Not quite, I pulled the XCFs apart into separate spritesheets, because I'm heading toward generating random 'customers' for my entry. The code is there to do it, but not used at the moment.

So the submitted version of my entry uses only  fixed 'finished characters'.

I have made a start on pulling apart the sprites and XCFs into recoloured spritesheets that I could then layer on the fly in the game. I have also recoloured the base male and female sprites to have a variety of skin-tones (and eye-colours) because the world is not filled with pale blue-eyed caucasians. Yuck. We really need to kill that stereotype..

Also, a number of the spritesheets do not line up...and the ones from the base assets have some ugly animation - check the female sprites as they walk north, looks like they've got motor-piston heads...

Ah, and a number of spritesheets have stray pixels, cleaned some of those up a well...you don't notice until you see them walking around on a coloured background and there is suddenly a strange thing flashing above their ears :)

So feel free to have a mosey in my  repository, and use whatever you want. 

I was also thinking of building an online character builder so that players could create their own 'shopkeeper', and if I did that I would add a button that would allow you to download that character as a spritesheet for use in your own games.

I'll have to play Polymorphable now :)

But the studentA/B/C whatever is from either the base assets or the online demo, can't remember. I wasn't happy with the animation on that one, has a piston-head when walking north.

But I'll be glad to help you with the recolouring for the non-walking stances, really easy to do in Gimp, there's a colour replace option for that.

That's how I did the dark base sprites - Picked the colours from the studentA/B/C sprite and then used colour replace on the base_male and base_female images.

For the tanned sprites I added a layer in Gimp, set the layer to either multiply or overlay, and then you just have to bucket fill it with a colour. The tricky part is picking the right colour so that it looks ok.

For the record, the skin/eye tone in the base assets is meant as a placeholder to be customized with the rest of the character, not as some stereotypical ideal.  I had assumed that most programmers even with no art background could probably do a color swap easily enough, though ofc not being from that side of the game dev world I'm not always sure.

I would be interested in your elaborating on what you mean by a motor piston head, though.  That metaphor doesnt say too much to me.

Hmmm...best place to observe the 'pistonhead' is perhaps in my online LPC entry. Look for a dark-skinned girl with (short) blue hair wearing a red top. (aka student_a.png) When she walks north her head stays in one place while her body 'pumps' up and down... From memory it's a flaw in the base female body spritesheet. I remember correcting it in some other spritesheets...

It's less noticable in student_b.png, because her hair covers her neck.

But you can imagine what happens if there is a 'mistake' in a base art asset, and other people start building and layering on top of that base asset. Nothing that can't be fixed though.

Could also just be a personal gripe, or maybe I've just spend too much time peering at those sprites up-close ;)

LPC Entry

http://madmarcel.github.com/yoas/index.html

Student A

http://madmarcel.github.com/yoas/res/img/sprites/full-characters/student_a.png

Student B

http://madmarcel.github.com/yoas/res/img/sprites/full-characters/student_b.png

For the record, the skin/eye tone in the base assets is meant as a placeholder to be customized with the rest of the character, not as some stereotypical ideal.

That's ok, I guessed as much, but it bothered me. My wife and children are not caucasian, they play the games that I make, and it matters to me. Appropriate role-models and all that.

I had assumed that most programmers even with no art background could probably do a color swap easily enough, though ofc not being from that side of the game dev world I'm not always sure.

Allow me to enlighten you ;)

I work with a large team of developers, and there is only one guy on our team besides myself who would know how to use GIMP. I doubt he knows what pixel art is.

I haven't played many other LPC entries, but I have seen a lot of screenshots, and in my opinion they all show the same thing: Use the provided graphics and that's it. Even with a 30 days timeframe. (Guilty of this myself BTW; I changed the concept for my LPC entry because I didn't want to draw any new graphics)

As a general rule programmers are not arty, and artists are not programmers. Horrible generalization, but I've worked on both sides, and I've even found that (other) developers have an aversion to using graphics software...

I spoke to some other devs on the LPC IRC channel and this came up a few times: Using Tiled to make maps is tedious and tiresome. Pixel pushing is tedious and tiresome. Avoid both if you can.

Programmers are lazy. They will use the provided graphics and no more. (If they even notice the lack of skin-tone variety) 

So I would prefer it if a variety of skin-tones are provided by default. No excuses. 

This is also why I think a 'super' combined spritesheet is a fantastic idea. Lower the barrier and get more people to start using these graphics.

Yeah, I remember reading about the TV adaptation of the Earthsea trilogy. Something similar just happened to "The Hunger Games"; very specific about what type of actors could audition for the movie...

Two things that are sorely missing from LPC assets:

- enemy sprites.

- female combat outfits.

...and I do not have the skill to address it. (Although I am tempted to have a go at one of the unfinished sprites that was submitted - the orc)

@MadMarcel:

  Re female head:  Huh.  I spent quite a bit of time fixing animation formatting bugs like that one; a number of them were introduced somewhere along the line.  I'm surprised one got through, especially without being brought up. I'll have to look into it and get a fixed version out, at least for the sake of future development.

Edit:  from taking a quick look at the current LPC style guide, the head appears to bob properly on the back view.  Perhaps the sprites in question were working from an older version with the earlier bugs?

Re skin tone, etc.: Generally, when people start pixel art, the very first thing they do is recolor a preexisting sprite (at least in some circles).  It's the first thing because it is basically the easiest thing you can do once you get a hang of the tools.  I would say that it's definitely something worth looking into as a programmer, if only because it lets you add variation to assets quickly.  Because it's pretty easy to do (and I figured people might want to make it truly individual when designing a character, rather than just choosing from a few examples) it wasn't high enough priority to add at the last minute.  There were plenty of other things that got cut as well.

I'll agree about female outfits generally being lacking.  I was hoping to fully animate Sara, but I got caught up in other work.  It's still on my list of things to eventually do, though.

"more ladies in non-revealing plate armor"

Given the amount of revealing female body armor in vidja games I always thought non-revealing armor was blasphemy or something.

I can't help but be amused when a game has a female warrior charging into battle with a plate armor bikini of all things. Because women only care about protecting their tits and lower naugty bits.

I used to play LARP, and one of our players had a girlfriend who jokingly said "I would only play LARP if I was wearing a chainmail bikini..."

So he made her a chainmail bikini (Yep, handmade little rings, the works, hours of work)

and so she had no choice but to join in wearing the bikini. (She wasn't a very good sword-fighter, had bodyguards from memory)

So take it from me; it's impractical, it's best worn on warm nights/days and it doesn't offer much protection, but...it is incredibly distracting!

-5 Dex for male opponents.

Makrohn,

If I ever finish this, you may have to create a third 'universal' spritesheet ;)

With all this talk about skin-tones the green-skinned peoples felt left out

Work In Progress (plus some doodling around)

I think I may be able to do a female version as well.

The male orc/ogre is not. He's taller and wider in the shoulders and body.

If I finish him (will be walking animation only) I'll put a request for some clothes and gear in the 'Resource Requests' forum.

The female orc is just a recoloured female base with a modified face, so yes, she can just go into the female spritesheet - I did that on purpose seeing as it is so difficult to get anyone to draw female outfits ;) That one should be quick and easy to do...

The standard female hair probably won't work, but that's ok.

BTW Thanks for the awesome sprites RedShrike...bet you've got finished versions of these floating around ;)

Female orc is done, that one was quick.

Find it here:

http://opengameart.org/content/female-orc-base-walkcycle

Whew, finished the female orc spritesheet. Now with pirate outfit :D

You can pull it apart and use the clothes in your universal sprite sheet...but ehhh...the colours don't quite work. Sort of works with the dark skinned female base.

"You can pull it apart and use the clothes in your universal sprite sheet...but ehhh...the colours don't quite work."

Remember, the base is meant to be recolored (or at the very least open to it) as part of character design, as ofc are all assets.  So I would think that shouldn't be much of an issue.

Yo.

Breaking those things into layers sounds like work.  Which is something I may well do, but there are probably other things I'd rather do first, such as properly sheeting out Xeon's LPC style sprite, and doing running animations for the base (something I truly regret not doing, second only to the high framecount on the walk animation).

Yeah, unfortunately not.  I actually work in mspaint, believe it or not, so I don't tend to work in layers.  Under normal circumstances I would have gone to the extra effort, but I was really rushing those last two to get them together for the contest.  Though I haven't seen them used in any of the games, so there's that.  xD

For the record, the skin/eye tone in the base assets is meant as a placeholder to be customized with the rest of the character, not as some stereotypical ideal. I had assumed that most programmers even with no art background could probably do a color swap easily enough, though ofc not being from that side of the game dev world I'm not always sure.

Background: I consider myself a programmer with little to no art talent. I nevertheless entered into both parts of the LPC; in case of the art phase with the intent to learn by doing. And I did learn a lot. But the thing which I still find the hardest is to find good colour ramps.

Hence my comment: As a programmer I can easily do colour swaps, but I am happy if an artist tells me which the new colours should be. Especially since using colours like #000000, #ff0000, or #ffff00 for skin implies insulting certain ethnies.

Wow. Awesome work, very impressed!

Wow, awesome work. I'd looked at doing this one from time to time...I would've only done the walking animation. This is SO much better :D

The biggest job was that the male orc had a very different physique to the standard male sprite...taller and broader, which I thought made for a nice contrast.

I see you've used the standard male body base, which is better in a way, at least he'll have lots of clothes ;)

I get a xcf image plugin error when i try to open that xcf file in gimp 2.8. What version are you using?

i just reinstalled gimp 2.8.2, same error. I will try on a different machine later...

I get a server error whenever I try to get the repository downloaded, and I get a "file too big" error when trying to view the XCF file raw.

Looks good to me :D

Also, have had no issues whatsoever with downloading the various XCFs, works perfectly for me.

(Gimp 2.8.0 on a windoze box)

the repo zipball works. ty.

This is really nice, good work everyone!

I'm not familiar with Gimp, is there a way to export each layer into its own .png file easily?

Thanks, but seems buggy under windows, it only does a couple sheets and rest are 1 kb.  If you still have them, would you mind uploading them some place?

Also,unrelated; does anyone have a Skelton thrust animation?

Here is the export if anyone else wants it; one layer per .png.  Only full sets included (other than weapons):

http://www.powerengine2a.com/data/pack.7z

Obviously same attributes, license, acknowledgements, etc as the Universal-LPC-spritesheet

Looks like all of the dresses are clipping outside their bounds: