Project is pretty much dead, or is it?

Well the current itiration of MB is pretty much canned. I wanted to keep going but I couldn't do it without my partner who's life has taken a turn for the busy. That being said, I had way too much time invested in the project to let it die. I decided to save some of my assets (mostly the story stuff) and create a much more modest game (think original Earthbound or Dragon Warrior).

The game will be seriously cut down in features but I think the scope is small enough that I can actually finish it. So basically we've downgraded from a SNES look to a NES look. Take a gander at NES-esk Jill:

(Click on bigger version to see unfinished walk cycle)

That's right, I remade her in 16x16 pixels. I think limiting the size of my sprites will help me a lot too. Now I won't fret over every single detail, I'll just do my best with what I have and keep pumping out my graphics.

I was inspired by the team over at the Games & Technology forum of Penny-Arcade who were working on a XNA game called Breath of Death VII. I saw that the 8-bit era games could look fantastic (okay so I'm cheating by using more than the NES's colour palette, sue me ;))

Of Map Editors and Men...

The past 5 days have been really exciting. Zedix and I have been working ceaselessly. Our progress has been nothing but phenomenal which is kind of amusing since everytime we try to do something like this our attention wavers. This time is different because we both have something to show so we feed eachother's motivation and we end up working harder and harder.

As far as the map editor goes we're pretty much recreating an interface similar to RPG Maker's own. It won't be as feature rich but it will be more specific so that we can use the tools we build ourselves with 100% feature utilization. By building our own system we can add certain functionalities without having to google how to do it for hours with someone else's design and/or have to resolve it with a hack. That being said the editor is looking shhhweet especially since it's using our own map format.

As far as pixel art goes I figure pictures speak louder than words. Here are a few mockups:

Holy Crap, it's December!

I'm just going to post this and pretend like I haven't been absent for the past 5 months.

Zedix and I got back on the horse last night and decided to make a simple RPG. To make things easier on myself we decided to pick a modern setting. In fact the feel of the game is strongly influenced by the Mother series and Peanuts. The cartoony look allows me to use colours without always having to fill in the blank with details. The grundgy look can be pretty draining.

That being said Zedix brushed off the dust of his C# skills and managed to rebuild the map editor I had posted so long ago.

Anyways here are a few characters I drew together and a mockup. 

And the mockup.