Magicville

Miscellaneous Forums/Blitz Showcase/Magicville

The forum is locked. These are the original blitzbasic.com forums, kept so they can still be read. No new topics, replies or edits can be made here. To join in, head over to the Blitz3D+ forums.

It's coming along. Here are my suggestions.

The candle base started out being too narrow which made the candle look too big. Now the candle and candle basea are both too narrow, it looks like it will fall over. I suggest having a thicker candle base and reverting to the original candle, or closer to it.

Your candle wick needs to be a light, not a piece of yellow fuzz. You need to give it a realtime glow, a flicker, and animate it. It needs to look light a bright light, not a totally unemissive patch of yellow.

Your candle base does not have the right contrast compared to the rest of the scene and makes it look washed out. The darks are not dark enough and the wood color is unnatural - looks like you colorized it and added too much saturation or something.

The perspective of your candle base and other objects provide the sense of perspective of the scene and this contradicts the perspective of the floor in the background which, as a result, looks like it is sloping upwards into the distance. The back wall of the room should be seated about half as far up the screen, based on the table's perspective.

You need more color in your game board objects. Purple and yellow do complement each other but there's too much of it. The game border needs more shape - add some fancy corners or texture or something, and there's too much green to it. Your coins also look dull and too green - would prefer a more goldy orangey shiny yellow.

Also because your room and table are lit and shadowed and your game board has no lighting or shadowing, it makes it look relatively unlit and thus dull. It could do with a spotlight or better specular highlights on the cell edges or something. It is too uniform, makes it look like there is only ambient light and no directional light, which contradicts the room and the shading of the objects.

At the moment the warm orange of your candle base overpowers all of the colors on the game board - reds make things appear to come closer to you. It pushes the game board back and makes it seem lifeless. I also think that perhaps the icons on each tile are too small. You are trying to go with detail by having them be 3d rendered but that's not a good idea if the user has to focus hard to see what the details are. I think there's too much blank space between objects.

Also this might be a personal thing but if a scene does not have a good reference of what `white` is in terms of levels of brightness, and similarly for black, then it seems to lack contrast overall and seems dull. I like to see a well balanced palette with good saturation. Your little green potion bottles are such a washed out color. The pages of your books are dull and not white enough - they probably compete with the white bowls. I think the hourglass timers are too detailed and the emblem on the coins looks satanic. No offence ;-)

I'm also puzzled by the sunglasses near the bottom of the screen, they look way too contemporary and modern, which seems odd in the otherwise old-age kind of atmosphere.

I think you also need somewhere on the screen some kind of word - maybe the title of the game, or of the part of the game you're playing, or something. People like to see numbers and letters. A logo? Compared to something like Inca Quest, visually, it's not quite up to par.

The pages on the book on the table are a strange attempt to make them look aged, the color tone is too even across the pages. They should probably look like more of a light tan, whitish, with dirt or whatever, perhaps a bit better textured.

All in all though it's pretty good. Keep up the good work.