Thanks very much for the input
Mr. Pink. As always, your views are well thought out and much appreciated. I guess I'm going to look into commissioning some painted box art.
As for visual style and color, that's something I'm still working on. Regarding a topic I brought up over in the
Codex Workshop, but discussed at a different
site, someone gave me this critique:
I think those mountains do match the surroundings (trees, buildings), just that there's a massive juxtaposition with the harsh black outline which makes it look like the 1-person amateur style that you're recognising you have; that style matches simpler mountains that also look 1-person amateur.
That phrase "1-person amateur" was kind of a wake-up call for me. I've put a lot of effort into the game, but it still definitely has that 1-person amateur look. It's a little frustrating for me because art direction is outside my skillset, and as a more technical person I just want to develop the game, adding features and fixing bugs. But deep down, I know that the look of the game is every bit as important as the gameplay. So for the last week or two I've been trying really hard to at least bring the palette together.
I'm studying the UIs of other games...
...the palettes of other games...
...studying and trying to use color grading...
...and now I think I might try putting together a post-processing screen-space pixelizing shader. I think I'm also going to ditch the Sobel edge again. (It's the Borderlands-ish dark outline around things.) It's just more trouble than it's worth.
In the end though, it's like I can see where the problems are, I can see what I would like my end state to be, but I'm just not sure what the exact steps are in order to get there.
I'll keep working on it though.
Oh, and by the way, in the bottom row in the color-grading screenshot, that's a hexagon-shaped rock that I made in World Machine. I think today I'm going to try making a whole hexed map. Last night I finished up a little experiment that I'll need to explain:
I had World Machine make me a UDK Landscape that was covered in small hexagon-shaped hills. Or actually, they're actually pretty big hills. The blue and white hexagons are the same size as the hexagon cells in previous screenshots, and the landscape vertex density is the same as the vertex density in the screenshots above. That map that I had World Machine generate is big enough for 3 days of in-game travel. (I figured the player would travel 3 hexes per hour, 12 hours per day, if he doesn't get sidetracked, get into battles, or travel through rough terrain.) The landscape tiles are exactly 3x too big for the in-game hexagon cell objects. That means that with this size of landscape I can either give the maps 3x the tiles without sacrificing vertex density, or I could give the maps 3x the vertex density (by shrinking the landscape).