Post by Midnight Spire Games in Is my game boring and unsightly? :O

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So it sounds like the NPC portraits, combat backgrounds, and GUI panels are your own work? Does that include the enemy sprites? I don't really know what's stock RPG Maker. I didn't watch all 13 minutes straight through, but I got the highlights. On the whole I actually think it looks really good, but I do have some criticisms.

The portraits look great as far as I can tell. The hair and clothing especially are impressive. There are a few things that look a little weird to me: Eric's protruding teeth, the medics' very square faces, and Aana's just-a-little-too-big eyes (they're creepy), but maybe those are intentional.

The battle backgrounds also look really good, but I think they might be a little too detailed. The slimes blend in with the rocky ground and the blue dragonflies blend in with the grass. It's kind of distracting when the focus should be on the enemies. The enemy placement also looks a little strange in some places, such as at 8:15 when a slime appears to be floating above the ground.

It looks like there is a day/night cycle? Most of the video looks like it's at sunset or night, so I'm not sure what it looks like during the day. The night filter looks good, but the sunset filter might be a little strong as it washes everything out into a sepia. I wasn't sure at first if it was sunset, or a flashback, or if it just looked like that. Why does the battle at 2:31 temporarily change to daytime?

As for the GUI, the panels look good. I like the blue theme and angular highlights. I don't like the font (Arial italic?). It's very plain, but also hard to read. It also looks like there are multiple fonts in use? I would drop most of the italics and underlines and use one font as consistently as possible. The dungeon mode screen especially looks kinda bad, as it fills the screen with text of all different sizes. From an interface perspective I'm not even sure what's going on with that screen or what I'm supposed to do. The little text box at the bottom (e.g. at 12:45) also needs work - the two lines of text are too close together and the text runs out of the box. The use of fonts is actually my biggest complaint - if you clean this up, the whole game will look a lot more attractive.

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Xanda4 years ago (4 edits)

I really want to say thank you for sharing you feedback.

It's been an up hill climb with making the designs stand out. All of the NPC portraits and sprites were individually made using a character maker, but I worked on many of them individually and made a single NPC sprite for many of the NPC's with their own face graphic.

The enemy sprites were made entirely by scratch, so they can't be found anywhere else. There are 6 team members in total and I made battle sprites and weapon graphics for them all, they have their own animations too, which I kind of had no choice but to make them as there isn't a program that can do it easily for VXAce. I made many adjustments so they could look different while trying to make sure they fit in as best as possible. I'm really glad you like them because I'm still learning to make graphics and sprites.

These are the party members, not including the pet. I'm still working out what to do on that one. It's no longer for sale as it never really took off. So I just give everyone the new costumes and designs for free.

The battle backgrounds and GUI were made using graphics which I own. I have a Lego variety of graphics and I just go to work on making the scenes. Thanks so much for liking them :) I agree that some may look a little too sharp and I'll add in some blur to the backgrounds.

It took a huge amount of scripting and eventing to make the lighting systems and features really work together in a way which can't be replicated easily. At night time, I scripted the lighting to become brighter if you were battling. Only if it's going to be too dark, which was a problem with the old lighting system. Since I changed the lighting cycles, I may not need that anymore, and so I'll remove the light effects adjustment.

I do like the sunset, it does go in to a sepia, the atmosphere while playing really feels great. I'll keep an open mind.

As for the font, I'm a bit stuck because I use RPG Maker VXAce and the core resolution is around 540 x 400 which is terrible for todays standards. I had to use a script to stretch the screen, and since I worked so hard on making the graphics look as great as possible after being stretched silly, the font looks more unsightly outside of being italic. I'm trying to find a way to make the font better, but I do surely agree with your comment and I'm going to sort it one way or another. :D

Again, I'm really thankful you helped. I also try to get better at making graphics by helping creators on itch.io with some stuff. It's not something I advertise, and I do it freely if I feel confident I can make something that can help. I'm trying out your games, and I'll do my best to review them all. :)

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