That percussive sound that starts the song at the beginning of Play is SUPER jarringly loud. I'd trim it out of the track entirely.
I know you've mentioned tileset improvements but just to put it out there you've generated isometric buildings, but the tile set you're using appears to be square based. This creates a very incongruous style where the buildings don't feel like they're actually attached to the ground.
Finally, about the pixel art you’re using: you’re asking Nano Banana to generate it, but there are a couple of issues with prompting pixel art from GenAI models. The most obvious one is that the pixels aren’t aligned to a traditional grid which leads to really noticeable fringing. This is especially obvious when I use the scroll wheel to zoom in on some of the art assets.
I’d highly recommend using something like Unfake [1] to clean this up, aligning pixels and reducing the palette to something more consistent. It’s a bit more manual work, but it will make your assets look dramatically better.
Thanks for all of this, really appreciate the detailed feedback and the links, will check those out.
Apologies about the drum hit at the start! Appreciate that is probably way too loud, especially on headphones. Cutting the first second out now and also adding a fade in for music track on the menu music to ease you in!
The tileset/isometric mismatch and the pixel grid fringing are both great calls. I am by no means an artist so this is a big help! I hadn't come across Unfake before, that looks super useful to clean up the existing assets and any new ones I generate.
I came across https://www.pixellab.ai/ today when I was researching unit sprite animation & tileset generation and think I may have to redo a lot of the graphics entirely, seems to be the most expensive part outside of the Claude Max plan..
Running through your suggestions with Claude now to get them implemented. Cheers!
Nice job. FYI there have been a couple of attempts at an RTS LLM Arena with varying degrees of success.
Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47149586
Show HN: RTS for Agents
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649853
And of course there's a ton of research into more traditional forms of AI playing RTS games such as Alphastar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaStar_(software)
Feedback:
That percussive sound that starts the song at the beginning of Play is SUPER jarringly loud. I'd trim it out of the track entirely.
I know you've mentioned tileset improvements but just to put it out there you've generated isometric buildings, but the tile set you're using appears to be square based. This creates a very incongruous style where the buildings don't feel like they're actually attached to the ground.
Finally, about the pixel art you’re using: you’re asking Nano Banana to generate it, but there are a couple of issues with prompting pixel art from GenAI models. The most obvious one is that the pixels aren’t aligned to a traditional grid which leads to really noticeable fringing. This is especially obvious when I use the scroll wheel to zoom in on some of the art assets.
I’d highly recommend using something like Unfake [1] to clean this up, aligning pixels and reducing the palette to something more consistent. It’s a bit more manual work, but it will make your assets look dramatically better.
https://github.com/jenissimo/unfake.js
Here's an example of where I demonstrate generating better sprite sheets with NB:
https://mordenstar.com/other/nb-sprites
Thanks for all of this, really appreciate the detailed feedback and the links, will check those out.
Apologies about the drum hit at the start! Appreciate that is probably way too loud, especially on headphones. Cutting the first second out now and also adding a fade in for music track on the menu music to ease you in!
The tileset/isometric mismatch and the pixel grid fringing are both great calls. I am by no means an artist so this is a big help! I hadn't come across Unfake before, that looks super useful to clean up the existing assets and any new ones I generate.
I came across https://www.pixellab.ai/ today when I was researching unit sprite animation & tileset generation and think I may have to redo a lot of the graphics entirely, seems to be the most expensive part outside of the Claude Max plan..
Running through your suggestions with Claude now to get them implemented. Cheers!