Agree with Surt.  

I see a project straight out of 1998 that's going nowhere fast and is about to fail a modest fundraising goal by no small margin.  The existing art is shitty as mismatched and you can see where he's probably deperate for content, even if it's a hodgepodge.  He's offering 'special editions' of a game he hasn't demonstrated any ability to produce (and yeah, it's a one-man team...with no real history as a developer...working in his spare time it seems.)

The newsworthiness is indeed questionable.

 Only took you 6 months or so ;-)

 >I don't think I've encountered nonstandard iso either irl or in pixel.

IRL = 30 degrees ("Isometric" itself means 30-degree lines; we've just expanded it to include any useful dimetric projection.)  15-degree dimetric (shallow view) and 30-60 (pseudo-oblique) are also popular for product design.

Pixel-art dimetric = 1:1, 2:1, 3:1, 4:1 (among others).  Boktai is a very popular 1:1 isometric game.  Many games on c64 and amiga used 3:1 and 4:1; shallower angles became less popular as days want by though.

Live a little bro!

EDIT : sticking to 2:1 for the challenge is fine.  just pointing out there's lots of other systems!

 not line angles, but rather compression ratio (camera pitch)

http://www.briandamato.com/ITCOTS/Illustrations_models/FullPage/ITCOTS-Forced-spiral-mul-design-isometric-0009.gif

http://www.htspweb.co.uk/fandf/romart/het/imposs/pyramid.jpg

^ the trouble with any of these middle pitches is that the steps butt into each other.  A view that is closer to side-on or top-down (while remaining dimetric) allows you to show the plan or the profile better (for this particular shape).

 Does Isometric require that it be 2:1, or can we use another ratio?  (Pyramids are notoriously nondescript in standard videogame isometric - a steeper or shallower angle is preferable).

 Art == artifice and craft.  Things created by skilled, human hands.  Natural objects are not art-->they were not shaped.  The measure of artfulness is the measure of skillfulness.  As we understand those things, it is a measure of fidelity to the artist's intentions.  That we've broadened its meaning to a million other things only serves to prevent it from functioning as a word.

Anything else (beauty, representation, tactility, communication, allegory, poignance, emotiveness, narrative, functionality, whatever) arises from context and interpretation.  These are necessarily social.  Anything social is a matter of discourse, usually though not necessarily spoken.  Discourse is disagreement and change.  Don't worry about trying to define these things are or find what makes everyone happy - those are flawed pursuits.  Talk about what they can be, what people are able to take from them, how you can learn from that, and how you want to move forward.

Nice, but hellllla dark!  I had to fullscreen just to make out the details.  There might be ways to do darkness that don't require limiting the palette

don't forget indicate all references, such as those for the cleric, conjurer, and crossbowman!

 Fucking A, personal/family crisis this week : I'm going to have so much material for the Clean Your Hard Drive challenge this year :) :(.

"round table" romance or "throbbing member" romance?

EDIT : NVM, I found a way to do both.

 nice.  the only thing I notice is that it starts to suffer a bit from "wallpaper syndrome" with those flat halos around the objects that make it impossible to see things as a "space" and instead as a series of semi-related pictures.  varying the way that grass texture can move between spaces would be a great help with unifying and deepening the set :).

 why would we ignore one of the best things ever?

I sorta love everything about this.

 I feel like the whole thing, while gorgeous, suffers from some serious priority read issues that would ultimately make things very difficult on the eyes when playing.

I would suggest killing the local value-contrast on the non-functional (i.e, bg) elements.  you can preserve all of the tight pixel work and pleasing color usage, but allow the characters and buildings to really pop. http://i.imgur.com/NR1MU.png

 seconded.

Personally I'm happy with this challenge because even though I really gave it my best shot, I ended up with my first green ribbon.  That underscores the level of participation in this particular challenge, and the high concentration of skilled works being produced in a single week with a single prompt!

 > those knees appear to be too far down compared to the rest of her body.

if you look closely too, you'll notice that the eyes are too large, the hands are too small, and the neck is impossibly thin!

going with the idea that the legs are disproportionately large compared to the hands, we can guess that the dress is at her 'actual' waistline and that the entire body tapers until the chin (and continues to taper towards the fingers) -- i think stylistically it's cohesive and it's obvious that natural atanomy is not a goal!

>  Keep in mind, this is NOT a weekly challenge, your work will not be voted on

i'm sure this has been asked before, but is transparency a color (so palette = 31c+trans?)

 well it's technically very accomplished and it will probably get one of my votes if for no other reason than that it took the challenge guidelines about a thousand times further than anybody else even attempted to!

 I like the concept but i feel like there's a missed opportunity in the unfinishedness of the piece - there are tones in the palette which can be used to smooth and refine the whole bottom half, and the plumage (or is it hair?) has plenty of room for some gorgeous shapes.  With a few days to go at the time of submission, it wouldn't have been unreasonable to pursue these things.

 FlyGuy - chill out and grow up.  There's no reason for someone old enough to buy himself a drink to behave the way you are.  I can understand your disagreement with MrBeast, but taking that out on Jeremy is a waste of breath, not to mention unwarranted.  You appear to be the one picking a fight, here.

Skamocore, who writes the majority of the challenges, actually does craft his posts carefully and selects his words rather particularly.  You can be assured that his choice of the word 'stylized' is very much intentional.  Jeremy, as a staff member, is familiar with this, knows Skamocore better than your or I do, and has authority over challenge rules.

As far as defining terms, "stylized," in the common use of the word, means "not seeking to embody naturalism or realism."  It's true that you can't draw a hard line between what is realistic and what is stylized, as everything is a mix of the two - but you can very easily say which pieces are more or less stylized than others.  Nobody is going to say that this is somehow less stylized than this, even if neither is particularly close to what you might call hyper-realism.  Don't confuse relative terms with wholly subjective terms.

Elk (Alex) is a dude, unless my contact list needs some serious revisions!!  Almost everyone here is.

Elk - sorry to hear that man :/

 This is a bizarre conversation.

 The title and other test is very nicely done, and surprisingly legible for a small-scale script.  the rest unfortunately is under-refined which calls additional attention to how crass it is, undermining the skill the piece could have showcased - I feel like even given an adolescent subject matter, the form of the object and texture of the smoke would have been a place to really show off.

 The pieces in the first pages of the hall of fame are also the first ones that newcomers see, since it' an obvious destination.  I forget how many stars new accounts can give, but they add up quite quickly.

However, I joined this site late in 2005 and was a lurker for a long time before that, and while that makes me a newcomer compared to some of the old fogeys around here () I remember seeing 99% of the 'hall of fame' pieces the day they were posted and thinking, 'wow, that's something new and different and better than I have seen or done anywhere else.'  while not particularly effective as a list of "the best pieces ever", since I agree that there's a lot of good stuff not on the list, I prefer to think of it as the "memory lane" section - a celebration of some of the more important/memorable moments in PJ history.