Lowser's Conquest - A little update

[Hani]

Oh Sednaiur, just one question, how did you make that grass sizeable texture? For me when I make a texture of something, it's hard.

[Artemis008]

This looks awesome though the world map kind of confuzzeld me at first. By the way does Lowser have any connection to Bowser or is he just a parody?

[Ethereality]

It looks very interesting. The graphics are really cute! Keep up, Sednaiur!
A question about the full version will release?

[Alagirez]

A question about the full version will release?

Sorry but your question is not answerable : Nobody can predict when Lowser Conquest will release.

[Fuyu]

I'm sorry for the delay in my response, been rather tired lately to the point of doing nothing but playing games and watching anime. Anyway getting to the topic at hand, I must say I have mixed reactions right now. First of all, I should start with the positives. The trees/things BGOs have great shading, just as enemies. In fact, I can safely state that both BGOs and enemies have good shading, but if I had to pick an item in those screenshots with the best shading I'd definitely say those plant blocks look fantastically.

Now with the negatives. I don't like the sizeable. It has a really weird shape, and one of them looks like a freaking condom. The 3Dish effect (BGOs right above the blocks) you gave to it clashes with the entire environment. Furthermore, the fill on the grass tileset has the poorest of shading in your entire atelier of graphics. While I like the overall design, it's lacking that essential spark all of your other graphics have, thus looking rather bad when you put it all together.

[Sednaiur]

I finished another level, which is kind of inspired by the "Soda Lake"-level of the original SMW:

Spoiler: show

I liked to do a level like this since longer, and it was first not planned to be in the ice world, but well...here it is.
Also, there is two more levels to go, until world 8 is started on. ^^

Also a spoiler for my responses:

Spoiler: show

Aah, thanks for the reply. If you allow, I'd go into some detailed feedback in the spoiler below:

The only downsides I can count, is the "Designed for one player"-part (I don't know anything about two-player mode and how it handles certain events, like "resize section-boundaries") and the "No checkpoints in levels"-part, which, if you have read this or any of the previous pages of this thread, only goes for the first finished version of this project, as I plan to make checkpoints availiable.

Ah, that's my fault. I haven't thoroughly read through this thread. I think even if your levels are short compared to, say, some other levels seen around here on the community (5-8 minutes per playthrough), it's still a nice option for the player to have the luxury of a midpoint. SMW's levels aren't that much longer than SMB3's either ^^. I just think right now that it's a weird decision to not design around them right away, since they might end up feeling "tacked on" and kind of out of place.

I think I understand your point with this. I decided to put them in, after I have finished the levels, but with care, so it will not look put inside in the last minute. In the end, I want to give out a satisfying playing-experience. :-)

You may just be nice and wait until the project is finished and then play it or watch a playthrough of it, before you already talk about "a more appealing difficulty curve and style", since you do not even know how the episode feels while playing it. You are not one of these people judging a book by it's cover, are you? ^^

mmh you make judging by the cover very appealing with all the artwork and information you put into the first post. Of course I can't judge the gameplay myself yet, but the difficulty curve box just looked like "this project will not greatly increase in difficulty as you progress" to me. Of course I could be completely wrong, since I haven't actually played it :P

Don't worry about that - I like to have fun while designing and testplaying, which is not a given case if all the levels are stying on the same level of difficulty. :-)
To describe the difficulty a bit, I could say that it is kind of like in SMB3, but a bit easier on the beginning.

Not needing luna.lua is not a downside at all (do you realize that I work onto this project since more than 3 years now? That it still is my first project? That I may have not the time to get into any kind of .lua for now?), but here goes the same: If you read some of my posts (try the ones on this page) you see that I will use it for this project in the future. :-)

True it can't be really considered a "downside", but you can't deny that there's a lot of cool stuff that can be done with lua. Of course, like with midpoints, scripts can easily feel "tacked on" and out of place when introduced 3/4 into the episode so I respect the decision to not include it. Getting into LunaLua isn't difficult, especially if you have previous knowledge in programming. And even if not, there are a lot of people (such as myself) who are willing to help a newcomer out ^^

Of course I am not denying that luna.lua is really nice and useful. I am not really too active on the forums (I am online only around once a week) but I use some of the time to see what luna.lua can do, so I sure know about it's use. :-)
Especially the "paral-X", the shop-API, and using a custom-HUD is interesting for me. But before I take care of all that, I first need to have the most important things done - the levels themselves.

Having only two playables availiable is not necessarily bad, but I may understand your point here.
But please first think about the fact that I intend this game to be SMB3-styled, which means:
-sliding down slopes must be possible (Toad, Peach, and Link cannot slide)
-grab and hold things of any kind in front of you rather than over your head (Toad and Peach likes to hold items over their heads)
-having no checkpoints (my levels aren't that long anyways)
-no double-jumps (Toad)
-no bomb suits (Peach)
-no boomerangs (Toad)
-no glide (Peach)
-no sword which can break and kill almost everything (Link)
-no shield which guards off most projectiles (Link)
-no fairy-transformation while climbing on ladders (Link)
-no bouncing off of spikes (Link's downward sword stab)
-having only the playables from Super Mario Bros.3

And to your "Also I'm sorry to break it to you this but this episode is anything but SMB3 styled. It's just this blurry style which doesn't look good with anything 16-bit."-part.
If you take a look onto the screenshots (the ones on the toppost are enough), you clearly can see, how the levels and their look is heavily influenced by SMB3. you know, things like:
-the kind of sizables
-the way most levels are designed
-the transition pipe-levels
-the majority of the NPCs
-the style of many of the tilesets
-the worldmap and the way it is build

I do nowhere say that the graphics are taken directly from SMB3, or that everything looks like it.

Aaah I have completely misunderstood "SMB3 Styled", because usually when people talk about style they refer to the shading style on the graphics. Welp. Anyways.. I'm excited to see what you have in store to bring some cool stuff into your levels then, because to be honest that's limiting your options quite a lot.

Don't worry about that either. I should say that this project is mainly SMB3-styled, but there are also a lot of levels with other styles, that either derive from other Mario-games, or that are completely different, to give a nice surprise if the player finds them. You do not even necessarily need luna.lua for that. ^^
After all, I may like SMB3, but I am not doing this project to copy-paste SMB3 into it.

For graphical styles of any kind, I would never ask someone as graphically biased as you, to judge my or some other people's graphical styles, since you always say in a way "this has inconsistent amount of colors and more colors than 16 bit allows; therefore it is not pixel art - it is not even good", like you did in the past screenshot-thread (screenshot-thread number 8). ^^
You seem to be hating almost everything which is either -not made by you or your close friends, or -not sticking to the guidelines of "limited pixel art".

But you are right about my graphics not really fitting good with anything 16-bit, which is a reason I make all of the graphics in this and the same style. :-)

Right, I've been meaning to give proper feedback on why I think so in a while. While I still wouldn't consider it proper pixel art (not creating crisp shapes by limiting itself to a small palette), I can see how it works and why people like it.
However looking over these screens I feel like your style isn't very consistent in itself. You seem to value realistic shading and colour over the graphics looking harmonic together in a single environment. At least that's the impression I'm getting. Let me pick an example:

What I see here is three different kinds of shading styles - one for the wood and rounded metal objects, one for the wheels and tiles associated with them, and one for the ground. And especially between wheels and wood I find there to be a big difference in style, to the point where it doesn't appeal to me personally.
The wheels, in my opinion, look fantastic. They're crisp, very defined and just look awesome. The ground also works together with them and looks good, but I think the wood looks too blurry to go with the style of the ground and wheels, if you know what I mean? It's hard for me to pinpoint the issue (I have tried to adjust them so it'll look more in line with the other graphics here, but didn't manage to get it right), but I think it's that they're just too soft and round for the rest of the environment.

A similar example would be the gradient on the special blocks and some enemies. It just mixes really weirdly in my opinion.
I think your style can work if it was more harmonic. And don't get me wrong, some of what you show here does work! It's just that then there's the stuff that doesn't (I don't want to pick too many examples).

I agree with you on the wood, but I still need to update it, since the "Airship wood" is already more than 3 years old (the pipes are already updated). Back in the days I did not care about any kind of rules, but to this day I made up my own rules, to prevent myself trouble like that. :-P
I am on updating the graphics at the moment, so I may post updated screenshots of all the ones on the toppost in around one or two months.

..and this is where I can segway into reduction of colours and harmonization of palette, because really all it does is make your life easier. Constructing an universal palette like presented here which you can use for all your graphics you want to keep in the style does help a lot in picking out colours that are redundant and could be merged together, and it does provide an overview over what works well together and what doesn't.
That being said, I don't know if you have a palette like this, but if you do, I think there's a bit of colour duplication amongst your different tiles and tilesets. What comes as a result is tilesets working well and being very harmonic when put into a secluded space but they'll not quite work when combined.
You don't show a lot of instances of combination in your screenshots, so I hope you don't do it too much - really, the tank is the best example I could find - but I hope you take this advice nontheless.

It is very difficult to explain my style, while I use no set palette, I use rules to shade things and how I set up the colors. For example, I use a very desaturated dark blue as a base for my metallic-colors, but I may differ this from time to time. I for myself have no problems to recolor any of my (newer) graphics, as I know my rules. But I admit that it can be difficult for others to recolor my graphics, but this is not the priority I have for my graphics. My priorities for my graphics are:
-to let them look in a way that I and possibly others like them
-that they have consistent shading and light sources
-that they are not cheaply made, like taking a part from here - flipping it over - and putting it there
-to have some originality

Of course I am not perfect, but one thing I like to say, is that this is my hobby and that I like to celebrate it this way.
I always do my best to keep everything up to date. Being lazy is not the reason you were born in this world, I say. :-P

Ramble over. Good luck with your stuff. I'd definitely like to see you work on a small, chaotic, unstructured project at some point ;)

Thank you. Sometimes I can use a bit of luck, since my notebook-PC is already really old, and I am having shivers just by thinking of how many times I already saw someone write "Sorry folks - this project is cancelled due to my hard drive being a chunk of scrap metal" in my time in this community. xD

I was asking mostly of the gimmicks for the nuclear levels.

Also, is it possible to get an early copy to LPers such as as303298/Wraith, bossedit8, and myself? Considering the release date of this episode, you will love what I have planned during the recording of this. I will be doing multiple Play through of this episode on camera. (100% and Speed run route) I might even ask bossedit8 to Co-Screen or Co-op this with me (PGE upon release) any who, I wish you lick like. (Typographical Error was to funny).

You do not expect me to spoil every detail of some upcomming level, do you? ^^

About giving out an "early copy for LPers", I already have send AS303298 an PM about this. I will send you a PM about this topic within the next days.

How did you ever get so good Sednaiur, did you go to an art school in Japan or something?

Uh, no. xD
No art schools need to be visited to do that. Everyone can do that, if he is willing to spend the time for it. :-)
But thank you anyways - it's nice to see that you like it.

Oh Sednaiur, just one question, how did you make that grass sizeable texture? For me when I make a texture of something, it's hard.

The way I did it here, was that I first put a color (obviously :-P) then generate 5 different shades of it, color a 16x16 tile with the middle-shade, then take the darkest shade, place dots at random on the tile so that they never generate lines, then use the second-darkest shade to place dots randomly around the dots of darkest shade, and then repeat that with the brightest shade followed by the second brightest shade of the color. Everything is just kind of random with some basic rules - nothing special. :-P

This looks awesome though the world map kind of confuzzeld me at first. By the way does Lowser have any connection to Bowser or is he just a parody?

Thank you. :-D
Yes, the picture of the worldmap is way too cropped down, but I could not do it another way, sorry about that.
Lowser's connection to Bowser is him being the twinbrother of Bowser that almost no one knows about. Lowser himself though, acts really different and is not really dumb enough to just kidnap a cute princess - he sees absolutely no use in that. Lowser does not even like Bowser and his ways of ruling - he rather laughs about Bowser.
He is a parody only by the name (and many of his underlings too), but otherwise... you do not want this guy comming around your country. :-P

It looks very interesting. The graphics are really cute! Keep up, Sednaiur!
A question about the full version will release?

Thanks. :-D
I will try my best.
About a release date, I plan to release the project in around 5 to 6 months, but I cannot really promise that, sorry.

I'm sorry for the delay in my response, been rather tired lately to the point of doing nothing but playing games and watching anime. Anyway getting to the topic at hand, I must say I have mixed reactions right now. First of all, I should start with the positives. The trees/things BGOs have great shading, just as enemies. In fact, I can safely state that both BGOs and enemies have good shading, but if I had to pick an item in those screenshots with the best shading I'd definitely say those plant blocks look fantastically.

Now with the negatives. I don't like the sizeable. It has a really weird shape, and one of them looks like a freaking condom. The 3Dish effect (BGOs right above the blocks) you gave to it clashes with the entire environment. Furthermore, the fill on the grass tileset has the poorest of shading in your entire atelier of graphics. While I like the overall design, it's lacking that essential spark all of your other graphics have, thus looking rather bad when you put it all together.

There is no need to excuse yourself for not commenting. I am happy if anyone actually takes his time to leave feedback. :-)
I am happy that you like the shading and the general look of most of the stuff. I am mostly satisfied with it too, but I needed to touch up the texture of the fill for the grass-tileset, since it looked way too much like 8x8 style.

And now to the things you mentioned:
You are right about the fill, even though, you surely talk about the texture and not the shading, since this is the same as always. But I already changed the fill up, so that it looks not longer like straight out of a gameboy. Thank you for telling me about it. ^^

About the sizable, the concept of it is taken directly from SML2 from the gameboy - I just revamped and colored it. So, if you see a....condome out of one of them, you surely just watched one or two Hentai too much (you mentioned that you watched Anime, and that you are rather tired), therefore I cannot do anything for you here. I can try as hard as I want, but I do not see the by you mentioned "tool of evil demands" there. Please check the "Tree Zone - special level" for more details on the sizable and how it looks and works.
Also, the "3D-effect" you mentioned is a misinterpretation from you, since it is not meant to be an effect like this, nor is it looking like one to me. The reason why I did it like that (and Nintendo already did on the gameboy) is that it looks plain cheap and bad if the player stands in thin air, while standing on one of the sides of the sizable. This technique is also used in other Mario-games, one of them being SMB3, where this is used on many kinds of the clouds there (like the long ones in world 5), so it looks like you stand on a lower layer of the cloud in front of it's higher layer. As said, this is simply done to prevent airwalk.

Other than that, I thank you for your critism and opinion.
I hope you will feel better soon, and that you get some strength to work further onto your project. :-)

[Emral]

Ah, I see. Thanks for the response and good luck!
I apologise for being a butt back in the screens thread '^'

[Hani]

You're killing me with these graphics. They SMW inspiration from this level is very good. The corals look really good. The torpedo bills are looking nice with those red alert eyes. This level is world 2? And the seaweed is like SMW inspired with SMB3 look. NIICE. Oh and I found out it is still the ice world.
Plus, has the underwater level background the same?

[MECHDRAGON777]

I finished another level, which is kind of inspired by the "Soda Lake"-level of the original SMW:

Spoiler: show

I liked to do a level like this since longer, and it was first not planned to be in the ice world, but well...here it is.
Also, there is two more levels to go, until world 8 is started on. ^^

This looks nice, but Ice + Water? How do you do it?

[PROX]

that's not ice, that's sand

[Alagirez]

O_O
Holy Sednaiur
OMG the underwater graphics looks great! and the design looks nice (i like the torpedos, looks beautiful....)

[PROX]

Well as always, sednaiur manages to have similar ideas as me when it comes to making an underwater tileset. It looks great despite the amount of colors, but you are going for a different style, so I'll forgive it. It looks great anyways, so I would forgive it anyway lol

[Snessy the duck]

Where did you get the font you used here?

Also, i suggest making the "Talkative NPCS Contained!" box golden, and the "No gore or strong language contained!" box silver!

[h2643]

Where did you get the font you used here?

It's revamped SMB3 credits font.

[MECHDRAGON777]

Also, i suggest making the "Talkative NPCS Contained!" box golden, and the "No gore or strong language contained!" box silver!

Umm, No Strong language is a good think. ...and most people hate a lot of talkitive NPCs.

I may have no room to talk here so ce I only played on a laggy computer while Skype was running with five co-commentators and bandicam up at the same time, but the rather easy difficulty should be silver in my book, but it is fine. Easier to speed run...

[Snessy the duck]

Also, i suggest making the "Talkative NPCS Contained!" box golden, and the "No gore or strong language contained!" box silver!

Umm, No Strong language is a good think. ...and most people hate a lot of talkitive NPCs.

I may have no room to talk here so ce I only played on a laggy computer while Skype was running with five co-commentators and bandicam up at the same time, but the rather easy difficulty should be silver in my book, but it is fine. Easier to speed run...

I just thought that the golden boxes were for something included in the episode(Talkative NPCS ARE included), and silver boxes were for something NOT included in the episode(Gore or Strong language ARE NOT included).

Also, why would Sednaiur put something in his episode that most people hate?

[Ethereality]

Also, i suggest making the "Talkative NPCS Contained!" box golden, and the "No gore or strong language contained!" box silver!

Umm, No Strong language is a good think. ...and most people hate a lot of talkitive NPCs.

I may have no room to talk here so ce I only played on a laggy computer while Skype was running with five co-commentators and bandicam up at the same time, but the rather easy difficulty should be silver in my book, but it is fine. Easier to speed run...

I just thought that the golden boxes were for something included in the episode(Talkative NPCS ARE included), and silver boxes were for something NOT included in the episode(Gore or Strong language ARE NOT included).

Also, why would Sednaiur put something in his episode that most people hate?

You know what, the episode has contains graphics SMB3 belongs to Sednaiur? I already knew. You like "Lowser's Conquest" project is very good? I think it's good.

[MECHDRAGON777]

Also, i suggest making the "Talkative NPCS Contained!" box golden, and the "No gore or strong language contained!" box silver!

Umm, No Strong language is a good think. ...and most people hate a lot of talkitive NPCs.

I may have no room to talk here so ce I only played on a laggy computer while Skype was running with five co-commentators and bandicam up at the same time, but the rather easy difficulty should be silver in my book, but it is fine. Easier to speed run...

I just thought that the golden boxes were for something included in the episode(Talkative NPCS ARE included), and silver boxes were for something NOT included in the episode(Gore or Strong language ARE NOT included).

Also, why would Sednaiur put something in his episode that most people hate?

It is gold be cause it is good that it has no gore and vowel language.

[Snessy the duck]

Umm, No Strong language is a good think. ...and most people hate a lot of talkitive NPCs.

I may have no room to talk here so ce I only played on a laggy computer while Skype was running with five co-commentators and bandicam up at the same time, but the rather easy difficulty should be silver in my book, but it is fine. Easier to speed run...

I just thought that the golden boxes were for something included in the episode(Talkative NPCS ARE included), and silver boxes were for something NOT included in the episode(Gore or Strong language ARE NOT included).

Also, why would Sednaiur put something in his episode that most people hate?

You know what, the episode has contains graphics SMB3 belongs to Sednaiur? I already knew. You like "Lowser's Conquest" project is very good? I think it's good.

What are you even talking about?

That has nothing to do with the quote. (I do like the project!)

[Sednaiur]

After I found some interesting new things (thanks to H2643 for telling us about the unused NPCs and blocks in SMBX ^^) to play with http://www.smbxgame.com/forums/v ... =69&t=2130, I mostly finished my updated worldmap-graphics.
Here are some screens of it:

Spoiler: show

I removed all the black outlines from the levels and sceneries, so they look less out of place to me. I also added two new textures to the worldmap-tiles, so not everything looks like sand dunes. :-P
The only thing left now, is to use all the new sceneries (35 in number) to spice up the look a bit more. :-D
And with this update, my project starts to use a lot of new things, like more paths (look at the colors of the paths on the screenshots ^^), levels, tiles, sceneries, blocks, and BGOs. I finally could implement all the tiles needed for my pipes, since I can now use 62 new blocks. It is nothing too serious, but still very nice to have, and it gives more room for creativity.

A spoiler for my responses:

Spoiler: show

Ah, I see. Thanks for the response and good luck!
I apologise for being a butt back in the screens thread '^'

Thank you.
Don't worry about it anymore.

You're killing me with these graphics. They SMW inspiration from this level is very good. The corals look really good. The torpedo bills are looking nice with those red alert eyes. This level is world 2? And the seaweed is like SMW inspired with SMB3 look. NIICE. Oh and I found out it is still the ice world.
Plus, has the underwater level background the same?

Thank you, even though, I don't think that graphics can kill you that easily. xD
Yes, "red alert-eyes" hits it good, as this was what I thought when designing them. And no, that level is from world 7. :-)

O_O
Holy Sednaiur
OMG the underwater graphics looks great! and the design looks nice (i like the torpedos, looks beautiful....)

Thanks a lot. ^^
I guess I am not too good when it comes to design water-levels, but maybe I improved a bit since my last underwater-level.

Well as always, sednaiur manages to have similar ideas as me when it comes to making an underwater tileset. It looks great despite the amount of colors, but you are going for a different style, so I'll forgive it. :P It looks great anyways, so I would forgive it anyway lol

Yes, these tiles are some of my oldest graphics, but I think they are still okay for the time they got made. :-P
I cannot remember anymore where I got the inspiration from anymore, though.
I am happy that you like them anyways, so thank you. :-3

Umm, No Strong language is a good think. ...and most people hate a lot of talkitive NPCs.

I may have no room to talk here so ce I only played on a laggy computer while Skype was running with five co-commentators and bandicam up at the same time, but the rather easy difficulty should be silver in my book, but it is fine. Easier to speed run...

I don't think that people "hate" talkative NPCs, but rather that let's players dislike them, since they break down their progress. :-P
But of course it is all a matter of preferrence, and I like it when NPCs say more than just one line everytime again. Also, since you do not need to speak to the NPCs, there should be no problem with that either, I guess.

You know what, the episode has contains graphics SMB3 belongs to Sednaiur? I already knew. You like "Lowser's Conquest" project is very good? I think it's good.

I am sorry but I did not understand what you said here. :-/

Thanks for all the comments and interest in my project :-)