DDP's Sprite Workshop

[kidicarus29]

Kinda lost my drawing groove over spring break, so most of my time has been spent catching up on the newest roguelikes like FTL: Faster Than Light, Rogue Legacy, Risk of Rain, etc...



Here's a little isometric mockup for Stonesense! It's a 3rd party program that lets you view Dwarf Fortress in pseudo-3D, allowing you to take screenshots like this. It's a huge improvement over the ASCII graphics, but it runs a lot slower. My intention here is to draw the entire tileset in 8-bit color (256 colors) which will (hopefully) speed up the game a bit if the developer adds an 8-bit color mode.

Finally, someone else who plays Dwarf Fortress! The game is so amazing. Good luck with this project, because I love DF. I prefer a tileset texturepack that replaces the ASCII art, but Stonesense is a very nice program, too.

[DragonDePlatino]

Basing the tile designs on Minecraft are we? The thing is though...yours look miles better, because you actually used hue-shifting, unlike MC's bland tileset.

Weeell...I didn't really have Minecraft in mind with the designs. That distinctive grass-on-dirt cube look is characteristic of a lot of isometric art. I will admit Minecraft does look pretty derpy though. Notch just threw any ol' programmer art into the game and didn't bother replacing it once the game became more popular. :U

Oh, wow! I wish you'd make a Minecraft texture pack now. ^^

Naaah...I'd just be flinging my bucket into an ocean. I like doing things that haven't been done before, and there's no way I could outperform the likes of DokuCraft and the Painterly Pack. I've attempted making a tileset twice, and it never turns out that well.

Finally, someone else who plays Dwarf Fortress! The game is so amazing. Good luck with this project, because I love DF. I prefer a tileset texturepack that replaces the ASCII art, but Stonesense is a very nice program, too.

Thanks! Just keep in mind, this isn't a serious project yet. I'm just testing the isometric waters to see if I can draw in this perspective.

On the other hand, you might be thrilled to learn that I'm actually working on an orthographic tileset right now! I've been working on it for several months now, and I'm aiming for a simple Cave Story-esque look so that the work load is reasonable. Here's a little preview of the races:

[Cyberguy64]

Color me curious about the three sizes of that guy with the beard up top.

Also, any particular reason you put a shine on the goblin's head, but not on any of the other bald characters?

[recme]

im really feelin the cave story/kero blaster vibe from those nes sprites. spectacular job!

[DragonDePlatino]

Color me curious about the three sizes of that guy with the beard up top.

Also, any particular reason you put a shine on the goblin's head, but not on any of the other bald characters?

That guy with the beard...If you're talking about the sprites along the top row, those're my templates for the rest of the humanoid species. Dwarf Fortress has 186 unique humanoid species, and it's a pain having to constantly edit the human sprite to draw these. Having headless and bald templates really speeds things up.

As for the rest of the bald characters...It's kind of hard to tell without any context, but the bald guys on the right are kobolds. The left one is based on the canon design and the right one is based on the more-popular fan design. Both have short fur.

im really feelin the cave story/kero blaster vibe from those nes sprites. spectacular job!

Thanks! They're really simple sprites but it took a week of revisions to nail down the style. This is my third time attempting a complete reskin of DF, and the closest I've ever gotten.

[Cyberguy64]

Oh, okay. I gotcha. Makes sense. I thought maybe it was a power-up type deal.

Lookin' good!

[DragonDePlatino]

I decided it would be best to keep these spoilered. Today, we have the dirtiest set of sprites I've ever drawn.

Spoiler

*rim shot*



Working with textures and palettes in the 8-bit colorspace has been veeery interesting so far. This 256-color palette is missing a lot of pure shades, so hue-shifting is absolutely necessary to get the ramps you want. The first four rows of tiles are the soil types of Dwarf Fortress. Think I got the colors right?

[DragonDePlatino]

It's been a while since I posted, eh? I've still been drawing every day, but I don't do very many little pieces so it's hard to find stuff to share. My current big project is GemSet in case anyone here is interested in that.

Anyways, here's a base for an in-battle sprite. It’s for another thing I’m working on.



Ignore the design itself. I know baldy ain’t exactly a charmer. What’s important here are the proportions and posing. If anything feels off go ahead and tell me.

[Cyberguy64]

The feet seem a little bit too small compared to everything else. Your model has his feet larger then his pant legs, but yours look smaller.

Other then that it's really nice, overall.

[recme]

your characters left arm doesnt have an elbow. it looks sorta odd, so can you try shifting the arm a bit to our left?

[DragonDePlatino]

Gotcha. I'll tweak the sprite's arm and feet. And in the meantime, I've raised the resolution of the sprite by a teensy bit.



In case anyone's curious, I'm using this guy as a placeholder for a MOTHER engine I'm working on. I wanted to make him a little bit bigger so that he'd fit more snugly into the battle screen. I'll also be using him for scale once I start drawing some of the actual enemies.

[Cyberguy64]

I like the idea of actually seeing the back of the character in the Mother style. Are you planning on animating them at all?

[DragonDePlatino]

Yep! My engine is gonna support a lot of features that the main series doesn't have. So far, I've already got acceleration-based movement so that you can't instantly move up to your running speed. I'm going to be keeping most of this stuff disabled by default, though.

[DragonDePlatino]

In a recent streak of insanity, I decided I'd like to try something new and start up a command-driven forum game over on the Bay12 forums. I'm not sure what the characters or story will be, but I'm thinking of dropping four adventurers into a dungeon and letting them go after an artifact. Something short and simple so it doesn't get out of hand.



Obviously, I need to keep the art style very simple so that updates aren't too difficult to draw. The art style will be flatly-colored and vaguely reminiscent of the NES Any thoughts?

[LuigiM9]

I like it. The square noses are odd, but I don't suppose they would look much better with more intricately drawn noses.