Opinions on Screen Shots

[contracycle]

Have the character occlude parts of the plants will be very demanding and basically require a 3D model of the environment.  Not worth it, but hard to avoid.

Hmm, I dunno, the Total War series use 2D sprites to animate apparently 3D units.  Its apprently only noticeable if you zoom in and look at individual 'men' and occassionally see they don't actually have a left side, just a mirror of the right.  But, that said, this is using a 3d environemt in some manner.

[Lara]

Hello,
Since everyone was so kind to respond, I've taken the time to go thru each of your comments and respond appropriately.  Thank you very much for the consideration.

The other option is to go with smaller tiles so that the pattern is lost to abstraction.  You could have more different small tiles that couple in graphically interesting ways to prevent the appearance of a repetitious field.  

That was our original attempt, however even with various tile sizes between 96x96 and 48x48 – standard for most older style tile based games we could not get the detail we wanted.  To do this you need sets of seamless tiles, multiple sets.  To get anything that even gave the appearance of actually having grass blades was either impossible or simply beyond our skills.  UO which is probably the most well known 2d isometric MMORPG has the same challenge.  Their green grass is nothing more then green tiles with a minor texture on it.  We wanted to actually show the grass, so went with larger tiles and much more detailed textures.  

What size tiles are you working with? I've never really worked on anything as graphically detailed, but I'm working on an MMORPG system myself using 16x16 tiles.

Our tiles range from  200x200 to 600x600.  All of these screens are done with one "base" tile with overlays for things like the pine leaves, clover, roads, etc.  Reducing the repetitiveness should simply be a question of adding another one or two base tiles.  For having a single large base tile we got a lot of detail that gives the impression of depth and ground cover.

First I'm very impressed by the appearance of the vegetation and ground in general.  The variety of vegetation is one of the things that jumped out at me.  Having different types of plants and colors of flowers makes such a nice image.

First thank you ... the other aspect of the variety in vegetation is that is specific to the area and tied into that area's harvestable resources.  Ie. Specific wood types, specific types of plants and herbs.

The balance of you suggestions would certainly add depth and realism, however we are very much interested in staying 2D and not ready to take additional client requirements for producing a 3D game, even if its just minor effects.  Most of the games coming out these days are 3D and leave those without the hardware in the dust.  So until we see how the game actually plays we're following KISS.

I assume this is for an RPG game?

That's the only comment I have off the top of my head at the moment; if it's same genre, same style of play, might want to try to diversify the look a little. =)

Yes its an online RPG, not single player like balders gate.  I've only presented a small subset of the overall graphical styles that are to be used.  We obviously started with the simpler ones to make sure everything works.  The later sets will be more complicated, including such things as navigatable mountain ranges, desert, rain forest and a dark forest theme.

The vegetation does look really good. Some of it gets visually lost, though, against the green grassy regions of the ground. You might want to consider making the grass different, less saturated colors (tan for dry grass, dark brown for bare ground, patchy weeds mixed with some bare ground averaging out to olive).

We've already toned down the grass in a few of the sets.  However the developers tell me to keep it bright and rich so that when the lighting and shadows go in it doesn't look dreary.

.. but i do have to say that these ground shots are looking pretty tasty.  the flora looks lovely and the grass looks much like the real thing.  there is a little weirdness when itcomes to the lighting, in that your undefined light source(s) lights the vegitation fine, but the ground seems to be lit by light sources striking from a different direction.  maybe this will be fixed by your shadowing , which you said is absent from these screen shots, perhaps not.  just a little nit-pick.  my bad.  any character shots though?  those would really interrest me...

Thank you, the flora was fun to do.  Frustrating but fun.  Lighting should fix a lot of it.  I've done some simulated lighting in photoshop and it makes a huge difference.  We do not yet have any "avatar graphics" (the little guy on screen) but we do have some paper doll images that can be seen here:

http://www.sanctuary-portals.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album03&op=modload&name=gallery&file=index&include=view_album.php

More to be released soon:

Again thank you all for your responses, they are beyond valuable!

Lara

[Lara]

Here is a sample with some simulated lighting to see the difference:

http://www.sanctuaryshard.com/images_temp/Cloverforest2s.jpg

Lara