Quest Quest: A Graphic Adventure (new download available!)

[threefingeredguy]

Sounds like a lot of fun.

[L4E_WakaMol-King]

Ok, need some more feedback here.

Which method of animation do you like?

(A) This is the traditional Zelda method, where all people sprites are constantly doing a sort of jig in place. It looks a little strange, but it adds life to the setting. There probably won't be a whole lot of animated sprites in my game except for the people. (The jig in place thing looks better with people who are facing forward... but this is the only working map I have right now, so I had to use it.)



(B) Here, the person is standing still. It makes a bit more sense, and would save some space, but it kind of takes some of the life out of the scene. Remember, not all places will have animated sprites, excpet for possibly the people.



What do you guys think?

(By the way, this is a good example of how the game will look. This particular map is the petshop in the pirate world. I'll try to have a playable version of this map that demonstrates movement and text done by this week.)

[kalan_vod]

I like the secondone better, but if you worked on the first ones' movement of the person it would be better.

[DarkerLine]

Maybe the people could do something that makes a little more sense? like, twiddle their thumbs, smoke a pipe, pick their nose, or whatever it is that people standing in one place continuously do.

[axcho]

I agree with DarkerLine. Also, I think it would look better to have the tiles look like they are seen from the same angle. Right now it looks like it is top-down with perspective, except the people are seen from the side. Try drawing all the tiles from the side.

I finished CAT Lab! I put it on United-TI here to get testers, so now you can see for yourself what they are like!

[DarkerLine]

Finally, if you're going to keep a top-down view, I'd suggest you give the walls a pattern rather than leaving them blank.

[L4E_WakaMol-King]

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll keep those in mind. I won't be changing the perspective of the objects, though I might consider changing the perspective of the walls to match them.

As for making the poeple do something else besides walk, I like the idea, but I'm not sure it's possible. The resolution is simply too low for them to do anything with their hands. I might be able to fit a pipe in on one of them, but seeing as the sprites are in black and white, doing the smoke would be rather hard.

[DarkerLine]

They could look around with their head.

[L4E_WakaMol-King]

I played around with a couple of other looks.

This is the same thing, only with some texture on the walls. This is my favorite of the new ones.



And again, with a different texture. I think this one is a bit busy.



This is a different perspective method, following the way Pokemon did it. It just leaves out the side and bottom walls. Keep in mind that the game scrolls with the character, so if there's not a tile, it will show up as black. It looks a little more realiztic this way, but I'm not sure I like it.

[Kozak]

If you want to make a game that feels like Zelda pick one of the first two. Else pick the last one.

[kalan_vod]

I like the last one the best, then the second and last the third .

[axcho]

I like the first one and the third one. The walls in the second one look like a keyboard. You can include walls, but just make them all face the same way. It would be like the third one, except including the bottom and side walls.

The reason the perspective looks bad is that the tiles don't stretch at all except at the corners. The upper-right corner of the room is really weird. It just doesn't look right. Don't tilt the wall tiles sideways. Make them face the same way. Or at least distort the view around the edges so it doesn't look like this:

\ | | | |#|#| /

It should look more like this:

\ \ | | |#|#/ /

What I mean is that the distortion should be spread along the whole screen, not just at the corners. You could write that into your engine, so it automatically stretches the sides of a tile-based display. That would be cool.

If you don't do that, please stick with the third method.

[L4E_WakaMol-King]

How about this?



This way the walls are still in the picture, and everything is a side/top perspective.

[axcho]

Yes! That is exactly what I was thinking of.

[kalan_vod]

This looks really good and you are doing this very fast