AuthorTopic: Sprites and tiles and UI bits, oh my!  (Read 14360 times)

Offline fskn

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Re: Sprites and tiles and UI bits, oh my!

Reply #20 on: April 23, 2021, 12:00:07 pm
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 . . .)

Them being out of scale isn't really a problem. The important part is that they must be readable. In which case, and if you want them to be items on the map, you could simplify them to the point where they're basically just silhouettes.

I'm thinking of something like the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild interactive map, and iconography for that game in general (UI-conography? :₫)
https://interfaceingame.com/wp-content/uploads/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-map.jpg
https://interfaceingame.com/wp-content/uploads/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-bow-zoom.jpg

They do use fully rendered depictions of those items too, though, when they want to be more specific:
https://interfaceingame.com/wp-content/uploads/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-buy-items.jpg
https://interfaceingame.com/wp-content/uploads/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-food.jpg

Old-ish maps also have single color icons to represent what's in a certain spot.
TSR used to do this for D&D too, back in the day.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6f/5c/27/6f5c278de97b3703cb3ffc561c2e32da.png
(BIG image warning: 3565 x 2894 px, 4.29 MB)

But I think it would be wiser to design the screens completely in Photoshop or whichever graphic program you're using so that you can first have a good overall look of the whole thing, and also so that you can change things quickly. Then design icons that would fit that layout.
(I'm assuming you're doing the other way around, designing icons first.)

---

EDIT:

Changed the squatting goblin to what I think would look more in line with the front and back facing sides.





Changed the posture, made the nape not too low, longer head, changed the position of the feet, shape of the arms... smaller nose, gave him more of a muzzle... Tried to make his feet look like they're pointing outward not straight forward...
« Last Edit: April 23, 2021, 01:15:06 pm by fskn »

Offline ornamentsbyelves

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Re: Sprites and tiles and UI bits, oh my!

Reply #21 on: April 29, 2021, 09:55:07 am
Altering the direction of the light is going to require changes to thirty-odd existing tiles . . . but I'm looking at on the order of 300 sprite frames (4-dir movement + 4-dir attack + a death animation per sprite, plus casting or throwing animations for some, plus single static sprite frames of 20 other goblin villagers).  So yeah, changing the lighting direction will probably be an improvement in the long run.

Offline eliddell

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Re: Sprites and tiles and UI bits, oh my!

Reply #22 on: May 04, 2021, 01:18:31 am
Thanks for the edit, fskn!  I'm afraid it's going to be another week or more before I have more time to work on this, though.  Currently involved in coding stuff on a different project.

@SeinRuhe:  The catch is, I'm familiar with a lot of old 2D console RPGs, but not so much with more modern games.  Graveyard Keeper is one of the few that I have knocking around that has good-quality graphics of the right type.  Anyway, I'm hoping to run off a copy of https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3990489 before I get back to the goblin, which ought to help with pose consistency even if the limb lengths are off.
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Offline Voidfyre

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Re: Sprites and tiles and UI bits, oh my!

Reply #23 on: May 08, 2021, 08:26:49 pm
Hi, so far I've only been a lurker, but something about your project really called my attention and decided to make an account.

I love all things roguelike/lite, and I love the premise of the story and the idea for this game, wish I could play it now!

So, regarding the sprites, the edits other members made and your edits all look more "pro" if you will, but there was just something so endearing about the original one, it's my favorite one! I think its expression fits the lore you describe better, and the other designs look more like the generic idea of a goblin, more villain-esque, whereas the original one fits a player character better, in my opinion.

If I were you I'd keep the original one and work on improving its quality while keeping its essence intact, and use the other sprites as enemies or maybe NPCs from the goblin town.

Anyways, this project is looking awesome, I'm a sucker for tilebased roguelike sprites.
Keep us updated!

Offline paulkapil08

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Re: Sprites and tiles and UI bits, oh my!

Reply #24 on: May 17, 2021, 12:37:29 pm
I've played some dungeon crawlers, the sheer amount of content of some of them is plain scaring from the dev point of view, what most (If not all) devs do is to have small milestones, this keeps the moral up. For what I see you should even start with a lower count of monsters, have a minimum viable product and after that continue adding up more and more! I'm willing to bet there's still a lot you are trying to figure out for this game, so is better to redo a tiny amount of units and tiles than having to redo everything because you figured out better ways.

Offline eliddell

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Re: Sprites and tiles and UI bits, oh my!

Reply #25 on: June 02, 2021, 02:11:59 am
Ugh, back after what I know only feels like forever.

@Voidfyre, thanks for your kind words.  I hope the game doesn't end up disappointing you when and if I finally manage to get something playable out of it.  As for the original sprite, there are a lot of other problems with it, but I'll think about the expression on the current one.  I was trying for "a bit irritated, but not vicious".

Anyway, I have a few new tiles to show.  First, some dirt:



I went ahead and added transitions to the tiles I showed before.  At least it isn't pixel noise.

Second, some lava:



These aren't quite the final tiles—there are still some issues with the bottom edges and tiling—but it no longer looks like orange water.  It helped that I realized that, unlike the water and the ice, there's no gameplay reason for the lava to be translucent:  any object that falls in ain't gonna be fished out again.
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Offline fskn

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Re: Sprites and tiles and UI bits, oh my!

Reply #26 on: June 02, 2021, 10:01:54 am
The dirt looks nice, and it really isn't pixel noise (which is good) but it still pretty noisy (which is bad).
I would try using flatter-looking areas with perhaps a few mounds of dirt here and there for variation.

It may look good enough if you painted some blobs of a single color on top of what you have there...

By the way your host or something compressed the image again, it's all full of artifacting.
Imgur is a much better image host (at the moment anyway) and it won't compress your PNG files or turn them into JPEGs. You can actually copy paste images there and then grab the link, no need to go through the process of saving a copy then uploading it there.

Offline eliddell

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Re: Sprites and tiles and UI bits, oh my!

Reply #27 on: June 02, 2021, 11:20:26 am
As I've said before, images on imgur often just don't show up for me, and I'm not sure why.  That makes me reluctant to use it.

Time for me to unmothball that webspace, I guess.
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Offline fskn

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Re: Sprites and tiles and UI bits, oh my!

Reply #28 on: June 02, 2021, 02:18:22 pm
As I've said before, images on imgur often just don't show up for me, and I'm not sure why.  That makes me reluctant to use it.

Time for me to unmothball that webspace, I guess.
Ah, yeah, I forgot. It sucks that most image hosting websites are meant to store photos so they will most likely compress the images you upload.
I guess alternatively you could try this one: https://imgbb.com

Offline paulkapil08

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Re: Sprites and tiles and UI bits, oh my!

Reply #29 on: September 15, 2021, 12:32:59 pm
I would try using flatter-looking areas with perhaps a few mounds of dirt here and there for variation.