Do the slime shuffle! These are new team member Liz Pulanco’s slimes shown at triple size and normal size. =) From left to right, top to bottom, they’re a Slimary, Slimectric, Slimercury, Slimerime, and Slimelty. These are some of the smallest creatures in the game, so we’ll get to see her work for Dreamblazers for bigger and more detailed sprites later on, but these are still adorable! And you can check out her overall talent on her website here.

Actually, it’s a little tough for me to believe that I’ve had these sprites since last Tuesday… time has been passing very quickly both because of my day job and some exciting things that are coming up in future posts but not quite ready for today’s post. I could put up the most up-to-date Miharu continent today along with the character sprite sheet for Tango that was finished last Thursday, but with the way things are going I’m hoping everything lines up so that next week or the week after I can do a nice mega-post spotlighting the talents of every team member so far with artwork both new and old. That’s something I really want to do in one big swoop; it’s been a while since a mega-post and I’ve mostly been posting more incremental updates recently, including today’s.

Enough about that and more about slimes, though! With a name like jellypaladin.com, you know I love these little blobs. :P Of course, our mascot and cover (kind-of-a-)girl Jelly was the model for the Slimary:

Even when I conceived a very, very basic version of the game back in 1999-2001, I always had the notion of using slimes as a form of tutorial (and I don’t mean the kind that flashes twenty text boxes at you; those didn’t exist back then).

The basic Slimary in Dreamblazers, as relatively helpless as it is, has one significant thing in its favor: the damage it takes from physical attacks is reduced by 95%! That teaches players very early that they can’t power through the game on physical attacks alone, then the elemental slimes (who also have that physical damage reduction) come in to teach about different types of magic!

An unfortunate fact is that many RPG series have virtually no gameplay depth and will allow just mashing “Attack” or “Fight” or hitting your strongest move turn after turn. That’s not something I can accept! You can expect more enemies than not to come up with at least one surprise, whether it’s a simple quirk of their stats like the slimes or a whole lot of AI options. (And the scary part is that I’ve given the Sylph Mage more options than she had back then due to new features added to ORK—but I’m not about to spoil everything!)

Earlier today Becca sent me some new overworld tiles, so I’ll do a take two on putting up a bonus post later this week with some updated images. =) Until then, though, I realized over this past week that even though I can’t show things like dungeon layouts for reasons of spoilers, I can show off Becca’s pixel art in another way…

Battlefield screens!

Look, look, it’s some of Becca’s artistry. :D I could put it to much better use than I have so far, believe me, but these are works in progress after all. Actually, in a way I’m worried what Becca might think when she sees this—I bet there are at least a dozen neat little visual tricks I could do with her pixel art that I haven’t figured out. Nonetheless, even for what I have so far they’re some beautiful environments, right? ♥

A lot of the vertical space at the bottom will also be eaten up by menus when I have real art for that instead of ugly placeholders meant for testing (not shown here :P), so the layouts are 100% subject to change. Also, each of these screenshots has a lot of empty space toward the left side since that’s where the enemies are going to be and I don’t know how much space they’ll take up.

Speaking of that…

…compared to this Final Fantasy VI image, you might notice that there’s a lot more visible horizontal space. Perhaps too much? Yes, I’d say so! To be honest, I’m not totally decided on what resolution or even aspect ratio Dreamblazers will be in, so I just designed a much larger space than needed. If I aim for a more SNES-like style, it could look like this:

A GBA-like style would look like this:

And a widescreen resolution would look like this:

But what if I end up going for the full 1920×1080? I could take that widescreen shot and crank it up to 400% size:

Or I could go back and use a larger battlefield so that I only have to turn the pixels up to 300%:

I don’t know what I’ll end up with, but we’re one step closer to finding out if the prospective monster artist lives up to her samples! Being able to put in real non-placeholder creatures will help give me a better sense of space.

Pixel Art Characters

Back in September 2012 the indie team behind Two Brothers mentioned to me that their characters’ sprites were designed before—well, before what would normally be called concept art, but since it came second in this case, I’ll just call it their traditional art. The biggest reason to go that route is to lend a certain feel to the visual aspect of a game.

I do everything for the sake of gameplay, though, so I started from the standpoint that most characters should have 6-8 outfit slots filled up at first and characters with 9-10 pieces of clothing or 2-5 pieces of clothing would stand out and feel different! Jelia is an example of a character who I had intended to fill every outfit slot except her legs (waist and legs are different slots) because part of her initial design was that she couldn’t change clothes.

(Now that I think of it, I’ll have to go into more detail about this topic later this month in a Dreamblazers Cutting Room Floor post on the Musings side of the site. Just wait until you hear my (now-canned) radical idea to make an all-gameplay-no-story mode and an all-story-no-gameplay mode! (Spoiler alert: it’s super pretentious indie meta nonsense!))

So when you see a character with a visually busy and complex outfit design like Jig (left side)…

…or her brother Tango…

…it’s usually because I had very specific ideas for the gameplay functionality of their clothing. Characters are even balanced partly by their clothes. For example, the Characters page shows over five times as many clothes that boost Magic Power as clothes that boost Power.

An unintended consequence, though, is that I’ve made it more difficult than it should be to convert certain character designs into their 16-bit forms. Jelia turned out well because of Alex’s skill, but nothing guarantees that it’s going to keep up considering some of the designs yet to be pixelized. So that’s something I’m thinking about at this point in time.

Why am I thinking of this? Well, because of my second topic for today…

Pixel Art Monsters

Got a promising application from someone wanting to draw the monsters and other enemies of Dreamblazers! :D Actually, I got this application nearly a month ago and it nearly got lost by not forwarding to my email… so my own blunder nearly blew this opportunity, but now things are looking up. I won’t say anything more until it’s officially official (!), but—well, I’ll just say I’m really hoping on this one. =) And you’ll know the details when I have them!

Pixel Art Cohesion

With a third pixel artist potentially on the way—and knowing that my goal for the monsters is to approximate a Pokémon style—I started thinking about the cohesion of all the pixel art. Right now Becca tends to draw fairly realistic environments (to the extent pixel art can be realistic) while Alex is faithfully recreating Flora’s artwork and color choices in pixel form.

I’m usually constantly pushing toward brighter and brighter colors and so far I’ve been fortunate that nothing seems to blatantly clash, but I began to wonder if that can continue. Will I eventually break everything with the monsters? What about the special effects (like magic)? Will the menus do it?

And then I realized something just this past week. Look at this Final Fantasy VI image:

I’ve played thousands of games and I’d have to think about it, but my gut feeling is that Final Fantasy VI is probably still in my top ten of all-time. It’s a masterpiece and always will be in my book.

That said, the more I look at this picture, the more it seems like a visual mess despite each individual element looking very nice. The background clouds, lake, and trees are hyper-detailed to the extent that it wouldn’t surprise me if I found out they took a photograph by a real lake and did their best to trace it with pixels.

The heroes are a colorful animeriffic bunch with the green-haired Terra, Edgar’s pastel blue and green outfit, and Mog the cute fantasy creature, but the enemies use earth tones and darker shades for a more gritty feel. If that wasn’t clashy enough, the menus are a basic blue gradient.

And the perspective is extremely skewed in a way that I can best illustrate visually:

The background is basically a flat-angle shot from the side of that lake, but the rest of the ground is a tilted aerial perspective looking down and forward. Either of those on its own is fine, but put them together and it’s a disjointed effect of two cameras being mashed together.

But—and here’s the key thing—I never noticed any of this until now. I didn’t notice, I didn’t mind, and although I do notice now I still don’t mind. So I’m going to plow forward without concern! Apparently I’d have to mess up super badly for any lack of cohesion to be as big a deal as I’ve made it out to be in my mind and in my worries.

Game development is a pretty fascinating thing, huh?