Post your sketches here!

[bluestarultor]

Been using my last day of freedom to work on Ruby graphics:



Uploaded with ImageShack.us


AUUUUGH! IT'S BEEN CORRUPTED!


Just kidding. This is an example of how I'm going to implement palette swapping. I figure it's easier to use primary colors as a base and then switch them out later. It also means that I have a way to make sure people don't just steal whatever background they like from the full version and replace it, because I'll (probably) be able to check key pixels or something to make sure that they're the right color and thumb my nose at them if it's wrong. Nothing major, just a message or actually disabling palette swapping and maybe even pulling a reversal to change the background TO that. It's my own little form of DRM. If you try to cheat your way into the extras, you get your eyes burned.

Basically, I have 6 colors set aside. When palette swapping goes into production, I'll have it set up to look for those colors and replace them with the actual game colors by index.



In non-blinding news, I also have some enemy stuff started. Here's a golden stag standing and attacking:



Here's one walking and a throwing star hitting the party:

I decided it would help make things interesting if projectiles and spells would "fly out of the screen." I have no means of making this actually 3D, but I figured since the player represents the party leader (which is otherwise ambiguous and may even change over the course of the game) that it might be kind of cool to actually have stuff coming at them not just stop at the window, if you think of it that way. The individual star sprites are placed in the middle of their rough ranges and will simply be flipped to indicate motion once they get close enough for it to matter.

Also, yes, I realize that the star has no outlines. None of them do. It's a stylistic choice I struggled with, but in the end I decided that the only things that would have outlines would be the enemies. I've been careful with the colors I chose for all the spell sprites so far, but I can't limit my palette that hard with enemies if I want a colorful world, so I resorted to falling back on a good old-fashioned black border.



Also, have a full sheet of a magic bunny:

This is the first full map I've done of an enemy. All of them are again in their respective ranges, minus the two floating at the top, which are because there isn't enough space to have them on the ground.