Thanks for the playing Curious Expedition! Sorry you're not feeling the new art style. It is based on Ligne Claire as popularized by Tintin. I hope once you see the whole game, we'll be able to win you over!
I LOVE the Curious Expedition, and my jaw dropped - literally - when I learned it was an HTML5 game.
From the perspective of someone who absolutely adores the mood and style and gameplay, I see the Ligne Claire work you're doing and it's absolutely beautiful. The art in CE2 is beautiful.
If I may offer an entitled little little nugget of feedback: As I experience it, the "breathing" style of animation feels a little jarring. Maybe when coupled with Ligne Claire especially. I'm referring to the "flexing" cutout animation (time-interpolated affine transformation / skeleton deformation of a set of shapes per entity). I'd like to request an in-game option to disable it :) Or actually, ideally to slow entity motion down to subliminal speed while maintaining motion speed of lights. Ligne Claire adventures are a big part of my nostalgia and my unconscious expectation would be of a more frozen, nostalgic, disconnected, dreamlike life on screen.
Mostly I feel shame to be saying this though and feel like there's no way to say this and also deliver the amazing amount of respect and love for your work.
Thanks so much! I appreciate it! The animation style that you suggest has come up in discussions before. We're still figuring out how to exactly deal with different scenarios where the diary text is much more detailed than what we can achieve in animation. That will be an interesting problem to tackle as we add more and more content to the game.
Thanks for the gracious and, well, amazing reply! I still feel somewhat horrible for making such an "instructive" comment and feel like I have crashed into a beautiful thing and put my ignorant and greasy little fingerprints where they have earned no right to be. But it's such an interesting subject :) I hope I have been able to express the deep respect I hold for what you're doing. — I'll certainly be watching and cheering on the game's development! And will be preordering immediately when that's possible.
My criticism is a testament to how good the pixel art is in CE1. My son and I love your game so I'll be buying the sequel, but I feel like you are going more towards the Renowned Explorers visuals which I felt was completely inferior to CE. That said, I looked at the new art and it is pretty awesome, I just have to get over it.
Thank you! We struggled a bit with coming up with a new interesting art style for CE2, but once we stumbled on art by Garen Ewing we knew we had something exciting for us.
Did you see our comparison with Renowned Explorers by the way? :)
From the perspective of someone who absolutely adores the mood and style and gameplay, I see the Ligne Claire work you're doing and it's absolutely beautiful. The art in CE2 is beautiful.
If I may offer an entitled little little nugget of feedback: As I experience it, the "breathing" style of animation feels a little jarring. Maybe when coupled with Ligne Claire especially. I'm referring to the "flexing" cutout animation (time-interpolated affine transformation / skeleton deformation of a set of shapes per entity). I'd like to request an in-game option to disable it :) Or actually, ideally to slow entity motion down to subliminal speed while maintaining motion speed of lights. Ligne Claire adventures are a big part of my nostalgia and my unconscious expectation would be of a more frozen, nostalgic, disconnected, dreamlike life on screen.
Mostly I feel shame to be saying this though and feel like there's no way to say this and also deliver the amazing amount of respect and love for your work.