Yeah, the trick is to be more than just "simple". Mine is a simple appearance but a very complicated design. It took a lot of precise decisions to put mine together.
The most important thing to remember is this - pick your colors carefully! In a simple pack, each color you pick is vitally important because it stands out significantly. You need your colors to work well with each other.
I'd say the second most important thing is this - don't go too simple! You can kill a great texture pack by oversimplifying details. On the flipside, some people try simplifying certain details that should just be eliminated (I see this problem most often with cobblestone. They essentially just take the original cobblestone design and simplify it down to just a gray background with lines on it. That looks bad. Don't do it. Come up with something more creative).
Lastly, there needs to be something to make your simple pack stand out among the rest. Mine, its gimmick is that it's almost 100% pixel art friendly. Blocks that normally suck for pixel art due to their textures (tree trunk, cobblestones, etc) have a smooth, clean look in my pack. If it's a block, it's probably pixel-art worthy. And it's worked - this pack has over 15,000 downloads now.
Your pack has an entirely different feel to it. I can't quite place it, though. I do see a couple things that could be improved, though, and I'm going to post 'em in your thread.
I have a minor update coming very, very soon. Somewhere I missed that a new painting had been released (a 4x4), so I'm including that. Additionally, I'm putting a little work into the currently existing art because I feel that some of them look too plain, or just are missing something. I may be replacing a few pieces, and I'm definitely editing a number of others (some, I just feel their orientation needed work. Others had a plain white background and looked dull).
Altogether, I think they're going to be a lot more satisfying after the update.
I also noticed a VERY minor problem in the items.png, which I have fixed.
This all would have been released sooner, but between my extremely hectic military training schedule (work days run 0515-1545 MWF, and 0515-1745 T/TH... plus 2-3 hours of study/homework time afterward), my busy personal life (my wife's pregnant!), and my own Minecraft gaming time (I built two castles floating above the ocean, connected by a skybridge, two Stargates (both very large), a huge hilltop fortress with a barracks, party room, kitchen, art gallery, and more, and secret hidden tunnelways connecting all of the above underground)... I have very little time to dedicate to my packs too. But I'm trying to keep at least my two most popular ones as up-to-date as possible!
Thread title now conforms with the proposed thread title standard.
Discovered this week how much better I like the pack when using fast graphics vs. fancy. As a result, I'm going to be looking into reworking the appearance of trees, as well as a few other aspects of the pack.
I've been lazy about updating because I've been going through some rough stuff, mainly with the loss of my wife's pregnancy recently, but I intend to be updating it for 1.5 ASAP. I have a very busy week ahead of me, but I expect the update will be out no later than the end of the weekend.
It's probably because all simple texture packs go in that direction...
I like it!
The most important thing to remember is this - pick your colors carefully! In a simple pack, each color you pick is vitally important because it stands out significantly. You need your colors to work well with each other.
I'd say the second most important thing is this - don't go too simple! You can kill a great texture pack by oversimplifying details. On the flipside, some people try simplifying certain details that should just be eliminated (I see this problem most often with cobblestone. They essentially just take the original cobblestone design and simplify it down to just a gray background with lines on it. That looks bad. Don't do it. Come up with something more creative).
Lastly, there needs to be something to make your simple pack stand out among the rest. Mine, its gimmick is that it's almost 100% pixel art friendly. Blocks that normally suck for pixel art due to their textures (tree trunk, cobblestones, etc) have a smooth, clean look in my pack. If it's a block, it's probably pixel-art worthy. And it's worked - this pack has over 15,000 downloads now.
Your pack has an entirely different feel to it. I can't quite place it, though. I do see a couple things that could be improved, though, and I'm going to post 'em in your thread.
Altogether, I think they're going to be a lot more satisfying after the update.
I also noticed a VERY minor problem in the items.png, which I have fixed.
This all would have been released sooner, but between my extremely hectic military training schedule (work days run 0515-1545 MWF, and 0515-1745 T/TH... plus 2-3 hours of study/homework time afterward), my busy personal life (my wife's pregnant!), and my own Minecraft gaming time (I built two castles floating above the ocean, connected by a skybridge, two Stargates (both very large), a huge hilltop fortress with a barracks, party room, kitchen, art gallery, and more, and secret hidden tunnelways connecting all of the above underground)... I have very little time to dedicate to my packs too. But I'm trying to keep at least my two most popular ones as up-to-date as possible!
Thread title now conforms with the proposed thread title standard.
Discovered this week how much better I like the pack when using fast graphics vs. fancy. As a result, I'm going to be looking into reworking the appearance of trees, as well as a few other aspects of the pack.
Please update for 1.4! <3
Cast aside your festive doylaks: dragon stuff is about to happen.
Multiplayer is lonely once you understand how it actually works.
Alpha 1.0.4
thetonestarr if you are reading this, may i make a new download link for people who want to use it in the updated versions of minecraft?