Faces Update (+ Big Beta Download) (Patreon)

Hello! I know I said that I was going to take a few days off-- but I ended up spending all day today and yesterday working on something that I really owe you guys... FACES!

I have made too many updates on the faces over the past year, and I haven't really delivered much.

The big reason for this is that I keep changing the style-- I'm never happy with what I have! It's no secret that higher-res illustrations are a bit out of my comfort zone: I prefer to deal with "game-pieces" like sprite animations or tilesets. So the faces have been a challenge for me, especially since I really don't want to release something that I think isn't up to a standard of quality.

I have (AGAIN) come up with something new, which I think will be the final style to deliver on the faces...

I'll get into a preview of that a little bit later on in this post...

But first, here's a big fat download of faces:

• FACES BETA for Patrons (.zip download)

These are a previous style that I'm calling "beta art" for the final faces set. The download includes 104 faces (the characters from the base character pack and the monsters expansion pack).

There are multiple problems with these-- notably they are very cartoony, blurry from awkward down-scaling, and the colors don't really match well with the Time Fantasy palette.

Still, they're HERE-- and you are welcome to use them as placeholders for the time being, until the final set is ready for release.

Now-- what WILL the "final" faces look like?

This is the process that I've settled on over the past couple of days:

These are (step 1) painted in photoshop at the final resolution (48x48) so that we can avoid the issue of awkward down-scaling. Then (step 2), they are exported with a limited color count that photoshop handles automatically-- somewhere between 16 and 24 colors, depending on the face. Finally (step 3), I clean them up manually at the pixel-art level. You can see the final results in the third column of the image.

Pretty sure this will be the final look for the faces! These are more in line with the Time Fantasy style, and use the same basic color-feel, so they won't look out of place like the beta faces above.

Please let me know your thoughts, on these final faces and/or on the beta ones.

---

Anyways, now that the Japan set is finished: these faces will be my priority for the next release. I have hopes to finish them before the year is over -- but there are a lot of them, so we'll see...

Anyway, I'll be back later this week with something new. The month is young, so keep the requests coming.

Thanks!