Heya Lanea,

Bart and I had a call last night about this.  I think we'd like go get
rolling on this soonish.  Our original deadline was to have a style
guide together by March 1st... that seems pretty unlikely now, but the
faster we can get this together, the better.  But I know human
timeframes are not magic, and we've also been slow ourselves in kicking
this forward. :)

I think that you're right that Chrono Trigger, ALTTP, etc are all fairly
different.  However, I feel like Zelda ALTTP and Harvest Moon are both
*fairly* close, at least as in terms of "shape and perspective".
(Chrono Trigger, not so much.)  Basically we want a style of artwork
that's got a fairly clear and *familiar* baseline shape and look to it
where people can build a bunch of separate things and have them mesh
together.  I'm fairly sure that the ALTTP / Harvest Moon general style
is one where people can build a bunch of compatible stuff together.
Generally I think that's true partly because it influenced a lot of the
design of top-down 16 bit style games that came after it, but to be
perfectly honest, I'll admit that there's another reason: I want this
project to succeed, and I've already seen the ALTTP "massively
collaborative" style happen before about a decade ago in the MMORPG
Graal Classic, where a lot of artists built a ton of content that mostly
looked like it meshed with the base design (and a wide variety of
environments in it too).  I'd be happy to branch out to something more
adventerous another time, but I think it's a good idea to play it safe
this round and do something that's pretty close to something we know can
work already.

By the way, JFCH your forest tileset looks amazing, and gives me full
confidence that you can do this. :)  It's very ornate though, and I
think that's the style of artwork that takes a lot of coordination with
an "art lead" to make sure things mesh together right.  I don't think we
have that luxury, not this first competition, at least...

Okay, enough justification, here's some more specifics about what's
meant, based off of conversations on the phone yesterday:

 - As for size:
   - 32x32 tiles (possibly 16x16 subtiled, but shooting for a base size of
     32x32)
   - 32x64 (or is it the reverse?  Tall mode!) characters
 - Roughly something along the lines of Zelda ALTTP and Harvest Moon in
   style and shape.  Some specifics about what's meant by that:
   - It should be orthographic, or "perspectiveless", in that things
     don't get smaller when they go farther away.  So,
     - Like this: http://dustycloud.org/gfx/goodies/safe2.png
     - Not like this:
       http://dustycloud.org/gfx/goodies/chalice_safe_scaled.png
   - Texture / noisiness level
     Pretty much somewhere between Harvest Moon and Zelda ALTTP.  To
     be more clear:
     - Zelda's very cartoony, maybe a bit too much so:
       http://files.sharenator.com/33971_A_Link_To_The_Past_2_Past_Harder-s500x431-100462-580.jpg
     - Harvest Moon has about the appropriate level of detail, but
       maybe it's slightly more noisy than we want:
       http://www.ogeeku.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/SNES_Harvest_Moon_02.jpg
     - By contrast, FF6 is far too textured.  It's probably too hard
       to get a bunch of artists to be able to settle on this kind of
        design and get their stuff to match:
        http://shrines.rpgclassics.com/snes/ff6/walkthrough/images/r4b/6.jpg
        http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/64/ffvi16042011215613.jpg/sr=1
     - Don't worry about this *too* much, just keep it in mind while you
       design your tiles realizing that it'll affect the style guide!
       But don't worry about it so much that it becomes an artist block,
       or whatever.
 - I was doing some sketches to test this and kind of show the style.
   Be aware that I'm not that experienced of a pixel artist, but might
   give you the right kind of idea (don't feel constrained to this,
   though you're welcome to use it to bootstrap things if that helps):
   - http://dustycloud.org/gfx/goodies/chalice_character_threeperspective-scaled.png
     http://dustycloud.org/gfx/goodies/chalice_character_threeperspective.xcf
   - http://dustycloud.org/gfx/goodies/house_sketch_tiles.png
     http://dustycloud.org/gfx/goodies/house_sketch_tiles.xcf
 
Is that enough info?  (Is it too much info, in fact? :))