Thanks!
Here is some creature replacement's I am working on.
I am looking for feedback. I am not sure if I am on the right track with some of these. There wasn't much I could use for references other than a few crayon drawings I found and the wiki descriptions.
(https://i.imgur.com/PYMpxNE.png)
From left to right:
Row 1: Floating guts, Drunian, Creeping eye, Voracious cave crawler, Blind cave ogre, cap hopper
Row 2: Magma Crab, Crundle, Hungry Head, Flesh Ball, Elk Bird, Helmet Snake
Row 3: Green Devourer, Rutherer, Creepy Crawler, Draltha, Giant Earthworm, Blood man
Row 4: Bugbat, Manera, Molemarian, Jabberer, Pond Grabber, Blind cave bear
Row 5: Cave Dragon, Reacher, Gabbro Elemental, Gorlak, Cave Floater, Plump helmet man
Row 6: Cave Blob, Amethyst elemental, a few plump helmet men for different professions.
I am planning on doing all the common sprites first, but I am open to requests.
Goblin Update.
(https://i.imgur.com/nim9KuL.png)
This set is complete and available via the download. I will make another pass to improve this and the others down the road.
I am taking suggestions on what I should do next. Let me know!
Finished some more stuff. Thanks for the idea's and information, it's appreciated!
(https://i.imgur.com/iyyTeq2.png)
Gremlin, Troll, Ogre, Unicorn, Dragon, Satyr, Bronze colossus, Giant, Cyclops, Ettin, Minotaur, Yeti, Sasquatch, Blizzard Man, Ice Wolf,
Beak Dog, Grimeling, Foul Blendec, Strangler, Nightwing, Harpy, Hydra, Merperson, Sea Serpent, Sea Monster, Roc, and I did the cave dragon over
(https://i.imgur.com/vwUuwVm.png)
I overhauled the dwarf design. Almost every sprite in the set is brand new.
- Changed the perspective. This allows for more details especially in the face.
-Changed color palette. Used the colors from the raws for hair, skin and eyes.
Update:
-Added Elves
-Major edits to several creatures and animals.
(https://i.imgur.com/eLE1Snt.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/lAijHEL.png)
Cave Crocodile, Giant Cave Toad, Giant Olm, Giant Bat, Giant Rat, Large Rat, Naked Mole Dog, Troglodyte, Giant Mole, Fire Imp, Giant Cave Spider, Fire Element man, Magma Element man, Iron Element man, Mud Element man, Giant Cave Swallow, Amphibian Man, Reptile Man, Serpent Man, Ant Man, Rodent Man
I see there may be concern that I’m not going to be continuing the tile set.
I am still working on it as often as I can! I probably won’t release anything until after the steam release though. This is mostly because the new sprites I’m drawing are too big to fit within the grid restrictions currently in place.
@Wannabehero: It’s nice to know you can appreciate what it takes to produce this much art. I didn’t keep track in the past, but I am guessing I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into this. I can’t even imagine how much time people like Meph have devoted. Your post made me realize most of you may not know what goes into making a tile set of this scope.
For those interested here is a window into my process.
My original sprites were created much faster because I was using filters and painting with a brush over a 2 to 3 color palette with simplistically designed characters to help speed up the process. This allowed me to pump out a unique sprite in less than five minutes which included the design phase. I didn’t really care for quality or accuracy as much doing it this way because it was mainly just a prototype at the time. This is why I had more frequent releases back then.
I switched to a more traditional pixel art approach once I realized there was interest with my set to improve quality.
Now I use custom palettes of 7 to 12 colors per palette and hand place each individual pixel. I do a unique palette for every sprite. Hand placing pixels is very time consuming process compared to just painting in highlights and shadows. Each additional color to the palette adds considerable amounts of time to this process.
Creating the color palettes using the raw colors is also a time consuming process. Some of the colors in the raw files are challenging to make functional palettes with. This is one of the more difficult aspects of pixel art. Paint brush and filters mimic this in a sloppy fashion, but drastically increase the production speed at the cost of quality.
Matching the physical descriptions in the raw files of creatures can be quite time consuming and occasionally frustrating. Some of the creatures are especially difficult to draw in pixel form and I find myself frequently reworking them to make them look as good as possible while staying as true to the description as possible. I try to maintain a front facing perspective to be neutral to directional movement, but some characters look awkward when drawn that way. Especially when considering proportional differences.
With grid restrictions planned on being lifted to a degree for the steam release many sprites are now much larger which takes much more time to produce. I can paint a 16x16 sprite in 5 minutes with 3 to 5 colors, but the time goes up exponentially as the resolution and or the palette size increases. For example a 32x32 with 7 colors takes about 20 minutes for me, but a 64x32 with a 7 to 9 color palette could take over an hour to draw from scratch.
With hundreds of sprites to draw this is going to take awhile. I am focused on redrawing what I have so far in preparation for the steam release and will hopefully continue producing new sheets afterwards.
Here is a few sprites I have been working on, feedback is always welcome.
(https://i.imgur.com/Gr8bMQo.png)
Compare the dwarf for size differences. Mushrooms are prototypes for farm crops and cave flora with dynamic growth sizes in mind. All are WIP
(https://i.imgur.com/xF1F6IT.png)
Here is an example of the modular dwarfs. The one on the left was the model I used from my set as a template.
Hair, moustache, beard and sideburns are all the unkempt style with only differences being hair color and skin tones. This is a very small sample size, so you can see the potential for variation.
This is all modular. The pieces are Sideburns style/color, Hair style/color, Moustache style/color/nose shape, Beard style/color, Skin tone, and eye color.
The modular approach has many challenges that will require a large amount of time to get right. Making sure that every possible hair style combination looks good is proving to be tedious, but I've mostly gotten it to work well.
Another issue I have been having is that the hair and skin tones are the same color in some cases so contrast is a problem. This just requires a lot of tweaking the palettes to create enough contrast, but its time consuming to test. Thankfully most of the colors are shared between humans, elves, and dwarfs for hair and skin tones.
I still have no idea what Toady, Mike, and Meph are planning for the overall modular design so I won't be devoting too much time to this until then.
In case you want to play around with it. It's not for Df, but it's a sheet similar to the end result you'd need for dwarves.
(https://i.imgur.com/n6OxWjZ.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/gXZsQn6.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/CGtmrbq.png)
Rename these and use them to replace the versions in your /data/art/ folder. No changes are needed for the "-top" version of the png.