New Area - Turak's Censor (Looking for advice)

[Kashlavor]

Started actual work on the first segment of my dungeon as a way to practice pixel art.  While I have plenty of fun gameplay and level design ideas I want to try I was looking for any advice people had on asset creation.  Partially inspired by theme_g I have just a few walls so far.  Anyone around here good at art with a few tips? Any tutorials?

[Heretic]

It looks good! My tip would be just to keep at it. Keep adding decorations and such to fully flesh out the tileset. I only started drawing when I started working on Ravenwatch last year, but you can take a look at the new artwork in the Ravenwatch trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE6_pok2fcc

What kind of theme are you going for? Is this a sort of tomb thing or a dungeon? It looks a bit like clay.

Also, does that waterfall move?

[Kashlavor]

The Ravenwatch trailer looks really cool, keep spreading that thing around.  I know I've shown it to some friends as an example of what to do.

The theme I'm going for should be reminiscent of a temple.  The color was based on some pictures of types of sandstone, but I scaled it down a bit since the original looked a bit too pink.

http://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/limestone-wave.jpg
http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/011/cache/sandstone-swirls_1180_990x742.jpg

The waterfall is animated, but needs some more work.  I'm also going to make flowing channels so the waterfall can turn into a maze of rivers.

Edit: Heres the prototype animated version.



The main push as far as story/gameplay is to send the heroes into the Temple of Turak, a place of power which wizards constructed in order to harness the magic of Turak.  Unfortunately the main antagonist (the titular Archnecromantrix) has also figured out how to harness this power so the heroes must destroy the Temple and free Turak in order to chip away at her power.

Most of the challenge is going to be big setpiece rooms, very open but cut off by a maze of flowing waterfalls which need to be deactivated in order to progress further.  The theme will also need a lot of ancient-looking stuff to reinforce the look like some ancient creature was bound under this building.

Random Gameplay Ideas
-Some doodads will have "help text" which is scripted to pop up when players are nearby, just to throw in little tidbits of backstory as they progress.
-The main type of enemy will all have the summon ability (but only a single use, or cooldown set to an arbitrarily large number), which they can use to summon in 3 of the tier below them.  Slowly ramp up the tension until players dread finding a whole room's worth of encounter inside a single foe.
-Going to let the theif unlock an ability called "Steal" or somesuch, which will let them take certain doodads and turn them into money.  Script-wise it will just work the same was as destructible walls with the "on hit" kind of behavior, but instead of opening passages it will just produce gold.  Essentially letting them "steal art from off the walls"  Just another way to hide secrets and force people to constantly keep an eye out for all the deco-doodads I took forevor to draw.

[Hipshot]

I think the theme looks nice, I somehow like the clay feeling you have there. It looks more "old" than my desert temple theme do.
You should look into making the waterfall have more even sections of colors, it doesn't have to be that fast either, look at this example.
http://www.pixeljoint.com/files/icons/full/shstagewaterfall084slow1.gif

[Kashlavor]

I'll check it out, just joined their forum actually looking for advice on art. 

Actually I had taken a break from drawing walls and stuff to get better at doing some new actors for the area as well.



I'm looking forward to doing some of the level design but I'd gotten caught up in learning how to draw.  It looks like you guys took the level design up a notch as well in the new campaign levels.

Edit: Just looked at the picture you linked, I already have that one on my hard drive.  Occasionally I open it up in my graphics editor and stare at it, trying to absorb its power and fathom how it was made....

[Xyanshift]

nice work will any of the assets be up for others to use?