General Project Thread & Feedback

You have your opinion, many others have different ones, those of us on staff included. What we do agree on is that image is the very foundation of S2HD; we are constantly looking for way to incorporate the subtle details it brings to mind. If you still believe that the game looks like a half-assed flash title when the alpha is released, so be it. I can guarantee there will be far more who will be pleased with the progress made. And there have been far more of those expressing their opinions on the project positively than those detracting it.

 

Sidestepping the issue at hand, pulling the 'troll' card, citing opinion. Well done.

I don't doubt that by the time the next page rolls over, such tools will have seen to it that there are no shakeups in direction and development, no improvements in qualty. Good to see you're consistent at least.

 

I'll be waiting for the second round of opinions from other sources around the internet, myself - mainly because I can't bring myself to give a shit otherwise.

 

What do you hope to achieve by ranting about the art style of S2HD?

 

Hope? Not a lot. I know nothing will be achieved in the end. Just needed to let off steam is all. BlastProcessing said it best; waiting for the second round of Internet feedback would be best. I'm still calling it, that there will be waves of 'meh' and generally not being impressed.

 

Well then thanks for dropping by to fog up the windows. Just like you 'know' the project will be a failure, we're confident in its success.

What do you say we call a truce on this and follow through with what Blast said?

 

I thought I just did. But don't expect to ask for feedback and not get the occasional tirade. It's all part and parcel, k?

 

Constructive feedback should not consist of blantanty attacking something. Besides, people are most likely to listen to you when you're nice about what you say and do.

 

Oh now come off it. I was constructive enough. Should I condense the useful parts of my post for you?

• Lots of manual gradients looks extremely amateurish
• Digital painting would produce a result much more pleasing on the eye
• The 'team' have forgotten the very image the inspired this project into being, ergo is a dull shadow if it's inspiration
• The more persistent feedback is always written off as 'trolling' without any actual improvements being made (HENCE THIS HERE DISCUSSION)
• The direction is mislead to say the least, attempting to look like a game it looks absolutely nothing like

OH WAIT, DID THE OCCASIONAL AND SPARSELY-PLACED SWEAR INVALIDATE MY POINTS COMPLETELY?

 

For the record, I don't think a step back toward the style of the original inspiration picture would be a bad idea at all. Your concerns are legitimate concerns. Especially as far as bosses and other machine-type things go. We need a little push back in the right direction. And that's something I can work on myself, too, with the EHZ boss and whatever projects I take on after that.

Even so, Jayextee, you seem to be wasting way too much of your energy berating the S2HD staff. I mean really. If it looks like it's not achieving anything, it probably won't.

 

I agree fullheartly with what Jayextee has said here. Unlike him, though, I'll probably download and play the final version anyways. :v:

 

Gradients have their place in art. I myself haven't used many gradients except when there's a spot where I really would just be wasting time doing it without a gradient.

Digital painting is being used for some parts of the game, and if you think all of that image that started this all was entirely painted digitally, you're a fool. I see plenty of gradients on that image, and I honestly don't like the way they're used. I understand the purpose, but I don't care for the execution.

Something else about that image that started it all is that it uses a ton of textures. So if we were to follow it suite, we should use some textures, right? Too bad every time we try to do something like that it's shot down by you guys.

The most persistent feedback usually involves us completely changing something that would render most everything done for the project useless and would be a waste of time at this point. Besides, the "persistent" feedback always seems to mellow out after a short time.

As for you thinking this doesn't look like a sonic game so far, I'm afraid I can't help you there. I think this is gonna be great to see in motion.

 

oh, I think motion is another issue in it's entirety, I'm afraid.

 

Go on....

 

I never said the opposite. I said that lots of them look amateurish, and I don't see much of the art, especially the main characters/badniks without one, even a manual one ("uber" shading )

You're probably coming from Vincent's opinion that King of Fighters XII looks awful. It does not, and is digitally painted. I believe I'm not the first to think Vincent's eyes must have been malfunctioning when he decided KOFXII looked "a pixellated mess" or whatever term he used.

Not a thing I ever did. Seriously, you can read through the entirety of this thread if you like (I read the first 50 pages earlier, to recap... and to try and see what went wrong exactly). I do notice I was pretty pro-active in nominating Vincent as Project Leader, though. Regrettably.

But I'll not sidestep the actual point with "what I said/didn't say" bullshit; one of the things the artisans of this project failed to realise was that the AlchemistDefined wallpaper was in essence a concept image. And before any work was done (people leapt right in with Sonic and ring sprites. WTF? That's like making the wheels before the fucking car) more should have been done, of other zones; experimenting with styles (because nice as the original wallpaper was, never rule out that a thing can be improved). I suggested this A LOT, but when the 'Concept Images' thread was instated, much work was already done, and little-to-no actual experimentation went on with styles, techniques et al. Team just found a niche, and made a big fat ass-groove it wouldn't shift out of.

Yes and yes. Firstly because the project has adopted a 'bottom up' approach to design which makes it very hard to establish some kind of coherent vision, not least without taking an age on every little piece of art, going through a great many iterations, clumsily finding; trial-by-error; which fits with the other drawn artworks. Professional designers work from the top down, generating concept images, sketches, mood and story boards, and mockups which later inform the separate pieces of art. Evidently, this is not a concept which has been generally well understood throughout the entirety of S2HD's development.

The feedback mellows out after a short time because it's pretty tiring arguing the same points and getting the same subjective defenses and sidesteps. This is akin to suggesting improvements to a "coloured pencils manga fanart" deviantART fan-artist (oh, that analogy again. Tell me it's not relevant; I'm finding all the convenient agumentative sidesteps so you don't have to) receiving uncomfortably truthful (occasionally hurtful) feedback and having their army of fantards back them up with absolutely nothing substantial. It gets tiring. We try to help, we fail, we give up, and nothing was achieved.

The fact that BlastProcessing, Chimpo and myself (amongst others) keep returning to try and 'steer' the project shows that we want it to succeed, or not to suck as hard at least. But your constant pushing away makes it very hard for us to want to.

Again, I never said this. If you want my definitive opinion in this matter, here it is.

This sure looks like an amateurish digital trace.

Looks like a Sonic game, sure. A hi-res fangame. Sure, the resolution is being improved. But the definition sure isn't.

Again;

Do you want that the detractors stay in this thread and attempt to whup y'all into shape? Nah, I bet you can't wait till we tire of arguing our points so you can get back to whatever it is you were doing, having learned nothing.

 

At the end of the day we ARE amateurs none of us are working for some big game company (at least I don't think anyone is) we don't have any funding , we are doing this because we want to. everyone else I have shown irl thinks its freaking awesome. I think we re doing pretty good to say what resources we have.

 

Kind of sidestepping the issue, there.

No, I'm not getting involved. I think the original DEZ "concept" is crap as it is.

 

As do I

the picture bought up talk about the project, I just see it as the picture that inspired us to start this project.

 

Im sorry Jay, but not every member of the team work with vectors... Cornet and I, for example. I work on high resolutions (like 5000 x 5000 at 300dpi) and I do everything painting with my tablet... Every staff member knows that Im just crazy doing everything manual with my shitty tablet, you can look at my Egg-mobile, there is A LOT of manual shading there (and Im not talking about gradients, but of the highlights, shades and shadows)

Cornet for example, he uses a nice airbrushing technic for doing backgrounds at a high res like me I suppose, the "Standards for the project" are just to guide new people there, you can keep a consistent art style while drawing too...

I don't even use Illustrator...just Photoshop and Sai Paint tool for some things out there ^^U


Look guys the "uberized" thing is not what people even thinks... uberizing the sprites is not just making the sprites use nice gradients...is just doing them nice to the eyes, Vinc corrected the sprites two times before finishing them... Double effort of course... Well actually we don't follow the exact sprites sometimes, for example, I made some metal cuts in the egg-o-matic and changed some things, added screws, detail, and that is nice in a high res piece.

 

May I suggest for the ones who want to do it their way, start their *own* version of Sonic 2HD [or if they like, try a different Sonic game], and we'll see what theirs looks like after a year or so.

If we can't compromise on 2 completely different methods, then why not try 2 different projects?


A little bit of competition won't hurt now, would it?