I’ve got an alpha set-up for one of my WIP’s canvases set up. Before I do a great deal of sprite combination and compression, I’d like to get some feedback. Unfortunately, I can’t get a video that’s both small and detailed enough to be helpful.
However! I do have a slideshow! A slideshow you can download. 50 fine representative slices in 30 mb!
“Pretty sweet,” I hear you saying. “Where do I sign up?”
If you have a quickish internet connection, an ability to unrar stuff, and a few minutes/hours/days to devote to my cause, I’d really appreciate some gentle constructive criticism. You can PM me, or reach me at the email listed in the description.
I’d like to help, but I’m getting this error message: “The archive ‘FTA Season alpha’ could not be expanded, the file ‘ftaseasonscheck765.png’ it contains seems to be broken.” I seem to have gotten 27 images correctly unRARed before it hit that one.
Thanks for the heads up. Let me take a look and see if I can beat it into submission.
Edit: It’s working and unraring okay for me. I’m guessing you tried redownloading? I could email them to you, if you want to PM me, or I could post them individually (but that means you’d need to download them individually, which is a pain in the neck).
Wow. There is so much effort in this… It looks really good. My wife, an art director, also took a look; she agrees.
The lightning is beautiful.
For most of your specific questions, I say–it’s just fine! The main outstanding problem that I see is the bluff/crag, in a couple of senses:
In cloudy-but-not-rainy scenes such as 600, the crag should probably gray a bit along with the sky, as it does for example in 630. It could probably also change hues a bit more than it does now in response to other seasonal changes (the only seasonal change I see is currently is that the stone become bluer when the snow is on the ground). However, this is not crucial and I wouldn’t advise you to spend a lot of time on it.
The crag is a bit monotonic in its whiteness (I seem to recall you commenting about this on the blog awhile back). My wife suggests that applying a gradient of color to it, lightening somewhat from bottom to top, would mitigate this and give a more realistic appearance. Maybe you could have a couple of semi-transparent gradient overlays for different lighting conditions? (Don’t know what makes sense given the existing setup.)
I think you’re just about there. Now you just need to get started on the animations (kidding, kidding)!
Yeah, the crag needs something; I’ll look at that gradient. I think it should be possible to fit a filter over it, too - I’ve got a couple of different opacities floating around, and there’s “space” there where it wouldn’t make anything else look too weird. It would darken the sky, but if that’s too much, I can always lighten the respective cloud/sky layer to keep the levels similar.
I took a look as well – the clouds look fantastic, and I really love the touches like the V of birds flying overhead in the fall. I think I agree with Erik that the crag needs a little more work to fit in with the rest, but overall I think these do a great job of communicating a particular season and weather.