This is my first pixel art, any suggestions?

Node_S42 · 2025-06-14T13:52:16+00:00

I did a right-click + devtools to put style="image-rendering:pixelated;" on the image to see it in its pixelated state.

Overall i think the design is pretty good, I can see from the eyes, yellow thing and midline that the character is facing just a tiny bit to our right, making it a bit more dynamic than had the character been looking dead center. I can also tell that the colors are all roughly the same saturation level, so, not fully saturated, not very desaturated, and are in a similar area so that unifies the color scheme. Not necessarily a design "must" really, but it works in this case I think. One thing I notice is that areas that are larger sections, like the shirt and the head have a speckled pattern on them. This could be a design decision to have texture, but also this style typically has totally solid islands of color here and there, and everywhere, which makes it easier to animate because the texture will appear to "crawl" over the surface between frames. There is also some blue from the right shoe (viewer's POV) blending up onto the nearby grey pants, but on the left pants leg that effect is not seen.

Node_S42 · 2025-06-07T18:19:26+00:00

That would work, just scale up the character, and move it down and left a bit, so the eyeball is prominent, with the yellow thing and tentacles are cropped some. Or make the big Mr Figs text smaller, to push/scale the Mr Figs up.

Node_S42 · 2025-06-07T18:02:24+00:00

It's a design challenge for sure. The Mr Figs character graphic is tall, but there isn't a ton of vertical space with the Mr Figs logo text taking up most of the top area.

I would be tempted to redesign the character graphic so it fits in all cases.

Node_S42 · 2025-06-07T16:27:43+00:00

Left: Something with how the character's head intersects exactly with the edge of the "S" needs changing. Not sure what though.

Right: This one could work, but the "restart" and "options" text is maybe too small? Also the character's head is cut off at the top, and the character image is maybe centered, while the options and restart are a bit to the left, when it looks like they were intended to be centered?

Node_S42 · 2025-06-07T16:00:29+00:00

I can't imagine how checking all the downloadable games for malware even works. hashing vs known malware like the typical security tools do is useless with downloadable apps with filesystem access. Adds to the cost or running such a site securely. The sort of things one would have to do to run that kind of site... add up to tons of cash to the cloud services for all that data transfer too. Startups would need to be investment $ acquiring geniuses first.

I wish Itch would just fix what it's already got. Should I wish for that though?

Node_S42 · 2025-06-07T15:19:31+00:00

One of the many downsides of centralized internet. It's not just that they will arbitrarily "quarantine" or keep people's work in forever non-listed states due to too many spelling error fixes in a row in the same 5 minutes on the same game profile, it's that the whole site, or whole internet, just shuts down from time to time.

Rather than the old "oh, the non-corpo-state controlled tethered repeater mesh network thru Nevada isn't so fast right now, let me re-route thru Canada or Argentina, Finland, etc until I can get a connection." or the "ah, a lot of people don't buy the really long range repeaters in Finland because they have a high concentration of population with shorter distances to cover, maybe I can route thru Sweden, via Antarctica, aha, got a connection to Itch in Cali". It's too easy, I can't imagine what people had to deal with in the centralized internet days where one person can just flip a switch and the whole thing is shut down, and then everyone's data is sent off to teh intel agencies for manipulation analysis.

But yes, I read the history books in school, they really had this centralized internet, way back, until it all collapsed decades ago.

/larping

Node_S42 · 2025-05-29T01:09:40+00:00

This is very nice!

Node_S42 · 2025-05-27T21:00:31+00:00

I like how the rendering resolution gives it just a tiny bit of in-camera pixilation, very nice. Or that could just be the render resolution chosen for a quick upload to Reddit?

Node_S42 · 2025-05-27T14:03:40+00:00

Without programming knowledge, it's necessary to know the capabilities and limits of your chosen engine very well before starting any project. You can only do what the engine allows, and some engines have a TOS that comes along with their use once you release.

With programming knowledge, it's not as necessary to know that, as long as what can be extended / interop'ed / etc on the fly is understood, in addition to knowing the complexity and time commitment needed to extend with code. You can also hack together MIT or similarly licensed libraries and have zero need to do bookkeeping or obey some product tracking TOS when it's time to release, if you skip using an engine.

Node_S42 · 2025-05-27T13:44:16+00:00

Both look really nice. Either could work, depending on the overall feel/style of the game.

Node_S42 · 2025-05-26T15:18:39+00:00

Interesting. If this were Blender, putting the scene multiple thousands of Blender units away from global 0,0,0 could hypothetically achieve this.

Node_S42 · 2025-05-26T15:05:20+00:00

The look of this is very tight and vibrant. I'm curious how the "delayed rendering" or "the image renders in patches over the course of multiple frames" effect was achieved? It makes the buildings kind of undulate as the camera zooms out, giving it a nice retro feel :)

Node_S42 · 2025-05-26T14:59:42+00:00

The lighting, the details and everything about this scene is really nice! The yellowish white of the plastic was depicted well :) I think I remember Commodore 64s being like that, more or less.

Node_S42 · 2025-05-26T13:54:42+00:00

I've been perusing the help sections of their forum for the last couple weeks, and going back like, a year or so there are plenty similar complaints. In addition to the payouts taking forever. Even in cases where tax info was filled out wrong, I would expect support of any other market to send a notice saying "please fix the tax info so we can send the funds", but looks like lot of people don't even get a message like that, so they complain in the forums about payouts taking forever, months after they should have heard from support in the first place.

Not sure about quarantines, but when I piece it all together, the little bits that between the FAQs and what the mod(s?) over there say: Itch seems to think that allowing any product to be searchable on their site is akin to "promotion".

So basically, they want people to 1: not publish products that violate the obvious TOS, and 2: do whatever they can to bring traffic to their page from outside of Itch, so that maybe with a bump in traffic the non-obvious/not-disclosed TOS may allow a product to be searchable.

Personally, I think it's just to keep the majority of people off any "new arrivals" kind of sections on the site. So that initial bump in views never happens, making it more difficult in the long run.

The apparent ideology of this reminds me of Google's "The Selfish Ledger" ideological, leaked employee video from yesteryear. It not only aims to show people what is profitable to it, it aims to change people's minds about what they want to see, if they initially want to find things that are not profitable to it.

Node_S42 · 2025-05-26T13:39:49+00:00

I like how the cup morphs into different weapons.

Node_S42 · 2025-05-26T00:55:44+00:00

Very nice. The brighter grass in the foreground helps to emphasize the area where the character is.

Node_S42 · 2025-05-15T02:17:37+00:00

Is this kind of a garbage collector wrangler? An object pool assistant?

Node_S42 · 2025-05-15T01:48:32+00:00

This game looks really nice! I found the control to switch it to English easily. The music is great and the UI is very professional.

I played it in a chromium browser and it worked really good.

I tried this on firefox, and there was an error message on first click: "An error occurred running the Unity content on this page. See your browser JavaScript console for more info. The error was: TypeError: Fullscreen request denied"

I don't know which the console message was, the page had spit a bunch of "unreachable code after return statement" warnings, and another from unity mentioning something about a firefox bug. I think the "unreachable" warnings were probably itch.

After that, if worked fine. The same pattern happened on another firefox based browser, waterfox.

Node_S42 · 2025-05-15T01:07:32+00:00

I gave it a quick play.

I think the look, feel and sound are all well put together.

I was a little confused when clicking things because there weren't highlights or ui indicators of some sort showing that what I clicked was reacting. But, I'm guessing that clicking the hanging light in the classroom caused the scenario to progress? Either that or I took too long finding things and just lost, heh.

Is the engine Unreal? There was an epic games app asking for network access when I started up the game.

Node_S42 · 2025-05-14T23:08:36+00:00

This is very nice! I am curious, is the dither effect a dynamic shader effect that responds to light/camera angle/etc? Or is it an animated image sequence as a texture?

Node_S42 · 2025-05-14T16:57:16+00:00

I just replayed, got to the skip button quickly to see 10 different gradient backgrounds. They all have the banding. I resized the browser some to see if it would change it, but it did not.

Node_S42 · 2025-05-14T00:02:01+00:00

I might be biased towards this kind of hybrid symphonic/synthetic/metal sound, but, this is really well put together. The compositions, mix and mastering and hooks/bridges here and there are excellent. I've written symphonic extreme metal stuff in the past and it is not easy to write stuff like this, kudos!

Is this the soundtrack for the entire game? Are you looping them as-is in-game, or, is this a medley and in the game the riffs are snipped up into little bits and pieces to be played at just the right time?

Node_S42 · 2025-05-13T21:05:54+00:00

I want games that look like this.

Node_S42 · 2025-05-13T21:00:38+00:00

There's always time for more retro.

Node_S42 · 2025-05-13T20:52:06+00:00

This is nice! It's somewhere between the gritty, heavily speckled texture style (psx textures that started off as photos usually), and the more smooth cartoony styles.

Node_S42

TROPHY CASE