This art style is easy... but is it good enough?

General Talk Miscellaneous
1

Hi all,

I don’t know if anyone remembers, but around 2009 I got a few fellow geeks together and entered the Microsoft Imagine Cup.

At the time we kinda “borrowed” assets from Graal which fit in with the theme of the game.

Well, for the second version, we did all the art ourselves :slight_smile:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000/368/086/ba2a76959c9cad58cd77162a2452aa9a_large.png?1359824190
https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000/381/639/64c72d9eac34290fbb7d3b12e9869274_large.png?1360541158
https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000/369/209/81c54738ea32dd9adf5a46b17f8cd7c2_large.png?1359898117

What do you rekon of the style? I would love to get some feedback.

What I think has worked really nicely is the fact that we could draw the pictures on paper and scan everything in. This art has been done 100% by coders using a 99p colouring pencil set. Could we not use a similar thing with our own Graal client (if we ever get one developed ;))?

We have put an early version of the project on kickstarter to get some initial feedback (mostly to see if the communities around open-source operating systems would be interested).
We also have some cool videos of the game in action there.

In the 3rd video on the kickstarter page, we demo a few of our tools. One of them is quite similar to the gani editor and the other is effectively the map editor. We plan to get these tools cleaned up (and most likely open-sourced) so perhaps with small modifications they could be useful for an open graal client.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1098528295/defile-of-eden-2-world-in-chaos-0

(Don’t feel pressured to pledge lol. But certainly feel free to spread the link to your friends if they want more games on Linux / BSD!)

2

I don’t see the graal in that but nice drawings, it’s nice for a programmer to be able to draw his own stuff and make games out of it.

3

Perhaps it dosn’t look too much like our current Graal, but by making the process easier for players to generate the art for their playerworlds (without having to actually be good at pixel art), it might give us a slightly different edge to Graal Online.

A lot of the artists here are pretty great at pixel art though so I guess this idea might not be so useful for them.
For the rest of us, it would at least mean that the default tile set would get a long overdue rest lol.

4

So if I donate 5000 I get to come chill in the UK?

5

Lol, only if we reach our funding goal… which we blatantly wont. :frowning:

Still early days I guess but my theory on getting a higher percentage of interest from the UNIX market might have been a little optimistic.

We are certainly aiming to finish the game regardless of funding (got quite a lot done), but we are gonna struggle a little bit more when it comes to actually releasing the game.

6

Wherever you’re showing this, you should present the video in the original post as well. I thought you just had some drawings on graphing paper and planned to make a game out of it until I actually looked at the kickstarter…

7

Hmm, that is a good point. If I can’t embed a youtube video on the forums, I should probably provide a disclaimer lol.

But it is great to hear that the art style is looking as intended :slight_smile: