[FILLED] Looking for artist(s) to develop new style for A Valley Without Wind.

[x4000]

The models would look horrendous without their painterly effect.

[Bluddy]

After playing again after not having played for a while, I'm of the opinion that the graphics need tweaking rather than a reboot. I also think it's unlikely that the Kickstarter idea will work (sorry -- don't want to discourage you).

Get an artist to render all the assets for midday, night, sunset, and sunrise. Limit the possible combinations of conflicting assets. Replace the bad indoor textures with good ones. Reduce the memory footprint of animations with the technique I outlined + make sure you're using compressed/16 bit textures and add some more animations. Other than these (relatively minor) things, the graphics are fine, and sometimes even beautiful.

[Hearteater]

I think without seeing what the candidates are proposing it might be early to disregard them.

[eRe4s3r]

After playing again after not having played for a while, I'm of the opinion that the graphics need tweaking rather than a reboot. I also think it's unlikely that the Kickstarter idea will work (sorry -- don't want to discourage you).

Get an artist to render all the assets for midday, night, sunset, and sunrise. Limit the possible combinations of conflicting assets. Replace the bad indoor textures with good ones. Reduce the memory footprint of animations with the technique I outlined + make sure you're using compressed/16 bit textures and add some more animations. Other than these (relatively minor) things, the graphics are fine, and sometimes even beautiful.

As someone who does this I can assure you that at 128x128 resolution something rendered out without extensive post editing (ie, line tracing) would look incredibly bad, blurry, undefined. No strong contrasts or clear details. You can never beat drawn art in low resolutions

[Bluddy]

After playing again after not having played for a while, I'm of the opinion that the graphics need tweaking rather than a reboot. I also think it's unlikely that the Kickstarter idea will work (sorry -- don't want to discourage you).

Get an artist to render all the assets for midday, night, sunset, and sunrise. Limit the possible combinations of conflicting assets. Replace the bad indoor textures with good ones. Reduce the memory footprint of animations with the technique I outlined + make sure you're using compressed/16 bit textures and add some more animations. Other than these (relatively minor) things, the graphics are fine, and sometimes even beautiful.

As someone who does this I can assure you that at 128x128 resolution something rendered out without extensive post editing (ie, line tracing) would look incredibly bad, blurry, undefined. No strong contrasts or clear details. You can never beat drawn art in low resolutions

Not entirely sure which specific thing you're referring to. Animation art could be kept as it is. Animations would be squished together to use up textures effectively, and textures could be 16 bit to take up half the space.

[x4000]

As a reminder:

1. Squishing textures together would make the creating process incredibly more difficult and time consuming for us, and is Right Out. We'd have to have some manner of determining where frames are via some new process, or define it all by hand, and that's not something I'm willing to invest that level of time into.

2. Being able to switch to 16bit textures is not a possibility with the unity engine the way we use it.  Their flexibility when it comes to importing at runtime is minimal at best, and our pipeline (for reasons already outlined) absolutely depends on being able to import at runtime.

3. The people who aren't of an opinion that the art is "a little bad" or "in need of slight tweaking" are likely not going to be looking at anything like what you mention.  We deliberately and painstakingly pick the best of the best screenshots to show with press releases (as do all games), and people still kvetch over them to an extreme degree.  IE, to reach those people an entire overhaul is needed.

4. Whether or not a kickstarter is theorized to work or not is irrelevant; we're going to try it.  If it doesn't work we've learned something interesting from that, and if it does work then we've got a new art style that more people like.  I'm not investing money into prototype art at the moment just to back away at the last second because a kickstarter might not work, you know?

5. Yes, without the post-processing the rendered 3D stuff at 128x128 or even larger looks abominable.  Blurry, no contrast, etc, etc, etc.  Hence our move to drawn art, since the post-processing approach has led to so much divide.  Also, it would be nice to have people with more formal expertise in art (plus their "10,000 hours" in) compared to myself, a relative amateur when it comes to art.

[MouldyK]

I hope we can see prototypes of the other 2 studios soonish as the first one from "K" was pretty cool.

[x4000]

Here's an evolution of the Darrell character with Studio K, as we've been working towards getting a style that would be appropriate and not too cartoony.  It's still not fully there yet, but getting closer.  My main complaint now is the head.

[x4000]

And here's a design sketch for the multi-layer background from what we'll call Studio H.  Below that is the small town screenshot with the parallax layers that currently exist in the game.

[MouldyK]

Yeah, I agree the head could be a tiny bit better, but the body looks nifty.

Most sprite-like heads always look kinda cartoony thing. Still, looks promising.

[eRe4s3r]

Character art is gonna fail or win me over with the walking animation to be honest, particularly with females vs males, and choosing a bald character was maybe a bit bad an idea ;p Can't judge hair movement in animations without.. hair

As for the head, I think the mouth should be less pointing towards us and be smaller (who stands around with open mouth?), the ears be a bit less pronounced and that'd be basically it. Head size does not matter to me, but it'll only ever get my sanction when I see female character art and the walking animations, and particularly whether clothing is going to be animated in the non-armored versions.

Also, the eye form should maybe be a bit more "scary dude" style, because we are glyph bearers, on our command continents change!

[LayZboy]

Why is the 3rd ones head animu style, and the other two have tiny heads.

[SerratedSabre]

Hmmm, it feels like it's missing something. The colors on the sprites seem kinda bright, in contrast to the games darker palette. We'd just have to see what it would look like in-game to get a better feel for it. As for the head, how much can the guy de-cartoonize the thing? I'm kinda curious to see what would turn out.

[yllamana]

I think the top Darren looks pretty cool, though he has some serious Warcraft shoulders going on and looks like he needs to relax a bit. I'll also be interested to see if they can get the female characters right.

[madcow]

That head bob, oh god. I hope that's not the idle animation, it would drive me insane!

The actual terrain looks the same, is it not getting touched up? ...Or am I just like going blind?