Icon Feedback

[Macro]

Well I've been working on my games story and I have written quite a bit of it so I decided to move on to the graphics for now. I'm doing icons at the moment. Well I might as well cut to the chase.

In my game for basic items like Short Swords, Leather Armor, Boots, Helmets, ect., ect. there are 6 variations for them.
Normal
Rusty (Obviously wont apply to non-metallic items)
Unidentified
Holy
Cursed
Magical

Here are the pictures of each from left to right. http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/mm18 ... ordset.png[/img]

I just wanted some basic opinions on how each looks.

Also the pallets were made from Axerax's style packs. (Just giving Axe some credit)

 

[seven]

The bottom 3 have a pretty cheesy effect goin' on there.
  -KRoP

 

[tai]

Visually speaking, I thought the bottom three were Ice, Fire and Water, respectively, until I read the text. For Holy I'd expect something with a kind of diffuse aura-like glow instead of the stereotypical action bubble. Cursed I'd expect black or purple smoky trails, and for magical I think a smaller bubble with a different coloured blade would work. I also think the question mark should be on top for unidentified, but that's really totally up to you and what an 'unidentified' sword is.

Techinically speaking, the strange angle is causing an aliasing effect, either alpha-map them or use a more standard angle (45º or 26.6º (rise:run = 1:2))

p.s. it's palettes. pallet refers to something completely different and unrelated.

 

[Macro]

I'll work on the effects but tai you used a lot of confusing terms on me there.

I'm just a humble spriter that uses MS Paint so I don't know what you mean by anti-aliasing or alpha-mapping.

And the palette typo you can blame on my spell check heheh.

 

[tai]

i said aliasing, not anti-aliasing. Which means you know something about it already =P

basically, the jagged edges stand out a lot, and because of the weird angle, the 'bumps' are not regular, sometimes there's a bump two pixels across, sometimes three.
Alpha-channels are used to anti-alias, i.e. its an additional graphic that isn't shown (except when editing) which represents how transparent the visible pixel is.

With partially-transparent pixels along edges, one can reduce the aliasing (bumpy-ness) effect. There should be lots of information and tutorials about that on the web, and how to use them with GIMP and Photoshop. If there aren't any good tutorials about transparency and alpha channels, I wouldn't mind writing one of my own.

I really recommend upgrading to a better imaging software. GIMP is open-source, and I'm pretty sure you can get Photoshop Elements for free, or very cheap at the most (they usually bundle that free with scanners and cameras), though I don't know the capabilities of that (Elements) compared with the full version or GIMP. There's definitely going to be some learning curve but I know there are features that would make your task easier, for example putting the same effect on different images.