HM-style pixel art Options

[ZBoy]

She said that the face in the bottom right corner shows the status of your character. So if the face in the bottom right corner is frowning, that means that your character is tired and almost out of stamina. Hope this helps. :)

[Nurse Fin]

It's also a placeholder image, since I haven't finished designing the main characters yet. I won't be updating this topic really until I get home, which won't be for a few days D:

[Nurse Fin]

Oops, double post... there hasn't been much activity in here.

Anyway, I'm home now, and work will start to return to its normal pace... still making tons of tweaks to the core database (I had some more ideas pop into my head while I was away). So now I have to go and completely rewrite the recipe lists again, hurray :P My friend and I were talking about ideas as far as subplot/storyline kinds of things, and we got on to the subject of Katamari Damacy and now we kind of want to do something with stars and constellations, but more than just the crappy old collection quests. That will probably take a lot of planning before we come up with anything workable (and will prolly need some help...).

One more character to introduce; Sylvie. Kind of lame that I had to change her color scheme last minute, but it seems like Marvelous just HAD to release a character for the new HM game that looked waaaaay too much like mine, leaving me no choice. Darn, because I agonized over her character design the most so far... right when I thought I had everything good to go (IMG:style_emoticons/default/lalaexdee.gif) ;

(IMG:http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v226/rinfin/sylvie.jpg)

She kind of looks like Saint-Juste from Brother Dear Brother now, even moreso in her fall/winter design.

I have 3 more characters' designs finalized (as in drawn out on paper) now, but it's such a big hassle to make the big fancy promotional artwork for them, I may skip ahead and start working on their in-game graphics first.


I think I'm finally starting to reach a conclusion for the main characters' base design. Maybe. Perhaps. I'm probably going to end up cheating and using my Fashion Mode game for inspiration.

[Harvest Sprite]

ZOMG! I luvs it. D:

She gots big hips. ;]

[Darth-Paper-Boy]

I think for a project like this you double posting is probably completely fine. And the gap was large enough and content rich enough to justify it anyway.

Speaking of content; Neat-o.

[Lindstrom]

I also noticed the hips. Do you draw those characters yourself, or is it like some kind of template thing?

Something that I always thought about when it came to collecting items, unless the items are unique; the concept of the secret seashells in Link's Awakening is probably the best designed item collection feature ever. Not sure if you're familiar with it, but the idea is that there are more than enough of whatever you're looking for, but they only appear in specific locations and can only be found once. So basically, of the 30 or so in the game, you only need 20, some being much harder to find than others, so a crafty player might do some exploring and find enough sooner than a more unaware player. Does that make sense? I hope it helps in some way.

[ZBoy]

So glad to see your back! Your art skills are amazing, and I can't wait to see more. :D

[Nurse Fin]

I don't really work from any particular template, but I do use the official artworks and occasionally a 3d model mesh as basic reference, and I snatch all the palettes from the official artwork so that it blends in well enough (I do often tweak some of the colors once I'm done though; like Kaede's hair was originally Luke Blue, and Sylvie's hair was Selena Red. :P)

I make rough sketches of everything on notebook paper before I make the colored artworks, though. I would upload some, but they really do look pretty crappy, and that would cut out some element of surprise wouldn't it :P

(IMG:http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v226/rinfin/42d4e0d0.png)
:3

[Sanoshi]

Whoa! You do amazing sprite work, that's for sure! I do hope you get a good system working out for your HM game. If it goes far, you should look into making in project and recruit more people help you out! :] I also love your deviantart work, your style goes so well with the Harvest Moon theme!

[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)

[Lindstrom]

Writing dialogue for random townspeople is easy and fun for me, it really comes down to understanding the character, and I'm guessing you're having a hard time connecting to like, the old shopkeep or whatever random villagers you have. If you want, just send me whatever details you have or think are important regarding those characters and I can whip up some dialogue in no time.

Which songs from the second site are the good ones? I've seen some pretty high quality MIDIs, but I listened to a couple from that site and I wasn't impressed. With a program like Audacity, you should be able to mess around with volume levels and maybe background effects if you want to bring other (ogg) songs to the mood of the first sites' stuff. Or maybe not, I'm not sure what kind of stuff you're working with. Either way, I personally think sound quality is pretty big compared to exactly how good a composition the song is. Assuming it still fits, I'd rather a high quality well-composed piece over a low quality amazingly-composed piece.

[Nurse Fin]

Yeah, some of the songs on the midi site are more mediocre (or just not suitable for a Harvest Moon-type game), but there was one song they had in the dungeon section that relied on heavy percussion and didn't sound particularly spooky or perilous, it was upbeat and it was actually made to sound like a MINE song... something which I couldn't find anywhere else (and I stalk a lot of sites). It was nm65, but unfortunately the site doesn't allow any kind of direct linking outside of the index. I was playing around with soundfonts last night (I use Fruityloops studio for that, haha) and had developed a pretty good sound for it, except that the strings sounded *really* off-pitch, so I'll have to try and fix that somehow.

Converting a song to ogg should compress the filesize somewhat (and it supports loops), so I'll try it out and see how much it impacts the overall size of the game. The game soundtrack itself probably won't be all that extensive either, maybe ~20 songs total. But even at 2MB per song, that would add on 40MB just with audio. >_>



As far as character dialogue, I will get back to you on that, as soon as I finish writing the dialogue templates and figuring out what's necessary for which characters (not every villager is going to join in on every competition, and so on). Since I want every character to be worth befriending, some of the characters I don't connect with immediately would seem bland if I tried to write them (I run out of ideas too). Others, like the barkeep, are just begging for lines like, "SEE THIS SCAR, M'BOY? I got this wrestling sharks in the ocean." :P

[Lindstrom]

Hmm that really is a good mine song. The only things that you would really need to improve are the strings and whatever instrument is supposed to be playing the melody.

Those are definitely the best characters, haha. Mimi had me writing for her comics and I had a lot of fun expanding on her original concepts for characters. When I did theater, if I wasn't a major role I was often playing about 5 or 6 parts ranging from like, grumpy old man to the street smart kid to the eccentric rich guy. Anyway designing characters is easy for me.

[Harvest Sprite]

I'd also be willing to help with character dialogue.

For the season background music, I recommend classical music midis. For winter, possibly vivaldi's four seasons winter second movement? Its in a major key so its not the typical sad winter in HM, its more of a happy pretty one. :D

[ZBoy]

If you need help, I can always post dialouge ideas in this forum. I love helpin out! ;D

[Nurse Fin]

Yay! Well I'll probably start asking for help soon. Later I'll put up a list of characters that I think I need help with, with their name and a basic description of what they do. I guess it'll be done on a first come, first serve kind of basis (I'll PM you with extra details on the character once you let me know, in here, that you want to work on them), but if you later decide you don't want to/can't work with that character that's fine. Just trying to keep things mostly spoiler-free.

Anyway, small graphical update:

(IMG:http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v226/rinfin/0bb093be.png)

Unless of course I change my mind and decide to use the full portraits, in which case this style would be scrapped. But I kind of like it, it reminds me of HM64 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/lalasmile.gif) ...and it saves space and time. I'm kind of torn, because full portraits *look* really awesome, but end up being impractical in a game with so much dialogue.

[Darth-Paper-Boy]

HM64's awesome, so I don't think it'll be much issue if you take the easy route. Though if you want to use full portraits, maybe you could use them for special events or something.

[ZBoy]

The text box looks really good. I'd prefer that style over a full body shot. Also, I would love to help with dialouge with the characters if you wanted ideas. I could also help give ideas for festivals, random events, special events, or whatever else you need! Like I said I love making ideas for games and stuff, I just cant ever figure out the programing to do so! :P

[Alhanalem]

WOW!
THEY'RE AMAZING!
I CAN SEE FUTURE IN THIS PROJECT!

Oh, and it's ok, leave it like that!
The pictures are just like the Wind Bazaar! ones!
But I think it would be better if the textbox looked like the box around the character...

[Nurse Fin]

Yay, another graphical update. I'm back to working on the sprites now, hopefully so I can start making maps soon.

(IMG:http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v226/rinfin/d61a09db.png)

Here are some happy trees. I've never made a tree before so I like how this turned out. Aside from this tree, there will also be an evergreen tree that doesn't change colors with the seasons.