Vagabond enters in alpha
Hi everyone!
I am pleased to announce you that the prototype I showed you a long time ago eventually becomes a game called Vagabond and I release the alpha today. Vagabond is a 2D RPG that features living procedurally generated open worlds.
Firstly, I want to thank all the OpenGameArt community for creating all the nice assets and giving me the idea of the game. I hope I credited everyone correctly on the credits page of the game website and on the credits screen in the game. If an asset or a person is missing, or you want to be credited differently (different name or different URL), please contact me and I will fix this mistake quickly.
The game is not free as I plan to use the earned money to commission new assets for the next versions. However, I offer a key to all the active members of the OpenGameArt community, just send me a message in the OpenGameArt interface and I will send you a key! :)
The game is not finished at all, currently, it mainly features the world generation but I will add more features and contents in the coming months. See the roadmap, for a detailed list of the planned features.
There are some assets I made for the game that I will publish here in the coming weeks:
- Female version of the skirt by wulax
- Death animations for the original LPC monsters, they are procedurally generated, I will also release the script to generate them
- Masks (white and black images) to hide hair under hats, they are procedurally generated too, the script will be published.
I also wrote a script to transform head (hat or hair) from male to female.
I modify most items and body parts to fix small issues. I will publish all the assets I used on a GitLab repo so that people can easily retrieve the versions of the game. If you see anything that you think should be published, just tell me!
If you have any question or comment, you can also contact me at pierre@vagabondgame.com.
Thanks again!
Hey, congratulations! This is very exciting, and I can't wait to check it out.
Thank you for sharing the modified assets and scripts. There are a large number of minor issues with especially the character sprites, which everyone who uses eventually has to re-fix. I think castelonia's LPC Spritesheet generator is the closest to a definitive collection we have for the body parts at the moment. Hopefully any tweaks you make could be merged "upstream" into their repository.
Thanks!
There are small tweaks that will be easy to merge upstream. However, I modified the female base character as there are few issues with it. Subsequently, I had to modify many items but I don't use all the items present in castelonia's LPC Spritesheet generator, so not all of them are fixed.
I am also very interested in any fixes you've done.
I've been wanting to create an updated and better standardized LPC collection, just so we'd have a source for clean LPC assets, that aren't missing animations, and all have the same selection of colors.
I use a special format to store the images: I have grayscale images where the values correspond to the indices of a color in a palette. So to have a colored image, a grayscale image and a palette are needed.
This format allow me to quickly fix all the variations of a body part and to make sure the colors exactly match for body parts that use the same palette (body, nose and ears, or male and female versions for example).
But I am not sure this format is very useful to other people, so I will apply the palettes to the grayscale images to generate all the colored variations. I am writing a script to achieve this automatically but it takes some time.
I think it's still useful! Perhaps more useful actually, especially if you can pre-generate the color variations. That way people can either use the assets directly in a standardized palette, or can easily make new recolors, programmatically or manually. This is what an older version of the character creator/universal spritesheet did for hair and facial hair: https://github.com/jrconway3/Universal-LPC-spritesheet (check out the _build/ subdirectory). They had all the hair objects in 4 directions, drawn using a standard pink palette, then included a set of Ruby/ImageMagick scripts to recolor them against a set of palettes and also generate the full spritesheet with all the different animations.
I also adapted those scripts to work for shields and headgear, so it generates the full sheet from a few images and can do automatic recolors (I think either BenCreating or maybe Basto has done something similar too, maybe for headgear?). I never shared those scripts but probably should if it would be helpful.
[quote]I've been wanting to create an updated and better standardized LPC collection, just so we'd have a source for clean LPC assets, that aren't missing animations, and all have the same selection of colors.[/quote]
I'm using an extended version of the LPC character spritesheet that also fits in the running, jumping and grab animations, as well as a push and carry animations I made myself. I've been planning to clean that up and post it here, along with any clothes I adapted to the new animations.
It looks something like the attached, but I messed up and merged some of the layers (meaning I don't have the base sprite for some of the modified animations).
Anyway, that should probably be left for a different thread so as not to derail this one into a general discussion on the LPC assets.
Congratulations on the Vagabond progress; I'm finding it hard to justify setting aside time for my own game, so progress has been slow there, but this encourages me to actually do something with it over the holidays. I should probably set up something like a devlog to record progress. Looks like we use a similar algorithm for casting shadows on cave walls!
@bluecarrot16 OK, I will publish the grayscale images, the palettes I used, my scripts, and generate all the colored variations.
Yeah, I think it would be nice to have a repo with this kind of scripts. What would be perfect is a reference script for each body part type, it would drastically ease the creation of new items, which is currently a pain.
You are still using Ruby/ImageMagick?
@Evert You adapted a lot of body parts to the new animations?
Thanks! Sharing with others is always a nice experience, I have so much feedback from this first version, it will take me weeks to fix/improve everything. I would be delighted to read your devlog.
The shadow casting on walls was a last minute addition, I was not sure but one of my brothers convinced me to add it. It still needs some polishing. Do you know any other game that uses this? I would be glad to see a screenshot of yours!
Here are the body parts used in Vagabond: https://gitlab.com/vagabondgame/lpc-characters.
There is a README that should explain everything.
If you have any comment or suggestion, let me know.
Hey, the version alpha 2 of Vagabond is released on itch.io! :)
Chopping, mining and crafting are the main features added in this version. In addition, with this release, a free demo is now available.
The next version is expected around May and will add farming and housing features. I have already commissioned some new LPC assets to bluecarrot16 to achieve this. I can't wait to be in May. ;)
If you find the time to try the game, I am interested in your opinion and any feedback.
Here is the new trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_WrCYR2YIQ
Have a nice day!