Still looks awesome! (but I kinda miss the C64-like appearance of the earlier previews ;p)
Ugh, C64-like? I sure hope not. Was one of the few 8 bits I never could stand the graphics of mainly due to the drab palette.
tokumaru wrote:I'm not a big fan of the fire/ice thing. The powers are OK, it's the palettes that I don't like.
The orange palette is too similar to the fire palette, so the overall impression is that you gave up on a lot of collors just for this effect. Also, because of the subtle difference, it will be hard to tell whether the orange dragon has the fire power-up or not.
I was knackered and didn't explain properly before (and the image is a bit misleading with the dragons rendered in all three palettes). The green dragon would turn blue and use ice and the orange one would turn deep red to use fire. They would be selectable at the start as to which one Player 1 would want to be. If both are playing then, like LittleBigPlanet, there would be small areas that both players have to co-operate to gain access to and often do it by combining their abilities. Such as setting fire to a particular obstacle and then using ice to put out the flames and clear the path. So niether dragon would ever be the same color as each other. And I didn't waste colors like you say, I needed a sort of orange range for sprites that could be 'woody' or 'rocky' but still needed the red/yellow for fire effects and to me they certainly look different enough to be clearly recognisible while being just similar enough that I can flicker between the two for the flames to give them a nice effect.
tepples wrote:And about palette changes to reflect power-ups: Super Mario Bros. 3 shows the hero's tailed form by changing the shape with the same palette. Super Mario Land 2 and the Wario Land series show powerups as hats.
I believe these are better options to indicate power-ups. Or icons in the status bar, like in
Kirby's Adventure.[/quote]
I always found the hats to just look tacky and icons in the status panel is boring (in Kirby I only liked the power ups that gave him something fun to use such as the sword). As for 'changing the shape' there isn't much room in a 16x16 sprite to do a lot to it and I've no idea what fire or ice powers would do to a dragon's shape that could work in that small an area or make any sense.
I'll have to think about it but I'm pretty busy with training and rehearsals for the next week or two so won't be about much. By the way that TV-like filtered image seems alright. I prefer sharp clean pixels (with or without scanlines) but yeah it's nice to see how it might have looked on a real NES plugged into TV.
Anyways seeya sometime
Thanks for all the help.