great work! It definitely looks alot better now! The gradient was a good choice for the background. It adds some texture without competing too much with the foreground.
Tuesday, January 2, 2018 - 09:28
Hi all!
Just wanted to say I haven't abandoned this project yet.
I am down the path of proper index palette support and palette editing, but I can see it's a much bigger change than I had originally anticipated. In a nut shell, the whole thing is based off the idea of matching RGB color values and switching it out to match color indices instead is non-trivial operation. So those features are definitely going to take a while longer to come about.
That being the case, I have gone ahead and rolled a small update (Version 1.3) that contains just the GUI changes (zoom/pan) that surt had petitioned for (one-to-one panning, scroll wheel zoom, true zoom %, etc).
I have been using the tool quite a bit as I work on stuff for my current game project. It's sort of worked it's way into my tool chain. I find it kind of liberating actually. When creating something, I no longer worry too much about getting the colors exactly right, I just focus on getting the general look and number of color right, then I'll go back and use the tool quickly preview a bunch of different coloring options and choose the best one.
I also find it very handy for tuning two pieces to work well together. For example, maybe you have a cave wall tile from one tileset and a floor tile from a different tileset, with a little color shifting, they can usually be made to match well enough to work as a new combination.
Well, I guess I'm just tooting my own horn here, so I'll stop now. Suffice to say, I find this tool pretty handy and am thankful for everybody's help and input on it.
@BenMcLean: thanks for the feedback! You're right, the lettering on the x360 is a bit washed out. I think I was trying to mimic the 'clear shiny plastic' look on the actual x360 controller buttons. In hindsight, they probably would benefit from more contrast on the letters. Of course, re-coloring them should be no big deal. Just for fun, I went ahead and re-colored them to Dawnbringer's 32 and 16 color palettes. The Y is still a bit tough, but the other buttons are indeed much improved.
Just a thought, but if your main desire is to make the music, want not make a game where the music is more central to the experience? Like a dancing prancing knights game or something?
I don't want to discourage you, but I do think any kind of city/empire building game would be difficult to create in the time frame you suggest. At least for me personally anyway. I'd also add that it seems like a large commitement if your main interest is in composing music for the game.
I suppose even if you kept the same genre you could still work out a way to make it more directly about the music. Something where you control the towns people only indirectly by choosing what music to play. Fast driving music makes them work hard, slow jams make them procreate, etc. Part of the challenge would be recruiting new bards to come to town which would bring new song/instrument options with them. Well something like that anyway.
I guess my overall advice would be, if you really are mainly interested in making the music, then I'd try to make the game about the music. Otherwise, you're going to spend alot of time making the game and not much time doing the thing you want, making the music.
@VinnNo.0: Wow! That's pretty amazing to hear as not only was 'WitchyBizness' one of my favorites from the jam, I also thought it was among the most polished entries. It certainly had more shine to it than my effort! Really liked how the opening menu was 'playable', very nice touch! Great job especially for a first ever public showing, keep at it, I think you've got touch! :)
Yay! Congrats to Red Voxel! That was well earned! Arrows of Love really had it all, a great concept and solid execution!
And congrats to everyone else, you guys really did a great job showcasing all the different things that can be done with all the wonderful art up here on OpenGameArt!
Finally, I'm not sure on the ettiquite around such things, but I just wanted to toss out MedicineStorm's "Celestite" as my personal favorite from the competition. Really cool idea, would love to see it developed further! There's something very satisfying about working out the right path for those cosmic lasers!
Played and rated everything. Lots of good stuff! You guys all did a great job! Special thanks to chasergaming for setting everything up!
I thought the itch.io interface worked really well. Very smooth, had never thought about how an online game jam should work, but they seem to have gotten it just about right.
My only feedback on the jam itself would be that next time we should find some way to let the public writ large vote. Perhaps some kind of 'People's Choice' award of something. I am guessing there's alot of ways that could go horribly wrong, but at the same time, it'd be great if non-contestants could participate somehow. There are lots of folks on OGA who only do art, or just wouldn't have time to make a game for the jam, and it would be great to include them in the process somehow.
Oh dear. In my entry credits are just shown when you quit/close the window. They're just sort of tossed up and you can either watch them or hit escape/close window again to quit right away. Hope that's enough. Honestly I only did it this way because I was crunching and ran out of time to do a proper title menu with a credits option. Of course, full credits are also listed in the readme file.
> mouse panning in image-space rather than screen-space is certainly in the "oh god it's so painful, it hurts to use it" category. Better not to use the mouse for panning at all in that case.
...
> If the program tells me the preview is at 100% zoom then I absolutely expect that to be the case
Gotcha, I was asking so I could properly prioritize working on it vs adding new features. As it happens, they were both pretty easy fixes, just a bit of math to convert things around. And you're right, it's much better now. Funny, I wouldn't have said either of these really bothered me the way they were, but using it with them fixed that I can see why you'd find the old way annoying.
Thanks again for the feedback!
I've been working on adding 'palette modify/add/edit' features and want to wait until they're ready before rolling up a new build. Hope you're ok waiting that long for the zoom/pan fixes.
> I won't even mention scrollbars for 2D scrolling
lol, yeah these are also % based. I have tweaked them slightly since the last build (they now stay on the edges of the preview area instead of hugging the preview image itself), but it's unlikely they'll ever look (or work) like the ones in your mock up. Programming a proper scrollbar that resizes itself accoring the image and the zoom level is simply way out of scope for this project. A sad artifact of the whole GUI being strictly home-brewed instead of using a proper GUI toolkit and a good lesson in why rolling your own is never really the right idea...
@Evert:
Linux build is not out of the question. Code base is entirely C# and SDL which makes a Linux port theoretically possible. The key issue is time. My plan is to finish my current game project and then spend some time porting the engine to Linux, at which point a Linux port of PixelPaletteTool would be possible also. But my current game project has been under development for 3 years and counting now, so it might be a while...
great work! It definitely looks alot better now! The gradient was a good choice for the background. It adds some texture without competing too much with the foreground.
Hi all!
Just wanted to say I haven't abandoned this project yet.
I am down the path of proper index palette support and palette editing, but I can see it's a much bigger change than I had originally anticipated. In a nut shell, the whole thing is based off the idea of matching RGB color values and switching it out to match color indices instead is non-trivial operation. So those features are definitely going to take a while longer to come about.
That being the case, I have gone ahead and rolled a small update (Version 1.3) that contains just the GUI changes (zoom/pan) that surt had petitioned for (one-to-one panning, scroll wheel zoom, true zoom %, etc).
You can find the update here:
http://withthelove.com/ppt/
For itch.io fans, I've also added a proper itch.io page for the project here:
https://capbros.itch.io/pixelpalettetool
I have been using the tool quite a bit as I work on stuff for my current game project. It's sort of worked it's way into my tool chain. I find it kind of liberating actually. When creating something, I no longer worry too much about getting the colors exactly right, I just focus on getting the general look and number of color right, then I'll go back and use the tool quickly preview a bunch of different coloring options and choose the best one.
I also find it very handy for tuning two pieces to work well together. For example, maybe you have a cave wall tile from one tileset and a floor tile from a different tileset, with a little color shifting, they can usually be made to match well enough to work as a new combination.
Well, I guess I'm just tooting my own horn here, so I'll stop now. Suffice to say, I find this tool pretty handy and am thankful for everybody's help and input on it.
@LucaProject: Grafx 2 is another popular option.
http://pulkomandy.tk/projects/GrafX2
@BenMcLean: thanks for the feedback! You're right, the lettering on the x360 is a bit washed out. I think I was trying to mimic the 'clear shiny plastic' look on the actual x360 controller buttons. In hindsight, they probably would benefit from more contrast on the letters. Of course, re-coloring them should be no big deal. Just for fun, I went ahead and re-colored them to Dawnbringer's 32 and 16 color palettes. The Y is still a bit tough, but the other buttons are indeed much improved.
Just a thought, but if your main desire is to make the music, want not make a game where the music is more central to the experience? Like a dancing prancing knights game or something?
I don't want to discourage you, but I do think any kind of city/empire building game would be difficult to create in the time frame you suggest. At least for me personally anyway. I'd also add that it seems like a large commitement if your main interest is in composing music for the game.
I suppose even if you kept the same genre you could still work out a way to make it more directly about the music. Something where you control the towns people only indirectly by choosing what music to play. Fast driving music makes them work hard, slow jams make them procreate, etc. Part of the challenge would be recruiting new bards to come to town which would bring new song/instrument options with them. Well something like that anyway.
I guess my overall advice would be, if you really are mainly interested in making the music, then I'd try to make the game about the music. Otherwise, you're going to spend alot of time making the game and not much time doing the thing you want, making the music.
@VinnNo.0: Wow! That's pretty amazing to hear as not only was 'WitchyBizness' one of my favorites from the jam, I also thought it was among the most polished entries. It certainly had more shine to it than my effort! Really liked how the opening menu was 'playable', very nice touch! Great job especially for a first ever public showing, keep at it, I think you've got touch! :)
Yay! Congrats to Red Voxel! That was well earned! Arrows of Love really had it all, a great concept and solid execution!
And congrats to everyone else, you guys really did a great job showcasing all the different things that can be done with all the wonderful art up here on OpenGameArt!
Finally, I'm not sure on the ettiquite around such things, but I just wanted to toss out MedicineStorm's "Celestite" as my personal favorite from the competition. Really cool idea, would love to see it developed further! There's something very satisfying about working out the right path for those cosmic lasers!
Played and rated everything. Lots of good stuff! You guys all did a great job!
Special thanks to chasergaming for setting everything up!
I thought the itch.io interface worked really well. Very smooth, had never thought about how an online game jam should work, but they seem to have gotten it just about right.
My only feedback on the jam itself would be that next time we should find some way to let the public writ large vote. Perhaps some kind of 'People's Choice' award of something. I am guessing there's alot of ways that could go horribly wrong, but at the same time, it'd be great if non-contestants could participate somehow. There are lots of folks on OGA who only do art, or just wouldn't have time to make a game for the jam, and it would be great to include them in the process somehow.
Oh dear. In my entry credits are just shown when you quit/close the window. They're just sort of tossed up and you can either watch them or hit escape/close window again to quit right away. Hope that's enough. Honestly I only did it this way because I was crunching and ran out of time to do a proper title menu with a credits option. Of course, full credits are also listed in the readme file.
> mouse panning in image-space rather than screen-space is certainly in the "oh god it's so painful, it hurts to use it" category. Better not to use the mouse for panning at all in that case.
...
> If the program tells me the preview is at 100% zoom then I absolutely expect that to be the case
Gotcha, I was asking so I could properly prioritize working on it vs adding new features. As it happens, they were both pretty easy fixes, just a bit of math to convert things around. And you're right, it's much better now. Funny, I wouldn't have said either of these really bothered me the way they were, but using it with them fixed that I can see why you'd find the old way annoying.
Thanks again for the feedback!
I've been working on adding 'palette modify/add/edit' features and want to wait until they're ready before rolling up a new build. Hope you're ok waiting that long for the zoom/pan fixes.
> I won't even mention scrollbars for 2D scrolling
lol, yeah these are also % based. I have tweaked them slightly since the last build (they now stay on the edges of the preview area instead of hugging the preview image itself), but it's unlikely they'll ever look (or work) like the ones in your mock up. Programming a proper scrollbar that resizes itself accoring the image and the zoom level is simply way out of scope for this project. A sad artifact of the whole GUI being strictly home-brewed instead of using a proper GUI toolkit and a good lesson in why rolling your own is never really the right idea...
@Evert:
Linux build is not out of the question. Code base is entirely C# and SDL which makes a Linux port theoretically possible. The key issue is time. My plan is to finish my current game project and then spend some time porting the engine to Linux, at which point a Linux port of PixelPaletteTool would be possible also. But my current game project has been under development for 3 years and counting now, so it might be a while...
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