SpaceStation 13! (Resprite Project)

[lallander]

I've recently joined up with the open source Byond project SpaceStation 13.  I'm working on a branch controlled primarily by the members of the Something Awful forums (aka GoonStation).



As you can see it has some serious problems with consistency of perspective.  I'm hoping to take it from this hodgepodge of different styles into what I believe is called the Cavalier Perspective (whatever you would call the top down zelda style).

I would appreciate any help at all.  Example sprites, offers to help, or just some good old criticism.

This is going to be a fairly major undertaking, but I hope the end product will justify it.  Wish me luck.

I should probably add a bit of technical info.  This system uses 32x32 sprites, I don't think there are any limits on color palettes or anything of the sort.  Other than that the engine is rather simplistic. Objects can either be solid or not, see thru or not, and allow air thru or not.

[Thunderbeast]

Hey all, I'm part of the project as well.  Haven't jumped into coding yet but I've been doing a bunch of spriting in my free time for the game.  I fielded the idea of the zelda perspective the other day.

The problem is it'll require a total overhaul of every sprite, including the characters.  As it is the mob sprites are static and unmoving.  It may also necessitate a change in layout, since walls may have to be 2 tiles wide now.  Code will have to be changed to account for N/E/S/W and corner wall tiles.

So yeah, any help/suggestions would be appreciated.

[JJ Naas]

Yes, I can see it needs a lot of work. I can hadly tell what's a wall tile and what's a floor tile.

Laser Squad is an old game of this type that you might find useful to study. The graphs are old and simple, but you have no trouble reading what's what on the screen:

[lallander]

Thanks for the example pics.  A setup like that would look a lot better, but has a major problem.  You can't see anything on the side walls. The game project has another problem as well.  In our game, the players can build and disassemble just about everything. This is going to make it difficult, having a multi tile object is almost right out.  The only multi tile objects in the game at the moment are the tables.

[eobet]

Please, please, please turn this into the forum challenge like the iso collabs!

I read the stories players posted after playing this game on the PA forums and some of them are truly hilarious!

However, the game's UI is absolutely horrible, a usability nightmare with zero intuitivity, and the graphics... well, just look at that screenshot. You can't even see where the UI ends and the gameplay area begins.

Like Dwarf Fortress (don't kill me please), I bet the game would become a hit with a polished interface and some nice graphics.

[lallander]

Byond is a fairly horrid system, so any game running on it is going to suffer because of that.  But it could spark some more interest in the game if it didn't look quite so bad.  Originally we thought we might try a Zelda style.  I'm not sure what you call it now.  Something akin to a cavalier where al walls in a room push out from the middle.  This has several problems with how we plan to do doors, airlocks, etc so that is right out.  Next we thought about trying a standard cavalier.  The problem here is that we can't rotate the view window so everything will end up looking extremely skewed.  A 3/4 perspective is probably the nicest looking, but it limits us to putting intercoms, fire alarms, atmos monitors, and light switches only on the north wall of a room.  If anyone has an idea of where we should be trying to go from here, please let us know.  Examples of cavalier style non rotated that don't look horrid would be a huge bonus as well.

[JJ Naas]

A 3/4 perspective is probably the nicest looking, but it limits us to putting intercoms, fire alarms, atmos monitors, and light switches only on the north wall of a room. 

Well, that's a serious game play issue. Are you willing to sacrifice that bit of the game mechanics for the sake of the graphics?

Well, here are some options that don't require a scarifice: A top down view like in Alien Breed. There is some room on the sides of the wall to hint what's on it.


Or.. something like what you actually seem to have now, but done in a clear enough style that allows you to tell a floor tile from a wall tile: the Bomberman/Boulder Dash/Ultima style. It's not very realistic, but done right it's easy to read, flexible and very easy to tile:

[Thunderbeast]

Here's something I whipped up yesterday, using scifi tiles I found online to test out the standard cavalier perspective to see if it'd work:



Lallander pointed out some problems, such as the walls seem pretty flat, but that's something that I can take care of later.  Right now I'm just testing the perspective.

And here's our courtroom with the new walls.  Original courtroom first, new one second.





The windows'll be fun

The main problem I see us running into is the doors.  they'll have to be resized to fit into one tile, roughly 1/2 the size they are now, and that'd necessitate a player resize too.  We could avoid this by having two-tile-wide doors, but I'm not sure about the feasibility of having multitile doors and none of our coders have responded to me about it yet.

But anyway, what do you guys think about this so far?



EDIT: So did someone forget to pay the hosting bill or something?  Anyway since yesterday I got this done:


The light blue is regular glass, dark blue is reinforced glass.  I couldn't find a way to put a wire mesh/grille in the rglass that I liked so I just made it darker.



It's looking better, but doors are still a problem.  Also, the incredible number of tiles that are required for this perspective make it unlikely we'll go with this, so lallander and I are looking at 1/2 and 3/4 perspective options to see what may fit best.

Also, I like that Alien Breed one.  I might experiment with that when I get time.

[HoberMallow]

That is looking so much better.

[JJ Naas]

Ok, so that's like the Ultime 7 angle, except leaning towards right instead of left:

http://bp3.blogger.com/_3WacBST0pXU/Rx1206zReoI/AAAAAAAAAu0/9lfgK50qsQI/s1600-h/Erstam.png
http://bp3.blogger.com/_3WacBST0pXU/Rkq8FBWj4QI/AAAAAAAAAjs/8OxeT7yXh1U/s1600-h/U7_Geoffrey.png
http://bp3.blogger.com/_3WacBST0pXU/R0S1c18Sn4I/AAAAAAAAAzU/g7vMLZdj8co/s1600-h/moonshade_ruin.png

I can't see why you couldn't make the chairs and tables and doors follow the same angle as well. They shouldn't take any more grid space that way.

At the moment this is not really pixel art, since you're using hundreds of colours with smooth gradients and you've obviously painted big areas with a soft, antialiasing brush. If you're gonna keep it that way, this thread should relocate to the low spec art area.