Finally caught up with myself again. First, some rear and side goblin views:
I'm not sure whether the side view with the flexed legs (matches the front view better, but not really the rear one) or the side view with the straight legs (probably makes more visual sense) is the better one to go with. I'm not thrilled with the legs of the rear view, either.
Items: yes, these are 32x32 (same size as the tiles), no margins required. These are representations for viewing on the map, to indicate "there's a rusty knife on this square" (or whatever)—the items menu has a space reserved for larger pictures, but I'm not looking at those again until I have the items menu coded. I don't intend to make armour/helms/shields visible on the sprite or in animations for version 1.0, and I'm undecided about how to handle weapons during the attack animations. The cop-out would be to use an early-Final-Fantasy-style "shake the weapon in the direction of the enemy" animation and sub a weapon sprite in, but realistically there should be different animations for stabby and cutting/bashing weapons.
I'm not sure about using only parts of the items. I don't think it's quite the right thing to do here. I'm aware that this is going to mean that some items aren't quite to scale (but then some of them would be nearly invisible if I drew them to scale, so . . .)
The format of the amulets was a (likely bad) worldbuilding thing. The goblins are still stone-age and have almost no access to wood (only small quantities of driftwood), so most of the items they have are made of rock or bone. Hence, simple bone amulets, with carved surface grooves filled with earth pigments. However, 1. the goblins could easily have access to clay (and do have fire), making crude ceramic objects possible, and 2. some of the amulets could have been dropped by human adventurers. So I hadn't thought that through as thoroughly as I maybe should have.
cels, I like your axe and knife with the "very bone" handles. They convey the materials better even if they're not strictly realistic (judging from all the time I spent staring at stone knives courtesy of Google Image Search, although I think a lot of those were actually antler handles). I'll see what I can do with that idea at some point.
fskn, thanks for the tut links! There's some there that I haven't seen before.
Okay, now back to the dirt tiles.
The truth is, back before XMas, I was already struggling with the damned dirt tiles (although this wasn't the project they were intended for). Among other things, I looked at a whole bunch of dirt tiles from commercial games (granted, mostly older ones). Nearly all of them consisted of pixel noise. Those that didn't, tended to be a single solid colour. The best I was able to come up with was this, which I located today in a file containing a mixture of stuff-I-didn't-use:
Tile + variation loosely based on a tile from one of the SNES-era Breath of Fire games. Anyway, definitely not pixel noise, but it didn't work with the grass tiles I was also working on at the time, so I shelved it. Now I'm trying to figure out how to create useful transitional tiles from this.
And finally, image hosts. I don't use imgur because I not-infrequently run into situations where something hosted there just won't display for me. For instance, in the currently running "Barbarian sprite with NES specs [C+C]" thread on this board, I can't see the image in the opening post (or any other pics except the one in cels' most recent post). I don't know whether imgur hates Pale Moon, or Linux, or my ISP, or my high-security no-Javascript-or-cookies-unless-specifically-permitted setup, or what, but there's obviously something not quite right. Postimages is obnoxious in a number of ways, but I've never seen them completely flake out that way.
