Brood War LD Screenshots revealed and interview

On August 14 2016 01:41 Wrath wrote:
Is that Pokemon?

On August 16 2016 09:40 CardinalAllin wrote:
The tileset is made from scratch, pixel by pixel. It’s a work in progress but you get a taste.
Ofcourse its heavily inspired by Pokemon 3rd gen, Zelda, Mario etc and I used them as reference. The tree is similar to Zelda Minish Cap for example.

This is a brand new tileset though. New patterns, new transition edges, new palette. Making sure all the edges of the tiles match up properly with smooth transitions is quite tricky. Im using less colours overall as well. I could have done it in a different style; indeed Ive studied many different games. But I chose to do it like this because its attractive, timeless, space efficient/information dense, and readable from a ‘hella tight gameplay’/esport point of view.
Infact Ive tried to push that last point a lot while hopefully still retaining some aesthetic qualities.

For example; Ive designed the tileset so that a scene can be rotated upside down or sideways and you could then refresh the visuals and the map would still function which is not how the other tilesets work. They have a lot of tiles where different things overlap (which looks great but only works from one angle). And they have tiles where you can walk but you wouldn’t be able to if it was inverted. So Ive tried to make that clearer without falling back on invisible walls or anything.
The original style could work in a multiplayer game where it was always left vs right spawns and in a game where you cant manipulate terrain. But I want the tiles to work even if its top vs bottom spawns and in games where players can manipulate the terrain (think 2d Minecraft). Note the house tiles are just included in here for show (they are my own palette but the style isnt compatible with fully player buildable terrain necessarily). Also the paving tiles are not very different from the originals in terms of pattern.

Another example; if you look at the fencing on the second picture you can see its very versatile. The pokemon tileset cant do complex configurations like this as they only made the basic directional change tiles. Also its vertical fence lines are offcentre which creates problems. Overall it means the pokemon fence tiles only work if you use simple fixed shapes that the player cant alter ingame.

The colours that are currently being used are very high saturation and will probably need a revisit.

On August 18 2016 18:36 fLyiNgDroNe wrote:
Its retarded that Blizzard spends resources on this, i dont understand, how many people are there with such hardware that cannot run regular starcraft? Who are they doing this for?! Graphics are so bad, i dont understand.

On August 18 2016 18:38 gingerfluffmuff wrote:

Gotta milk that TI-92 crowd, which got left behind by all that other major AAA studios

Also consider how many pre pentium computer there are still out there, like in nuclear power plants, metall factories and old train controlling computers

Imo doing 16 bit is a big mistake, 8 bit would have been better. no one needs 16 bit really