Indiana Jones old-school

[Guybrush379]

Hey guys, I made this room for my adventure, it's the first room in which Indy appears, "Henry House". The story takes place after Last Crusade actually so I decided to rebuilt and draw the house with my own style (ripping some little elements from the original version also). What do you think? It's my first attempt in digital colouring. It's not completed yet, I want to refine edges with paint and of course the other details like books, objects.



I've used this method:

-Draw and marked the lines then scan.
-Colouring with photoshop
-Made it 8-bit 256 VGA with the same Indy palette

The original drawing is better looking, anyway I want to use 256 like in Last Crusade. Do you know how to preserve at best the image making it pixel art? Thanks

[EchosofNezhyt]

Not too shabby.

Props to sticking with the old school and stuff, If your re-sizing your drawings for pixel art use nearest neighbor as the resize option.

For best looking redraw it at that resolution

[Khris]

Actually, since this isn't really Pixel Art (it's a matter of definition, but to me, Pixel Art means you place each pixel using a fixed, low color palette), I'd go the "draw it at a high resolution, then scale it down to 320" route without using nearest neighbor scaling or a limited palette.

There's a clear benefit to doing a low-res game, but there's no obvious reason for downgrading art to a 256 color palette. It servers no purpose unless you actually do a 256 game because you want color-cycling (sacrificing transparency in the process). Also, the method you've used is flawed; the dithering is too uniform and there's noise in the picture everywhere (color noise near dark parts, and artifacts in the white parts).

There's also a big difference to the Indy3 backgrounds: black outlines.

My point is: since you aren't even trying to copy the Indy3 style 100%, why stick to its limitations? I'd either try to recreate the rather beautiful background art of Indy3 or, failing that, use 16bit backgrounds.
It's pretty much impossible to create something that looks like Pixel Art without actually pixeling it.

[Guybrush379]

Thanks for advices. Well, the point is that of course is impossible to me drawing in pixel art, making all the outlines with different colors. This way is maybe a bit odd looking but I find easy and quick to do with photoshop. I don't want to copy, just make some fast backgrounds for an adventure. What I really want is learning the scripting part or maybe some who can traduce what I want to do in a particular scene or cutscenes.

Learning the scripting by myself is really hard I think, but for the moment if I'm able to make Indy move, change rooms, talk, take objects I will be very happy

@Khris: When you do high res background shadows and lot of brushes are important, quite a big time needed to do a scene, even if of course is better looking.

I've resized the big scanned and coloured image to fit the 320x200 area, which is the nearest neighbor option? I just used ctrl+t

[EchosofNezhyt]

Control T will use your default Photoshop interpolation technique.

You can go to Image>Imagesize and at the bottom is nearest neighbor.

But if your re-sizing like what you have above it might be better to stick with BiCubic Sharper/Bicubic

Like the drawing im doing at the moment is 320x 240 but in game I double the size so when I scale it I use the nearest neighbor cause it will translate it up with out messing with the pixels.

I find that pixel art is more time consuming then higher res stuff, Though I feel both are pretty different.

As for the scripting stuff I have very little knowledge of coding/scripting and I haven't had any problems doing anything I wanted to do yet.

Good Luck.

[Khris]

Like I said, do whatever gets the art done. The outlines are fine, and so is the resizing, all I recommended was to ditch the color reduction.
Photoshop won't use nearest-neighbor unless you specifically tell it to, like FritoMaster explained.

[Guybrush379]

I've completed the background with just some corrections to some lines, added the objects. 256 palette fits nicely the sprites I'm going to use (the ones from Last Crusade) but I'd like to create mines too. Maybe for panorama views or that kind of things some more photoshop is a must.

[EchosofNezhyt]

Edit: The book cases look nice being filled in an all.