KZR wrote:yup. it may also be known as corkscrew by some people.
I don't know if this is useful or not, but the corkscrew featured in Emerald Hill Zone is 128px*384px, as shown by the picture bellow. The red interrogation point is the object that activates the twisting pathway (if not present, the tiles will be passable), and the corkscrew can be repeated as many times as needed (one twisting pathway object must be added per repetition).By looking at the metting log, I see you are planning to use 64px*64px chunks. Sonic 2 uses 128px*128px chunks.
http://sites.google.com/site/icydearchi … athway.png
By implementing this, does it mean that all characters will have twisting motion sprites drawn?
I wish the code for that thing still existed.
]]>http://www.retrogamer.net/show_image.php?imageID=4225
See how the river twirls around a bit. This is by far my favorite level design so far.
]]>btw, Alex, i don't think anyone here is going to paint a Mona Lisa, but you did an awesome job here
]]>The contrast has certainly improved, but there is still something wrong with it. I discussed the issue with a friend, but we didn't achieve a solid resolution. "maybe improving the mountains a bit, drawing better shadows, etc.", but still, we didn't reach a definitive conclusion. Now I'm at fault in here because, unlike programming, this is art and I don't know exactly what is wrong nor how to 'fix' it. All I know is that other serious indie platformers have 'nicer' backgrounds, but this statement is worth too little, as it is too vague.
I found a polished pixel art tutorial on the net and in it there was a mountain. I took the mountain from the tutorial, edited it a bit and painted it green. I need to ask permission from the author in order to really use it in the game, but here's a preview:
Besides putting the new mountains, I combined KZR's sunshine picture with a very nice Creative Commons sky from opengameart.org. I also moved his trees to the bottom (so the background still represents a river), and the details from the water were modified, so it looks like the water is running and the sun is shinning on top of it.
... the background as a whole is still not "the ultimate piece of art", but I think it has improved.
]]>would these colors be good?
]]>
if you place new trees they should be aligned with the grid. there are 3 types of trees that do not align with each other because the graphics are slightly different. but each type should align with no trouble.
oh, i understand now. it's indeed working well. thanks.
now that the brickset is already very good, i'd like to bring the background back to the table one more time. my friend ramon and i were discussing this a while ago: although the background is well done, we have a problem about contrast. The brickset has a lot of green, and so does the background. Worse: it's the same green, and this we believe makes the layout not as beautiful as it could be.
let's see an example. this is the original background. see how much green there is:
although the background is very well done, it's hard to tell what is a background from what isn't, specially in the first pic. I tweaked around your bg and removed some layers (it's all backed up on dropbox), trying to improve the contrast. the result wasn't all that good:
it's improved, but it's still got contrast issues.
the following one has more blue, and in my opinion has got by far the best contrast, which makes the overall (foreground plus background) very beautiful. However, it isn't really a river/meadow anymore, and that goes against the what we've been discussing so far:
so... any ideas on how to improve the contrast and make the overall thing (background + foreground) look better?
]]>edit: see, i think we have many copies of the middle part of a tree, but they are incompatible.
]]>the only thing not quite right are the trees: in the grid-enabled editor, the bottom, the middle and the top parts of a tree are not always aligned. One or two pixels are off when putting the pieces together. Sometimes the bottom part of a tree is also not aligned to the ground. Is it fixable?
]]>Edit:
the brickset is done, although i can't export groups as described in another topic
Edit 2: groups exported. image size must be multiple of 64 for RBE to do it.
]]>]]>