AuthorTopic: [WIP] [C+C] Dark Monastery  (Read 5778 times)

Offline JJ Naas

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[WIP] [C+C] Dark Monastery

on: January 11, 2015, 08:32:58 pm
It's been a while since I talked about doing a Dungeon Master/EOB/Black Crypt (and Lands of Lore/Knightmare) -inspired mockup in this Pixelation thread, but no matter, I finally got to work on it during my Xmas holidays just now. Enormous thanks for Lackey's work of mapping out the necessary shapes.

I took Lackeys templates, which were based on EOB1 and 2 (which had the smallest first person windows) and expanded them to the size used in Black Crypt. Still very WIP and all, I'm currently working on the UI to make it look decent enough. Once the UI's in shape I can FINALLY get to the best part of creating monsters and other ingame objects.

This is what it currently looks like:



 - The character portraits are the oldest part of this thing and may need some smoothing out.
 - The UI needs to be solidified.
 - The magic menu needs some semi-believable fake logic.
 - The look of the arrows must match the button -like look of the weapon buttons.
 - The compass obviously needs work.
 - On the bottom of the game view is my hopefully original idea of showing the location of the party in relation to a larger context. This one's supposed to show that the party is currently on the first floor of the cellar beneath the evil monastery
 - The game view. The barrels and the windows are sketchy, I'll get back to all of this once I no longer have to worry about the UI. As you can see from the palette and all, it's VERY heavily inspired by EOB 2.




These are the wall, floor and roof pieces. I made the whole set so I can more freely create a bunch of varied locations where to put monsters and stuff once I get that far.




The palette. I'm aiming for 32 colours. There are still 4 slots free.


Offline JJ Naas

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Re: [WIP] [C+C] Dark Monastery

Reply #1 on: January 12, 2015, 07:29:40 pm
Today's effort. The bottom image starts to look decent. I added a dark green to the palette. The grays on the sky look a bit rough, do I need an intermediate additional gray? We'll see.

« Last Edit: January 12, 2015, 07:31:33 pm by JJ Naas »

Offline Helm

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Re: [WIP] [C+C] Dark Monastery

Reply #2 on: January 12, 2015, 08:02:39 pm
I really love this stuff. The greys in the ground are beautiful Westwood touches, just this sort of washy painterly feel, good job.

Don't bother with 32 colors or any other such restriction under 256 colors. What I would instead suggest is to bitstretch your colorspace to 3,3,3 or 4,4,4 to get an authentic set of colors and use straight, saturated ramps where it would make sense for a game of this vitange (like UI work, health bars, glowing magic effects etc). There's a lot of newschool tech that is useful for catching up with stuff Westwood did just by virtue of having good graphic designers that mainly would go in the representational game world (3d view, portraits, etc) which you can and should forego for more 'gamey' elements in the same game, that's how you're going to end up with something that isn't just close to the source material but is honouring how the source material was put together.

Offline Decroded

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Re: [WIP] [C+C] Dark Monastery

Reply #3 on: January 13, 2015, 01:15:08 pm
Love the mockup.

Hey helm what does bitstretch and those number sequences mean?

Offline Helm

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Re: [WIP] [C+C] Dark Monastery

Reply #4 on: January 13, 2015, 09:55:54 pm

Offline Theoden

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Re: [WIP] [C+C] Dark Monastery

Reply #5 on: January 14, 2015, 08:52:19 am


This is looking amazing. I will keep an eye on this topic.
Do you have a development blog or something similar that I can follow?

Offline JJ Naas

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Re: [WIP] [C+C] Dark Monastery

Reply #6 on: January 14, 2015, 10:57:08 am
Helm: Thanks. I agree about the larger palette, only that'd get the genuine EOB2 -look, which I guess I'm after. I've never worked with a palette that big so I don't quite know how to handle that amount of colours. It would be wise to practice with some smaller scale project first.. or just keep on going with this and do a proper 256 -colour refining round later. After all, the shapes and elements need to be created and a general colour scheme needs to be decided on no matter how. We'll see.

Decroded: Thanks. 256 colour palette is indeed a mystery to me, I'd imagine all the necessary colours are here.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-bit_color#mediaviewer/File:256colour.png

Theoden: Just this thread. My holiday is now over, so progress may be slow, but I'll attempt at least 1 or 2 updates per week.

Offline Helm

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Re: [WIP] [C+C] Dark Monastery

Reply #7 on: January 17, 2015, 10:34:34 am
What program are you pixelling in? Pro Motion can be set to emulate any bitspace and I use that (for work) all the time. Platform Panic is 99% 3,3,3 bits, for example. I really don't think it's useful to download a 256 color palette and try to colorpick from its indexes when you need another color, more like organically end up with ramps, created as you need them, from a 3,3,3 or 4,4,4 bitspace, which Pro Motion does gracefully, dunno about your program.

Offline JJ Naas

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Re: [WIP] [C+C] Dark Monastery

Reply #8 on: January 17, 2015, 02:02:02 pm
I'm using Photoshop.

Offline Helm

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Re: [WIP] [C+C] Dark Monastery

Reply #9 on: January 17, 2015, 02:14:00 pm
Well... I know this is a drag, but you could migrate to a proper index palette pixel art program if you want to do what you're trying to do more efficiently and effectively. Aside from this larger critique I think your art looks amazing here. If anything on the design front, I'd like to see you pick a theme, like is the UI made out of chiselled stone like in one 3d step crawler, or is it carved on wood, or is it on papyrus, you know. Right now the brown palette around the character portraits and for the key buttons is a bit featureless, it doesn't have a theme.

Offline JJ Naas

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Re: [WIP] [C+C] Dark Monastery

Reply #10 on: January 25, 2015, 05:16:44 pm
A small update. Some more work on the UI. The theme is gold on black stone. I ditched the 32 colour limitation and started adding new colours whenever needed.



Offline Decroded

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Re: [WIP] [C+C] Dark Monastery

Reply #11 on: January 25, 2015, 10:07:19 pm
cool stuff but it looks more like cooper than gold.
brown -> yellow -> white is an easy way to do gold, then perhaps work in some hue variations (e.g. a touch of green) to make it look more natural.

are u able to extend the theme to border the world view and map areas?
i think this might add some coherence.

stone highlights seems a bit soft and blurry. are u able to vary the hues a bit more?

Offline ptoing

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Re: [WIP] [C+C] Dark Monastery

Reply #12 on: January 26, 2015, 09:03:49 pm
To get the RGB333 or 444 colours in PS (though this is a bit meh working with imo) is to add a posterize adjustment layer on top of everything and setting it to the amount of steps per channel that those modes have. So either 8 for 333 or 16 for 444.

I think 444 works very well for this and gives it more interesting colour gradiations while not losing detail (which in 333 you would)
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.