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Tilesets and Graphics / AutoReiv [10x10(x2)] graphic set [0.40.24]

« on: August 05, 2015, 07:35:37 pm »

"Once a beautiful game, and now? It is a rude bauble, fit only for your kind."

INTRODUCTION

Greetings! I'm new to this game, and to the community as well. I'm not new to graphic modding in games however. It's usually the first thing I try to do when I get my hands on something new and fun; try to muck around with how it looks and works.
It was Quill18, and his gloriously tragic forts on YouTube and Twitch, that finally made me take the first step. So I got the Lazy Newb Pack and strapped up with Spacefox. Now, I knew the game was immersive, but reading and watching other people play is one thing. When I finally started to get comfortable with the interface, and started to experience that immersion first hand, it was a completely sublime.
Immediately my instinct to create kicked in. I began experimenting with different tilesets (especially Taffers') and colors. At first it was just through the LNP launcher, but I slowly began picking apart, and putting things together at a more substantial level. I also decided to start showing my face in the community, so I subscribed to the sub-reddit and posted a little drawing I made the day before as a greeting gesture.

That was last week. I'm now registered here and on the wiki too, and I'm planning to stay.
So what better way to celebrate my 1st post here than to share the fruits of my dabbling with all of you wonderful people?

ABOUT

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So with this graphic set I aim to keep things as ASCII as I can, but at the same time allowing for some sacrifices to be made in order to give room for the aesthetic I'm going for...
Now we enter a more philosophical line of reasoning. Being new, I'm sort of in the dark here, but I can imagine this being one of the more common topics when talking about the game, so bare with me.

I'm not going to go into the mechanics of the game, but they are of course elementary in providing the kind of emergent stories, the likes of which I have never experienced before. No, I rather want to focus attention on the inherent dual nature of the work that I, and many with me, are committing to here.

You see, all the richness in experiences that the game produces, is presented to us in a very visually abstract manner. This favors the imaginative amongst us, and nourishes those who're growing. It prompts us to use our creative power to concretize, or make "sense" of what is abstract.
With other contemporary games, especially those with flashy graphics, there is little (visual) abstraction. If you take a game like Skyrim for example. It actually has both nice graphics, and a very rich world. The difference is that this world is exactly the world it presents itself to be; the game's graphic engine has solidified it for you, and your imagination is only left to play with whatever blanks it has left in its wake.

I am of the radical opinion that our innate imaginative capacity will always be greater than any amount of digital rendering ever will be. So because Dwarf Fortress, through abstraction, gives us a chance to imagine for ourselves what the game word looks like, it actually allows us to collapse the wave function before any flashy engine gets to it.

With all this stimulation going on, many of us feel inclined to create depictions of what we envision in our heads the game world to be. Now we get to the duality I mentioned earlier...
Because I'm in fact enforcing my visualization of the game through this graphic set, I'm actually shortening the abstract distance, by leading you on path other than that which your own imagination would have followed. So in a way the abstract nature of the game gives rise to behavior that is diametrically opposed to it. Which is ~~inevitable~~ not as bad a thing as you might think. I personally feel that this dialectical relationship is the best creative fuel I've ever found in any game. At the very least it get's you thinking, and working...

I've gone on long enough I think, so let's wrap this up...

Keep in mind this graphic set is still a work in progress. It does come with a complete 10x10 tileset that can stand on it's own just fine. There's a 10x10x2 version of that tileset as well for you guys with proper monitors (unlike me). Included is also the beginnings of creature graphics and item overrides (for TWBT). These I will continue to expand upon, so remember to swing around back for more later. There will no doubt be small changes to the base tileset as well.

FEEDBACK

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DOWNLOAD & INSTALLATION

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