Cosmologicon on 2009/09/05 19:42:

I'm not an artist! Believe me, I would draw better if I could! It's no surprise that the geometric shapes came out a lot better than the human faces. The player sprite kind of bugs me too, but I'm not sure how to improve it.

Thanks for the feedback!

nitrofurano on 2009/09/05 20:21:

if you were working on spritesheets i'd ask you to remove the beziers from the .svg drawing sources you used, for seeing if you had some improvement - that's another reason why i ask everybody to use spritesheets (and loading them as subsurfaces on sprites) instead of working with independent files each sprite, working on spritesheets is hugelly time gaining, and can set the difference on short times like the Pyweek deadline in few hours now... - sometimes working on polygons is much more simpler and clean than working with shapes with beziers, and they are much more easier to edit.

Cosmologicon on 2009/09/06 09:45:

Okay, yes, the protagonist looks horrible. (I struggled with his look all during development. Right up until an hour before I finished, he was just a yellow circle.) So I took your advice and uploaded my first post-competition release. This should not be used for judging. Rate the entry based on the old version. But the only difference is the protagonist's picture and sprite, so as long as you understand that and rate accordingly, the rest of the content is the same, so feel free to play the new version.

About the drawings. The pictures of the people used for dialogue were drawn freehand with a tablet in Gimp, like the sprites in my PyWeek 8 entry (Panspermia). The sprites and castles and room screens in this game were drawn in Inkscape in SVG. I don't know what you're talking about, removing beziers from the sprite sheet? I didn't use a sprite sheet because I don't know how.

The Gimp drawings in Panspermia were better than the ones in this game for two reasons. First, that game had about seven images total, and I spent about two hours on each, tweaking the shading and details. (Yes, it takes me two hours to draw a flower. I said I'm not an artist!) This game has that many drawings, plus that many sprites, plus a few enemy sprites, plus that many SVG castles, plus a few feather icons, plus a dozen huge SVG room screens. I wasn't able to spend more than 20 minutes on each drawing. I know my lack of skills probably means I shouldn't attempt such a graphics-heavy game; I'm just saying.

Second, human faces are one of the hardest things for me. Maybe it's because I'm so left-brained, but more than that, people are extremely sensitive to subtle facial features. Paradoxically, drawing realistic-looking alien plants is much easier.

By the way, I like how you have a suggestion for everything! It's so much more refreshing and useful than feedback like "Please improve your game." :-)