tailfin's custom sprites

[Luchi]

Hi there. ^^ I'm an aspiring pixel artist and video-game developer, so I thought I'd share some of my works here.

Some custom portraits I'm doing for a video game of mine. I still feel they're in need of some polish though.

Custom mugs:

Tristian is essentially my ideal female Lord. She's over 25, uses a bow as a primary weapon and mounted, but can use swords for melee combat too.

Ianna is a different take on the 'princess who gets exiled from her kingdom'. She's an example of the trope 'Royals who Actually Do Something' despite her meek appearance. I didn't want another FE!9 Elincia after all...

A WIP of Tristian's twin brother Percival.

Other in-game screens:

[Maritisa]

Oh wow, these are super pretty. High-scale halfbodies aren't something you see often around here, let alone high-scale overworld sprites.

Though... I do think you'd benefit from trying really hard to move away from the RTP maps and their general style... It's always really glaring and looks woefully unprofessional. I do like the scenic panorama effect you did in the last screenshot, though; that's the sort of thing you'd expect as a title screen haha. But generally, you'd get better mileage if you made your maps or tilesets yourself or had somebody else do them for you.
Since you're probably working in RPG Maker as a result, I'm... just gonna say from personal experience as tempting as it is you'd be better off in the long run learning a more open-ended general engine, like Unity or something. General level design knowledge and loose workflow logic aside, which, while those are valuable, almost nothing will translate out of RPG Maker to other engines. You may or may not think it's not an issue right now but trust me when I say you will sorely regret it if you latch onto RPG Maker's format.

Edited February 17, 2017 by Ritisa

[Luchi]

Those tilesets are my own, lol. xD And it is a bit hard to move over to a completely different engine like GameMaker or 2D Unity since I have zero programming knowledge and I've been using the engine for around... 8 years now?. I guess the reason I used RPGMaker was because it was just easier to bring my game ideas to life without having to worry about writing a single a line of code.

Unless you have some suggestions for me to move away from the engine completely? I'd welcome it, especially if players will be able to boot up my game without having to download the RM software to play it. =)

[Maritisa]

Unity has a ton of documentation and tutorials, and if memory serves me correctly does have *some* extent of shortcuts akin to game maker. But I far recommend Unity over Game Maker as GM is really hard to make something proper-feeling with. Unity has said tutorials easily findable on their site, so there's no real need for me to link them haha.

If you're the type who learns better by reverse-engineering there's lots of sample projects or open engines out on the net for people to look at, too, in addition to their comprehensive tutorial list. Plus, if you're working in an engine like Unity, you're not limited by any real constraints other than what you put on yourself, which can lead to a project much closer to your vision.
But... I'll tell you first and foremost that if this is your "dream project", don't make it your first project, because you're sure to learn a ton along the way and then want to fix up old parts and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, you'll likely end up getting hung up on perfecting it and never actually finish anything, then you'll end up discouraged with yourself and likely lose all motivation to continue working on games. A ton of stuff gets decided during the development process, not during concept phase, so let it take its course and don't cling onto your idea too hard, at least not for your first project. You should use this opportunity to accustom yourself to the engine, and it's likely your first project will be more akin to a tech demo than a full game. That's fine! It secures your working foundation in the future.

Just don't be afraid of trying something new, you'll feel lost for a little, probably, but nobody goes into something knowing everything. That's just not how people learn. It's one thing to know the theory, but putting it into practice is a whole different thing, you know?

Best of luck to you with your endeavors!

Edited February 17, 2017 by Ritisa

[Dinar87]

I really like the grass in those screenshots you posted :D

[Luchi]

Oh, I'm well aware of the 'first-project-ambitious-game', its very common on the RPGMaker forums xD. This is actually my sixth RPGMaker game that I'm working on, and the first one ( Enelysion ) was completed in November 2014 after about 4 years of work. It's around 12 hours long. Maybe I'll finish Tristian in RPGMaker VX as my final swan-song project in the engine, then move onto Unity. What matters most to me now is finishing the game, after all. =)

[Lenh]

Hell, I think if you like and are happy with the output RPGMaker provides, stick with it, there's plenty of skills you can hone there. +People here are still building hacks off 10+ year old engines and of course you can build everything from ground up and invest time learning how but why if you are just going to do the exact same thing.

The mugs look overinspired/traced from official art, but otherwise the two finished seem okay and the wip is getting there. I feel like there might be some height issues with the first map, hard to tell. The second map has a dimension-breaking pot and just seems kind of crammed and empty/patterned at the same time to me. Still, nice work~

[Luchi]

The portraits aren't traced btw. But I am emulating the FE7/FE10 art style ( or trying ) so-- But seeing as I am hoping to sell my video game one day, tracing portraits from an existing game is an obvious no-no.

That's the original drawing before I redid Tristian's armour.

One of my earlier background works. Spriting clouds and sky is always fun.