A question about tiles!
Hey people! (DeeMer and Nahjor mostly, right? :C )
I'm a pixel artist, with an ambition of leaving a mark in the roguelike genre.
I've enjoyed this game a lot and I think it's one of the most clever roguelikes out there, so it's only logical that at some point I want to do a tileset for this.
But I need confirmation on a couple bits of info in order to do so.
Does the color switching work like this?
255,255,255 (pure white) -> highlight of whatever color
250,250,250 (white) -> midtone of whatever color
239,239,239 (grayish white) -> shadow of whatever color
Which tiles use color switching? My guesses:
-Player character sprites (six ranks)
-Amulets
-Tunics
-Boots
-Helmets
-Rings
-NOT fountains.
Is there any chance of you helping me to a non-spoilery "creatures and items name list", to have solid concepts to work with? Or could you tell me the way to extract this information from the editor?
I'd dig all the info from the game, playing it, but you know, I'm not much good at playing roguelikes ^^U
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- A question about tiles! - Psiweapon
- A question about tiles! - Psiweapon
- A question about tiles! - DeeMer
- A question about tiles! - Psiweapon
- A question about tiles! - Psiweapon
- A question about tiles! - Nahjor
- A question about tiles! - Psiweapon
- A question about tiles! - Psiweapon
- Congrats + Idea - Kyzrati
- Essentials Kit - DeeMer
- 2.0.3 - Uselessly depleting fountain of inversion - Nahjor
- Middle spells - Psiweapon
- Middle spells - Nahjor
- A question about tiles! - Psiweapon
- A question about tiles! - DeeMer
- 2.0.3 - Inexhaustible Hair of Wolf - Nahjor
- 2.0.3 - Inexhaustible Hair of Wolf - Psiweapon
- 2.0.3 - Inexhaustible Hair of Wolf - Nahjor
- A question about tiles! - Psiweapon
- A question about tiles! - Psiweapon
Glad you're enjoying it, and there's always a place for more tilesets. :)
You're pretty close on the color switching. That's exactly what uses color-swapping: PCs, and the five flavors of artifacts. Note that there are actually two "amulet" tiles; the one near the top of the tileset (gold stone on a chain), which is used for amulet items, and the color-swapped one, which is used for neck-worn artifacts, such as the one made from floating eyes.
There are actually four colors that get swapped; 255,255,255; 250,250,250; 245,245,245; and 240,240,240. Generally, 255 is used for the brightest color, 250 for the next brightest, etc, but it gets more complicated with the PC images. Eomancers, for example, are: 255, 245 -> Black; 250, 240 -> White. For reference, I've attached an image showing all of the different possible PC tiles. Each row is a different rank (aspiring at the top, master at the bottom), and each column is a school or pair of schools (from left to right: none, Elemental, Arcane, Light, Dark, Cosmic, E/A, E/L, E/D, E/C, A/L, A/D, A/C, L/D, L/C, D/C).
I'll put together a new "map" of what tiles correspond to, should be up later this afternoon.
OK, tileset map is included below. If anything on there is unclear, or if I screwed something up, please let me know. :)
Wow, thank you very much! That's really helpful!
Am I correct in that the default tileset is in RGB color format? Would there be any problems in using a 256 colors file, as long as the color swap values are the correct ones? Well, I could make it RGB afterwards anyways.
Also, WHAT THE HECK is the weird crystal thing to the right of the bookshelf? I can't make any sense out of it.
Don't take it badly, but one of my main motives for making a new tileset is revamping the PC sprites, I like the two or three first tiers, but I don't like how the top tiers look.
Still, I'll probably stick to most of the current "designs", redoing them in my stile (I.E.: the pilferer, I want the creatures to be easily recognizable even if you change the tileset)
Who did the default tileset, is it exclusive for this game or is it shared with other games?
It is indeed in RGB format. I haven't tested it with loading from something else, but as .NET's image file handling is a little weird anyways, it probably won't work out well.
The weird crystal thing is a piece of terrain that only shows up on the last floor of Laxuno's dungeon. It's a large chunk of faceted crystal mounted on the floor, and it has unusual properties when exposed to the proper stimuli. :)
I don't take it badly at all; I am no artist, and my additions to the tileset are far from great. One of these days, I'd love to have a competent artist rebuild the tileset from scratch with MG in mind, but that's still in the pipe-dream stage.
The base tiles were made by David Gervais, and can be found here. They were, as I recall, originally created for Angband, and I know a number of other roguelikes use them. I've added a number of my own tiles, and extensively modified quite a few of them.
A W E S O M E
I have to congrat you on the names of the archmagi, where the hell did you pull them out of? your ass? Because they're as cool as they get!
Sateja, Mhiu, Ath, Laxuno, Nhuz... they've really got something to them.
Another thing I'll probably revamp are tokens, IIRC, at the start of the game you're given a brief description of them, I'll try and stick to them.
Seeing that most of the tiles are from David Gervais' free tiles, now I'm not so sure of sticking too much to the current designs, I don't want it to look like a ripoff of his tiles!
Also, eventually I'll ask some specific questions about particular monsters, because I don't have the foggiest what some of them are.
As I recall, the archmage names can be credited to one of the generators over at Seventh Sanctum. It takes a few iterations, but it is usually able to produce something that I like, or at least something that sparks an idea I can use.
I think it'd be super cool to have another tileset for this game.
If you need to figure out something about any particular creature, I suggest opening up the MageGuild editor and making a custom level with everything you need in it. Just surround a monster with a see-through wall that can't be fired through, and check its in-game description. I fell into the trap of kind of basing some of my tiles of the default set, but when I checked them in-game, the description was pretty different - especially w/ the tentacle beast. But you don't have to stick too close, either. My Verminlord is based off of Dale Gribble.
Not that you need to be told this, but my other advice is to just play the game more. Once you go through a few times and see what the monsters are like, you'll form a stronger mental image of them.
Glad to read you, deemer! :D
Thanks for the advice, it's really the best advice I can follow.
If you call basing your tiles off the default set "a trap", then I'm NOT going to do it at all!
Yes, I'd like to get as much info from playing the game as I can, but as I said before, I'm not much confident on it because I'm little to no good with roguelikes (only ever finished one, only once, and it was a pretty obscure one, Zap'M)
That said, I *want* to stick to the game descriptions (save exceptions,probably) because I like taking an already existing concept and pixelling it.
If you check this, an entry in my pixel art blog:
http://ilovemakingtiles.blogspot.com/2011/09/ffhtr-creature-sprites-now-...
you'll get an idea of the style I'll be using for this.
Also, Deemer, your designs of the Archmagi are pretty cool! But there's something nagging me... does the cosmic archmage (Nhuz?) look like a character from Spawn? O_O
Deemer, I'm following your advice, and I'm pixelling monsters I'm encountering.
I'm playing a game, and I have the program I use for pixel-art open (GrafX2).
When I find a monster I feel like doing, I read its description and proceed.
Since you're experts in the game, you'll have no problem recognizing them for what they are ;)
Does he? I don't know too much about Spawn, especially not any characters that aren't Spawn himself.
I really like your stuff, Psi. I don't think it would look out of place in some of the great PC/DOS games of yesteryear. I'm really looking forward to the final thing.
Wow, thank you! :D
I don't know much about Spawn either, I've just read a couple of comics at a friend's, a long time ago.
The character I was thinking about is called Cagliostro or Cogliostro, but googling it doesn't return many images that resemble your Nhuz... or maybe I'm just mistaken, lol.
I'm going to make two alt versions for the tileset, one with a male PC and another with a female PC.
I've been experimenting today with both, but I'm more satisfied with the female one than the male one.
I'm a guy, but I like playing with female characters, and I want to explore the different aesthetic possibilities of male and female magicians.What I'd like to do, is introduce progressive changes in the PC sprite, so that any two adjacent ranks are similar, but the top rank looks almost nothing like the starting one. One thing I've been thinking about, is making the male sprite more bald and bearded with each rank X_D
Also I'm trying to pull some cool stunts using the magic colorswap whites, but I'm not sure to what extent I will succeed.
Hey!
Some more tiles :)
Two new female PC ranks, and the five scrolls. I went on a completely different direction with scrolls, hope you like them (I sure do!)
Oh, and a vampire too! ;)
Walls, Doors (wip), stairs, hole, Delver and target ring wip (not correctly split up and positioned yet)
Nahjor, if you start to feel like I'm abusing the image upload, feel free to erase the old ones.
Nice work. :)
And nah, you're fine. Plenty of space.
Oh good :)
Target circle, potential red cloud/fire, hydrowyrm, bituminous wyrm.
Most of potions and the gargoyle added.
Now they're pasted on top of the default tileset so you can try them if you want.
Looking really good! I see you like red-headed ladies too.
Har Har !
Today I've started with the balls, and it's being quite hard.
I'm not consistently good with effects, sometimes I manage to make something pretty good, sometimes it's crap. And distancing myself from Gervais' approach to effects, while avoiding producing a crap output, isn't being easy.
Apparently, the effects MageGuild uses currently have embedded themselves pretty deep in my skull. And I won't settle for less than a complete redraw!
So far I've made the smallest balls all the same, just in different colors, I'll try giving them different effects in the bigger sizes.
All small balls (how aliterative!) , all medium balls, and some large balls.
I'll have to stop pixelling for this tileset for a while because I have other things to do, I'll come back in a few days probably :)