sharp black lines in the pavement and some other tiles like the roofs don't look too good..
* The gateway looks like it was made in paint :)

this is what I can come up with atm :) I'm not saying I could do it much better myself though..

You're making fantastic progress since the last art you showed us. I've got a few practical suggestions:

1. Desaturate the tiles a bit; The colors are a little bit too strong for my eyes. The temple gate red is way too pure. In the real world, no color is ever pure :)

2. Never EVER use black to outline details in the tiles. Use darker versions of the outlined area colors, but not too much darker than the colors being outlined.

3. Overall palette could use some massaging; mix in a little cool bluish grey to the darker parts of the color ramps, and add a little warm pale yellow to the upper ends. This will help considerably in giving your palette a 'sunny day' feel that's missing from it now. You've already got this happening on the dirt paths

My 2c, worth what you paid for it... ;)

Looks great, Dan. My only suggestion would be to give the character sprites some drop shadows, so it doesn't look like they're floating in the air above the terrain. For instance, we did this with the Dweep sprite here, and it helps to visually attach him to the ground:
http://www.dexterity.com/dweep/images/dweep-screen-2.jpg

Originally posted by Dexterity
Looks great, Dan. My only suggestion would be to give the character sprites some drop shadows, so it doesn't look like they're floating in the air above the terrain. For instance, we did this with the Dweep sprite here, and it helps to visually attach him to the ground:
http://www.dexterity.com/dweep/images/dweep-screen-2.jpg

I agree with that , the drop shadow is needed. The graphics look very great. Keep on the good work !

definitely looks great and interesting. can't wait to try the demo.

Great job!

Hehe.. I like the gfx too. They're not "state of the art", but quite good and pleasant IMO.

However like it's already been said, I think some colours are too saturated (the green grass, the blue tiles..), and there is not enough relief. For example the trees are flat, also the ground should be darker where it goes into water to indicate that it is lower.. I think (I'm not a graphician ! And these gfx are much better than what I can draw :-) ).

Edit: Oh, I forgot.. the black outlines around stones on the ground or in the walls are a bit hard on the eye.

There is a nice gfx tutorial there: http://pixeltutorial.cjb.net/ . It talks about that kind of gfx. Might be usefull ?

Wow, I go away for a few hours and look what happens. I'll see If I can address the comments.

@Hanford
At the time you were talking about this on the board I thought you were a little off base. Maybe a little too focused on making money and less on "making game". I now realize you were just tring to finish the darn thing. If this were the retail industry, you are judged by what you put in the box, and in that case you would want everything to be perfect. Especially since there's such a short shelf life. But as indies we have the luxury of getting everything up and running, polishing it within reason and then including our customers as we refine the product in the months following its release. Judging by others experience (Kai's Message board) this has been quite popular with the customers.

@Henrik
Don’t worry, I wasn't really offended. I've actually done very little pixelart for this project. One of the trees, (and yeah, that intestinal tree is an edit of mine), and the roofs on the walls and buildings. With the exception of the character sprites, the vast majority of the art has been done by our designer. Who is really more of a programmer at heart then an artist. Since I do all the coding I just don’t have the time to do the art as well. We've approached digipen (a local game development school) about providing us with one of their game art students and we've have some interesting opportunities presented to us. We really need someone who can step in and tie all the art together for a unified look and feel.

Currently the palette is generated by cutting and pasting all the art into an image in photoshop and then saving it with a 256 color palette :)


@papillon
Hey thanks for sticking up for me. I don’t really know you but I do enjoy looking at your art on pixelation. Yep your right, I’m pretty familiar with the secret of manna art. I even wrote a tutorial on how to make good looking wood using SoM's palette :)
Wood tutorial (http://www.indie-rpg.net/pixel-zone/shtml/tutmini-wood.shtml)

@Ratboy
We were shooting for a brightly colored, cartoon look for our game to appeal to a wide audience. One of the things we did (which is probably not so good) is make the background and characters equally saturated. It does make for some bright graphics, but it also makes it easy to loose the characters against the background. Hence the black outlines. We really don’t have any consistency to how our art is done, which is again why we are looking for an artist who can edit the stuff we have and tie it all together. We just weren’t going to let not having an artist stop us from making the game.

@Dexterity
Yes, that little box at the ninja's feet will be replace with a similarly sized drop shadow. We recently added shadows to the background and it really helped separate the trees and bushes/walls from the background. Well definitely have that for the characters as well.

@johnson
Thanks Man!

@jih
Give us a month or two; we'll post it here first :)

Dan, Looking great!! I think the design is great... it has a consistant style to it and an appealing one at that. Keep up the good work, and post a demo when you're ready so we all get a chance to play :)

I realize I'm not adding anything worthwhile to the discussion, but I'm digging the screenshots. I see a lot of improvements, looks nice.

Encouraging Comments are Always appreciated ;)

I go away for a weekend and all the others get to say the nice things .. :)

Defintly a big up since the last screenshots. I am starting to get intrigued by your gameplay, the levels seem quite spacious and I can imagine it will do wonders for your explorative gameplay. Just a reminder about the non-8bit problem, so that I will be able to play the demo when it comes out.

And talking about Hanford, it was really he who first mentioned the twofold list (Must have, Nice to have). I just clinged to it desperately when trying to get Space Station Manager initially released, that is why it stuck.