As I said last week, here we go! Let’s show off the talents of everyone on Team Jelly Paladin in one post. :D Going in chronological order of when they joined the party, first up is something new from Flora. It’s not actually going to be in the game (probably), but it’s my profile picture for the upcoming Team page!

Yes, as it turns out, the clothes I wear in my own life are in fact as colorful as the crazy rainbow character designs I’ve pushed Flora toward. :P That Team page will be coming soon, but for now let’s move on to Becca!

Here’s my current work in progress of the continent of Miharu! It’s looking loads better than a couple weeks back, naturally, but I’m still shuffling things around and considering what I can do with layouts.

Oh, by the way, the water tiles are animated too. =)

Now I can actually screencap this stuff courtesy of 1) ScreenToGif and 2) an update to Tiled. Actually, that update happened almost a year ago, but I didn’t realize that Tiled—at least for now—doesn’t notify when updates are available. Whatever the case, it’s a great program and I’ll probably have to add a Tools page too so I can give credit to all the excellent software I’ve been using.

Third up is the Tango sprite sheet I mentioned last week, coming from Alex:

I spent a lot of time getting the continent ready as well as some other things yet to mention this post, so showing off his walking animation will have to wait for next week. Besides, who cares about a male protagonist in this female-heavy universe anyway? :P
(I’m kidding. Tango actually has an extremely meaningful role! It’s not a coincidence that he’s in the top row of my early character profiles group shot.)

Last up is Liz! But how can I do this when her newest art is technically a spoiler? Ah, I know. We’ll do it Pokémon style!

Who’s that Pokémon?

I’ll give an additional hint with washed-out colors:

Wish I could show this mysterious creature off in its full-color glory since it turned out beautifully, but I just can’t give away spoilers! Look forward to another amazing creature that I can actually show coming soon, though. :D

That’s it for this week, shining a little spotlight on everyone. I don’t anticipate having much if anything to show off next week since family events are going to occupy the upcoming Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday, but you never know what might be in store.

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.