Game & Map Screenshots 6

[Demiqas]

Hey, could anybody tell me how my new map is? I've just recently started mapping more seriously, and I'd like to know what I could improve on.

Spoiler

Note: In game, it's supposed to be night in this map.

 

[Raider]

For me it looks good

Maybe you could overlap the tress on the right and make it a bit more "dense" there, but that may be personal taste.

So, the mapping is good, but it doesn't really seem like its night. Maybe you should use a screen tint in addition to the lights of the lanterns. Now it looks like it's day, but with shining lanterns.

And of course, that house needs an entrance

 

[KanaX]

Try giving the house a small shadow!

Making the grass a little more diverse in colors would be nice too!

 

[Demiqas]

For me it looks good

Maybe you could overlap the tress on the right and make it a bit more "dense" there, but that may be personal taste.

So, the mapping is good, but it doesn't really seem like its night. Maybe you should use a screen tint in addition to the lights of the lanterns. Now it looks like it's day, but with shining lanterns.

And of course, that house needs an entrance

I was thinking about making it more dense. About the night thingy, I didn't take this screenshot in-game, but I use a screen color tint through eventing so it's only visible ingame

Try giving the house a small shadow!

Making the grass a little more diverse in colors would be nice too!

thank you for the tips

 

[Kes]

As the house has 2 lit lamps right next to it, no, I wouldn't give it a shadow.  They are throwing light precisely on to the area that in RM is normally the shadow side.  On the other hand, if you wanted to do some custom shadows which take into account the actual light sources, that would be a different thing.

EDIT

I've identified what it is that's bothering me.  You have a path which comes in through a nice gate and goes straight up to... a blank wall?

That blank wall is also the floor where the family will live a lot of the time, but that part has no windows, which I think is unlikely, especially as the side part of the house does have them.  Still on that bit of the house, the blue lamp over where the door would be is fine, but I think the other lamp looks very odd there.  Not only would you not need 2 external lamps so close to one another, but also you wouldn't hang one like that under the eaves.

Who leaves a barrel of potatoes in the middle of the lawn?  (Over on the right hand side.)  There's also a box of potatoes and a barrel of apples or maybe tomatoes scattered around there.  This is night.  It is unlikely that people would leave substantial amounts of food strewn around the place for all the animals, birds, whatever to come and get it during the night.  That barrel of nuts would attract every squirrel in the land.  Even if left outside (I assume they've been delivered by that cart) I think they would be more neatly together.

Moving now outside the fence, you have an awful lot of lamp posts there, including a couple almost obscured by trees.  I can see 6 altogether in a tiny space.  Is that number likely?

 

[GrimTuesday]

How about this?

 

[Demiqas]

As the house has 2 lit lamps right next to it, no, I wouldn't give it a shadow.  They are throwing light precisely on to the area that in RM is normally the shadow side.  On the other hand, if you wanted to do some custom shadows which take into account the actual light sources, that would be a different thing.

EDIT

I've identified what it is that's bothering me.  You have a path which comes in through a nice gate and goes straight up to... a blank wall?

That blank wall is also the floor where the family will live a lot of the time, but that part has no windows, which I think is unlikely, especially as the side part of the house does have them.  Still on that bit of the house, the blue lamp over where the door would be is fine, but I think the other lamp looks very odd there.  Not only would you not need 2 external lamps so close to one another, but also you wouldn't hang one like that under the eaves.

Who leaves a barrel of potatoes in the middle of the lawn?  (Over on the right hand side.)  There's also a box of potatoes and a barrel of apples or maybe tomatoes scattered around there.  This is night.  It is unlikely that people would leave substantial amounts of food strewn around the place for all the animals, birds, whatever to come and get it during the night.  That barrel of nuts would attract every squirrel in the land.  Even if left outside (I assume they've been delivered by that cart) I think they would be more neatly together.

Moving now outside the fence, you have an awful lot of lamp posts there, including a couple almost obscured by trees.  I can see 6 altogether in a tiny space.  Is that number likely?

About the blank wall part, I add my doors through eventing, so that's not going to be a blank wall in game

I changed my map and I reduced the amount of lamps I had. Other than that I had quite some illogical placements and some mistakes here and there, which I also fixed.

I also colorized the grass inside of the house part.

About the cart and the food part, it is supposed to be an active part of the scene. Also, night is not entirely correct, let me say dark instead ^^

I got a new version of the map here:

Spoiler

 

[GrimTuesday]

@Demiqas - adding more trees definitely improved this part of the map, it looks very nice now. I have two suggestions, though - do you think you could add some more small patches of random grass and stuff like that to this blank lawn in the center, about where the white flower between two red bushes is? Also - is it just me, or does this ladder look a bit like drawn by Mr. Escher? Do you think you could add some shadow beneath it, just a little bit really, to clarify the perspective? Maybe it's just me, though, and to other people it looks just fine. All in all - I like how you can put some seemingly random stuff to make the map look more alive, not blank and dull, at the same time not making is look chaotic and cluttered 

 

[Jarrad]

Thoughts on the use of static battlers in a SBS? I've been toying around with the concept and I like it.

 

[GrimTuesday]

@Jarrad - I think they can be used effectively with success (I'm going with this solution myself), but like in any SBS, some battlers just won't do. If it's an SBS, then battlers facing directly at the camera would look out of place (IMO at least). They should be facing left/right, you know, to be visible from a side - if the party is facing left, then the enemies should be facing right, to make it look polished and "believable". In the screenshot you posted, only the little red guys seem eligible to be used in an SBS.

 

[Galenmereth]

I'm curious what people think of this alternate hover view of the stat effects of items. The idea with the icons in the normal view is that showing x icons is an easier way to see the effect difference at a glance, but if an item does have more than 5 or so of these icons in a row, it's hard again to judge exactly how many there are. So I implemented an alternate hover/select view, where it then shows a number next to one icon, like shown here:

The transition between normal and hovered makes it less confusing than it might seem, shown in the following video:

 

[Dream3r]

@Galenmereth Looks great to me.  Makes checking without needing to count them much easier when you have the larger numbers and the transition from hovering over is instant so that helps.

 

[Sharm]

Just wondering, why are they individual entries in the first place?

 

[Galenmereth]

@Sharm: For two main reasons: each item takes up a specific amount of space in your inventory (shown by grid on left side), which means bundling them would make it hard to judge. Then each item can have unique characteristics and modification; things like wear and tear and quality. So it became necessary to split up items. Rest assured you won't actually open a chest and find this much stuff in them at once; it's just me pushing things a bit to test my systems

 

[Sharm]

Oooh, okay. That makes sense.

 

[Demiqas]

I worked some more on my map and I ended up with this:

Spoiler

Which one do you guys think looks better, the one I just posted, or


This one:

Spoiler

Or this one:

Spoiler

 

[cabfe]

@Demiqas:

You've soften the pixels, right?

Since it looks like a RMXP game (at least the ressources you use were drawn for it) you might have an inconsistency in your graphics. Unless you apply this filter to all your graphics, of course.

As for the greenness of the grass, you said that it was an evening scene so it would be best to see both with the final tint. (Or do you plan on showing this map during the day too?)

 

[Demiqas]

@Demiqas:


You've soften the pixels, right?


Since it looks like a RMXP game (at least the ressources you use were drawn for it) you might have an inconsistency in your graphics. Unless you apply this filter to all your graphics, of course.


As for the greenness of the grass, you said that it was an evening scene so it would be best to see both with the final tint. (Or do you plan on showing this map during the day too?)

Im making the whole game with RMXP and RMXP-styled graphics. In dark it really just looks grey
What do you mean with softening the pixels?

 

[cabfe]

Im making the whole game with RMXP and RMXP-styled graphics. In dark it really just looks grey

What do you mean with softening the pixels?

Your pixels are now less crisps, a little more blurry. That's often the result of a filter called Soften. Or maybe you didn't do anything and this is a result of an image compression algorithm?

 

[Demiqas]

Your pixels are now less crisps, a little more blurry. That's often the result of a filter called Soften. Or maybe you didn't do anything and this is a result of an image compression algorithm?

Compression ^^