Antharion - Indie, TB, party-based Kickstarter
 

Antharion is an indie 2D RPG with turn-based combat, a party and an open world inspired by Ultima, among others. The team are looking for a modest $15k from their Kickstarter, with $2k already pledged:
More information.

The environments look nice, but the characters walking without their legs moving just looks too weird.

It looks so silly and I actually like it.
If I find out it doesn't have endless mobrespawning, I'll back it.

Looks terrible.

Probably the first thing they should fix is if they get enough money is the animation!

Wow. I think it looks great. At least it is gameplay we care about right;)

Never thought I'd ever say that about a DArtagnan comment, but…

Full ACK!

What does that mean?

ACK is a replacement for GREP, a command prompt mode for EMACS. Full ACK is one of the front end options for it. Also, it's written in PERL if that matters.

So err… no idea what they mean by that either.

hahaha, man I thought I must be tired but I have no idea what he means. it means full acknowledge..other wise totally agrees with opinion.

That does seem to make more sense than some obscure EMACS reference.

I think the environments look ok, but I´m finding the character art and lack of animations grating.
I´m not particularly "graphic whore-y" when it comes to graphical fidelity, but when a game comes with art direction/presentation I dislike it´s pretty much a show stopper for me, even when other game´s features sound good (like in this case).
Toning down the characters´ exaggerated look and adding more animations (even though that´s quite a significant workload increase) would go a long way at making this game more appealing to me and, I guess, bigger audience.

Can't decide if the lack of walking animations is actually an advantage in this case, because it looks rather funny in a South Park kind of way. It's not like it's supposed to look super realistic (or scary) anyways.

I'm looking at this as sort of the FTL idea for rpg's. I don't need high end graphics for some entertainment. For instance I am playing underworld gold and no one can say that looks pretty.

But the game seems to go for "serious" tone otherwise.
I mean,
or
doesn´t sound much South Park-like to me :).

@ DeepO, a lot of South Park episodes have dark themes with murdering or even torture, it depends on how you read it i guess. I don't get a very serious vibe from it :) But it could also be that the game isnt finished you know.. He does say money will go to more pixel art.

Of course, but I consider general vibe of SP to be that of comedy, whereas Antharion gives an impression of a "serious business" game when it comes to its story and setting.

Yeah, let´s not provide them any feedback till the game is finished then ;).

What do you mean by that? Isn't this feedback?

It is!
I just didn´t like the perceived notion that my superinsightful comment might be irrelevant since the game is not finished yet :).
I read the "But it could also be that the game isnt finished you know.." bit as a "let´s rather not offer any feedback yet", which it seems was an unfortunate misinterpretation.
Sorry if I read too much into your post and/or came off as too snarky.

I think it looks quite decent even without walking animations if they make the camera smooth scroll. Some nice lighting and other effects can be seen. I think it looks about as good as the latest Spiderweb games overall, if not better. Sure, some aspects are worse (like the per tile camera movement), but others are better and overall it's solid.

Having funny looking graphics with serious themes in the story is nothing new to video games. Warhammer anyone? Or games in general even. Lots of funny pen and paper RPG art around. Same for all the wargames using super deformed art style for the unit figures. Adventure games also often look funny with serious stories. Serious or not it's the text that will give off most of the mood when the graphics are this low-fi.

Anyway, it looks like they've already developed a lot of the game. Their Kickstarter page has lots more information than those bullet points too, they mention having 20 cities, 100 dungeons, NPCs with daily schedules and AI that has them report you to guards or attack you when appropriate, loads of already implemented spells in three different schools, hand crafted everything rather than generated environments, etc.