My Game

[ShannonSmith]

Actually I'm not sure what my game is yet, I have mostly been working on bits and pieces. I am thinking something along the lines of AdvanceWars but not sure. I finished an interesting piece that I thought might be of use to others, click the image for demo + source:


The block images are made up a few rounded rectangle draw calls and only take up a few tens of bytes. The shadows could be dropped for even less space but they make a big difference in your perception of the relative height of a block.

I'll update this thread and change the title once I have a more concrete idea.

[Eli Delventhal]

Ooh, really purty. 

I'll be excited to see where this goes next.

[kappa]

agreed, it does look very pretty, the art style does remind me of those free graphics released on lostgarden a while back http://lostgarden.com/2007/05/cutegod-prototyping-challenge.html

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[ShannonSmith]

The style is based on the LostGarden tiles, in fact I didn't actually pick the set of rounded rects for the proto-block. I evolved it randomly with the fitting function based on the sum squared pixel difference to plain block in the Cute Planet set.

[SquashMonster]

Very pretty.  A few tiny nitpicks though: I'm not sure the left and top sides of the blocks should have a shadow (where would the light source be that causes both sides to be shaded?) and the overlapping shadows don't look right.

[ShannonSmith]

A few tiny nitpicks though: I'm not sure the left and top sides of the blocks should have a shadow (where would the light source be that causes both sides to be shaded?) and the overlapping shadows don't look right.

The light source is the diffuse scattering of sunlight through the atmosphere. It is not strictly speaking correct but it is a good enough approximation for a 4K game.

I based the shadows on the lost planet guide:


Mine don't look as good because I am not using gradient shadows (particularly prominent where shadows overlap as you point out).

Here is diagram of how the shadows are applied.

[SquashMonster]

I actually have the same complaints about his shadows.  I think yours look better than the ones from lost garden anyway; they're cleaner and more stylized.

[ShannonSmith]

Another bit done that may be useful to others: Vector Graphics



Click the image for the render/converter source code.
The graphics are encoded in strings and only take up a few hundred bytes. I am using a very small subset of SVG (only path elements and solid fills) and the coordinates are only at 9-bit resolution. You can still do a fair amount with that and i even managed to massage the SVG Tiger into my format.

[Eli Delventhal]

Woah, nifty! You're making some really cool resources!

[SquashMonster]

I saw "Vector Graphics" and the picture and thought "that's amazing!"

Then I saw that your format comes with a from-SVG converter.  That's beyond amazing, that's just magic.

Out of curiosity, how many bytes was your tiger?

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[ShannonSmith]

Woah, nifty! You're making some really cool resources!

Now if only I could get started on an actual game. 

Out of curiosity, how many bytes was your tiger?

Around 17k uncompressed (original svg was over 100k). It is pretty nasty, the paths are insanely complex.

There is still a bit of redundancy I could get rid of. Also you really don't need 9 bits of precision, smaller sprites only need 6 or 7. The converter isn't very magic, only path elements are supported so you generally have to edit them in Inkscape a bit to clean up any unsupported features.