coyotecraft
Sponsor
Mismatched art
Like wearing socks with sandals.
Fangames aside, the usual culprits are environment objects like trees and barrels that use different color palettes, shading, and contrast.
Mixing perspectives
Similar to mismatched art, only trying to make a side-view game with isometric sprites. It shouldn't be done.
Using Photos
There are times when this works. But you have to be in-control of the perspective and lighting so it all matches up. It's not really practical for 2D game editors. And if the photos are low resolution images you pulled off the internet and are covered in dusty artifacts, don't bother.
Fancy fonts
Speaks for itself I think.
Spacious maps
It's bad design to let a player walk around a giant map only to find out there's nothing to do. Also, be careful of houses that are bigger on the inside. It can be a little bigger, but a shack shouldn't have 2 floors and 5 bedrooms.
Spelling Errors
Avoid typing directly into the editor. It's a pain in the ass to fix later. Use a word document so you can run spell check. And have at least one beta tester be on the lookout for those mistakes.
Radio station
Radio station? I don't know what else to call it. It's when you only hear the first 10 seconds before you exit the scene/map. Title screen music; if the player can hit new game before the first note then you should think about using something else.
Text chirping
Nintendo games love this. It's used well in Animal Crossing when the chirps sound like vowels. Or Lufia II uses a noticeable change in pitch when different characters are speaking. It's suppose to be a semblance of speech. In those games the character's never say more then a few lines of text, so it's not that bad. But it's a really bad idea to have a single pitched chirping sound in something like a visual novel where characters speak in paragraphs. It might as well be nails on a chalk board.
Image Scaling
This is something any photo editing class should teach. You can scale images down but once that data is gone then scaling it back up looks like crap. So if you have the need to "zoom in" on a picture in a game it's better that the image is already a high resolution and scaled down in-game so that zooming in just returns it's normal size.
Left: Low res. scaled up, High res. normal size
Right: Low res. normal size, High res. scaled down
Missing Files and playtesting
I don't know how many time's I've download large project files only to start the game to see "Titlescreen.png" not found
It just shows you didn't playtest. It's understandable in a process of a year that you missed something that was suppose to be deleted or changed. But if it comes up not even 10 minutes into the game then you should have caught it on your own.
Like wearing socks with sandals.
Fangames aside, the usual culprits are environment objects like trees and barrels that use different color palettes, shading, and contrast.
Mixing perspectives
Similar to mismatched art, only trying to make a side-view game with isometric sprites. It shouldn't be done.
Using Photos
There are times when this works. But you have to be in-control of the perspective and lighting so it all matches up. It's not really practical for 2D game editors. And if the photos are low resolution images you pulled off the internet and are covered in dusty artifacts, don't bother.
Fancy fonts
Speaks for itself I think.
Spacious maps
It's bad design to let a player walk around a giant map only to find out there's nothing to do. Also, be careful of houses that are bigger on the inside. It can be a little bigger, but a shack shouldn't have 2 floors and 5 bedrooms.
Spelling Errors
Avoid typing directly into the editor. It's a pain in the ass to fix later. Use a word document so you can run spell check. And have at least one beta tester be on the lookout for those mistakes.
Radio station
Radio station? I don't know what else to call it. It's when you only hear the first 10 seconds before you exit the scene/map. Title screen music; if the player can hit new game before the first note then you should think about using something else.
Text chirping
Nintendo games love this. It's used well in Animal Crossing when the chirps sound like vowels. Or Lufia II uses a noticeable change in pitch when different characters are speaking. It's suppose to be a semblance of speech. In those games the character's never say more then a few lines of text, so it's not that bad. But it's a really bad idea to have a single pitched chirping sound in something like a visual novel where characters speak in paragraphs. It might as well be nails on a chalk board.
Image Scaling
This is something any photo editing class should teach. You can scale images down but once that data is gone then scaling it back up looks like crap. So if you have the need to "zoom in" on a picture in a game it's better that the image is already a high resolution and scaled down in-game so that zooming in just returns it's normal size.
Left: Low res. scaled up, High res. normal size
Right: Low res. normal size, High res. scaled down
Missing Files and playtesting
I don't know how many time's I've download large project files only to start the game to see "Titlescreen.png" not found
It just shows you didn't playtest. It's understandable in a process of a year that you missed something that was suppose to be deleted or changed. But if it comes up not even 10 minutes into the game then you should have caught it on your own.
