HM-style pixel art Options

[Nurse Fin]

Well, I'm no expert spriter or anything, but it's kind of fun (yet tedious... go figure). I know a lot of people have attempted to make their own HM games with little luck. I'm only really able to program stuff like a cooking system, advanced social system, calendar, mining system... but the actual farming has me stuck. Oh well. :P At least I can make graphics, too. If I ever get around to making a full working test bed I might want to make a fan game with original characters (not ToT/AP chars, I just used them for testing purposes) and stuff like that. :D Maybe... someday.

(IMG:http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v226/rinfin/dcee1391.png)
(IMG:http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v226/rinfin/1bf96d52.gif)

I've only made a few floor and wall tiles so far, no furniture or anything, and I've only finished a standard female walking template. But I made all this in about 6 hours, which isn't too bad :D

[Nurse Fin]

Thank you. I'm still working on my spriting abilities, and it's becoming a little more fun... kind of (IMG:style_emoticons/default/lalaexdee.gif) Fun but frustrating and tedious at the same time.

I've finished the roster of characters, and it comes to about 35 townspeople total (excluding the protagonist's child/ren, and including the rival children). Going by the dialogue templates I'm working on, each character has ~200-300 lines of dialogue (marriage candidates obviously have more), give or take, not including events and heart events. ....oh man. That's a lot of writing. >.< But if that's what it takes for less robotic characters, then I guess it may pay off. And some characters are easy to build and practically write themselves for me. As for the others... does anyone really like/have a talent for writing dialogue? Want to get into a shell of a character and flesh them out? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/lalaexdee.gif)

Anyway, I put together a full calendar with birthdays and festivals set up, and I just finished figuring out what fish can be caught where/what seasons. Trying to bring back some festivals that integrate mini-games, like the Egg Hunt (because it's cool yo), quizzes, and a few ideas I came up with on my own that will *hopefully* work.

So far the game data size is around 2MB, though I think the final projected size will be around 25-30 MB because it's a looooot of data, and even though I'm keeping the walking graphics under 15KB and the individual portraits under 100KB, I bet they will add up fast along with everything else.

It'll be even bigger if I switch out/convert my MIDI files to ogg/mp3. Which I'm still debating, since it's hard enough just to pick out songs that fit the seasons, and even harder to have to decide which ones are the least annoying. I really like some of the mp3s at Sam-Free (especially k-04, I WANT that as the winter theme), but the midis just don't sound very good in comparison. They are too quiet to use along with music from other sites, the octaves are different, and they don't have the nice ambient effect (and for some reason I have to rewrite them just to get them to play on my computer @_@). Darn. The other site I'm looking at is Hannya's, which has some very nice songs (like the perfect mine themes) I wouldn't have to convert, but I can't find a replacement winter theme that sounds anywhere near as good as Sam-Free's. Hrm.... would it be wiser to edit midis, or just convert midis to oggs? (I have a ton of soundfonts) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/lalatounge.gif)