Screenshot Roundup for the weeks of April 1st - April 14th
A collection of notable screenshots posted by our members in the Game & Demo forum in the last while!


Xeno|Soft shows off the latest progress on his game Winter - prodigious use of both trees and transparent message boxes. Xeno has always been known for stylish and unconventional presentation. Many mappers clutter the space so much that it becomes hard to make out the paths. The cool thing about Xeno|Soft's game is that the tree leaves become transparent as the character walks under them, allowing for both effective game play and aesthetic freedom.


Anima_DnB flaunts his versatility with a cheery Harvest Moon fangame and a gloomy, gritty horror game. Not many people use the tilesets from the original Harvest Moon on SNES, despite them being colorful and stylish. On the horror side, it's nice to see some fairly effective use of lighting effects. With well-known games like Taut out there, elaborate lighting has become almost a requisite element of the genre. Fortunately grim games like these ones seem to be more successful with lighting overlays, whereas the effect is commonly misused outside the genre.



Ocean's Dream provides the old school dosage of the week with Paradise Blue. Ocean has been working on this game for some time and has created all the graphics and music for it. Not only does it boast a distinguishable visual style, but has a deep class system for building characters to your liking as well as a large, lush world to explore.



CrossKnight stops by with some slick menu design. Clear and concise menu design is something a lot of people fail to accomplish in independent games, since they get so caught up in making flashy text boxes and using fancy fonts that the information fails to be easily conveyed. There's a lot to appreciated about menu screens that are seemingly plain!



Sanosuke employs some manner of 3D witchcraft to integrate tilesets into foreign dimensions. It's nice to see someone really experimenting with visual styles. In recent days Sanosuke has been exploring the use of 2D graphics commonly used in RPG Maker games textured on to 3D structures, thereby creating a look that's markedly more 32 bit than you usually see in RPG Maker.



Walina shows a map that's still a work-in-progress, but it's gorgeous anyway. This is another less commonly seen graphical style in the community. The "hand painted" backdrop style is great for conveying a lot more intricate detail and making a game lush and vibrant, but requires an immense amount of artistic skill and time to produce. Hopefully more information about this game surfaces soon!



And finally Meiscool impresses as usual with great mapping and editing. When looking at Meiscool's screenshots it becomes apparent just how far you can take resources through editing. That tileset you've seen in a thousand different games can look completely new with something as simple as a change to color saturation in the grass, or the inclusion of tiles from another set edited to fit the palette. Game makers should definitely not be afraid to experiment with their rips because there are a lot of ways to get a relatively unique look for your game with common resources!



For more material from Gaming World members check out Game & Demo and be sure to contribute your own work!

I sure like screenshots~!

I will never play any of these games but they look very nice.

Good job guys

Granted, i've already seen them, but great thread.

How often do you plan on doing these or will it be pretty sporadic?

Oh man, this is a neat-O idea for the staff blog, with regard to Game and Demo advertisement. Good job, guy!