Near-final ship tileset, now with better sails and more options!
I have also finished all 4 directions and walking animations of the shovel, but as I was recording the preview image I decided it needed a few more tweaks... too late for those edits tonight, but here's what it looks like...
I have also been playing with some cooking-related animations: chopping with a chef's knife or cleaver, tossing food in a frying pan, and stirring a pot. Chopping definitely works, not so sure about the others yet... Other ideas for animations that could be shoe-horned into the existing motions?
Hi, not a bug, a feature actually---just not really explained (realized I forgot to explain it on the pirate sheet as well)...
The pink mask is to hide parts of the base sprite (e.g. the remainder of the leg) that should be missing. It is designed this way so the prostheses work with multiple bases. To get rid of it, in the generator, click "Replace Mask (pink)". I'll add a note to this effect to the pirate page too.
The biggest thing you could improve is modulating the contrast throughout the images. Background elements should have lower contrast, while foreground objects have greater contrast. The tiled floor jumps out because of the high contrast, but the lockers blend into the wall (and into each other) because they are low contrast. A simple way to achieve this is to draw dark borders around foreground objects (it is possible to achieve readable images without this, but takes more discretion); this is what the LPC style does for instance.
Additionally, think about how objects exist in 3D space. It doesn't really make sense that the bottom of the lockers is flush with the wall, but you can also see the top of the lockers (i.e. they stick out). Likewise with the kitchen counters, where it looks like they are offset a few feet from the wall, because the top edge of the counter lines up with the floor line.
Finally, enhance the 3D nature of your scene by thinking about a light source and what objects would be illuminated. In your case, the light source is from almost directly above, so the space under the tables should be in shadow, at least slightly.
Welcome (and whoa, thanks for sharing all the art)!
Castelonia (aka Sander Frenken) and I have done a lot of work on the generator in the last year or so to get everything better organized, get the assets attributed, and add a few features. I will note that there are a few missing attributions after the last major refactor, which one of us needs to go back and fix (the information is all there in an earlier commit, but some files were renamed and thus the mapping was lost).
The generator code itself is a bit of a hack, it may or may not be a good starting point for building a new app. However we have encapsulated most of the "metadata" about the assets in a series of JSON files (i.e., assets are arranged into mutually-exclusive groups, Z-indexes are specified, etc.).
For palette swaps, the main issue is that not all assets use the same palette(s). All the pirate assets I posted recently https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-pirates , for instance, use a common set of colors and were automatically recolored using these scripts https://github.com/bluecarrot16/lpctools . I've attached the different color palettes I used. But not all assets in the generator are like that.
I intend to eventually go through and recolor most things into a standardized palette, then create programmatic recolors of all assets. Haven't gotten around to it yet though... it will be a lot of manual work.
If you are just going to apply some kind of continuous color filter (like adjusting the tint/hue in Photoshop, rather than replacing discrete colors), you wouldn't need to do all that manual work. The results will not be as consistent and cohesive, but it may work just fine for your purposes.
Hand tools for farming! A hoe, for tilling soil, and a watering can... for watering... Thanks to SRWG for the commission! I'll be posting these soon. I also did a sketch of an improved shoveling animation, if someone is interested in that.
Made north- and south-facing hammering animations, which was a bit of a challenge, because if you look only at his arm, it is... not really moving how you would swing a hammer :p But I think it ended up working out OK actually! The motion blur and the little sparks kinda draw the eye away from the arm movement. This also makes me REALLY want to try doing an axe chopping animation, because I think 1--2 frames of motion blur could make for a really dynamic and convincing axe swing.
One problem is these animations force the issue of scale---whereas normally we can get away with things being approximately the right size, with these animations, the tables and such have to be exaclty the right height and the character in just the right position or it looks super strange, at least in certain directions. The anvils on the stone table/pedestal things are clearly too tall for the north-facing guy to hit. But if you mentally edit-out the stone table, he can just baaaaarely reach the anvil. I'll have to mess with this a bit.
I tried making a sawing and smaller hammering animation for the woodshop (very rough sketches), and realized the layers get a little tricky too... I think the south-facing sawing would work if the saw was moved to a separate layer on top of the workbench/planks (currently the layers are, bottom-to-top: character > workbench > planks). He can get away with hammering right now, but he's not quite standing in the right place. Not sure whether it's worth it to try and sort all this out. What do you think?
Draft of the much-requested LPC sailing ship! Deck parts designed to be modular to allow different sizes/configurations. Only one size mast and sail at the moment, but could definitely add others. Thanks to castelonia for supporting this work!
Hey man, this is really great stuff! I meant to post some feedback earlier but lost track of time. A few quick comments (let me know if unclear and I can make additional demonstration images):
- for big patches of grass, water, etc.: you are using mostly the "accent" tiles; this makes the pattern obvious and the tiles look repetitive. Instead, try using mostly the plain version (~8 plain tiles:1 accent tile). For grass, this is just a plain green square. You can setup tile probabilities in Tiled (Edit tileset > Properties > Probability) to paint this way using the Random Mode (D) or the terrain tool. Counterintuitively, the simpler pattern will make your scene look less repetitive and more organic.
- on a similar note, ease up on the ornaments in the necromancer's fort. A lot of the ornaments don't have solid bottom border and are more meant to be used with tiles that have an implied top border. They look kinda strange hanging without that. Likewise for some of the windows, though that's more my bad.
- the geometry of some of your buildings is hard to visually parse. For example, the blue bridge in screenshot_24.png , it's hard to tell where the wall ends and the ceiling begins. Consider using small drop shadows on the right side of an object to emphasize this. You can find some in the LPC Base Assets > UI > shadow.png . Using tiles with harder/darker borders also helps with this problem.
- in screenshot_25.png, the smaller parts of the fortress building should be further forward/down in the image. As it stands, the roofline is longer than the floor line, which doesn't make sense. Also those walls don't really have roof tiles, if you'd like to use them as walls of an enclosed building I would suggest getting rid of the inner row of merlons and draw/appropriate some roof tiles. If they're being meant to enclose a small space, they might benefit from some shadows on the inside.
- buildings work best with the windows when each storey of the building is 3 tiles tall. Buildings that break this rule end up looking strange. You can see this in the building in the southern Menta village, just north of the dock (see image). The white huts on the dock have kind of the same problem, but I think they would look nice with a window on the upper level, as you've done for the blacksmith.
- speaking of which, I love the little blacksmith area. Great use of different tiles and nice little implied space. The only problem I see is that the backing wall is kinda too high contrast compared to the objects hanging there, so it's hard to parse them. That's partly my bad, I'll be making a higher-contrast version of the furnace whenever I get around to releasing the Blacksmith pack. I could make a lower-contrast version of the wall too eventually, but there should be other options as well that let your objects stick out better.
- in the tipsy cat interior, the ceiling moulding looks too thick with both that decorated top row of wall tiles against those thick room border tiles ("ceiling"). I would suggest swapping out the top wall tile for a plainer version, leaving the room border tiles alone.
- finally, I've made this comment elsewhere to pvigier, but it helps to have variable density of trees and to pick one or two dominant species for an area, rather than having all kinds of trees be equally likely. Preferably these should be the more round, symmetrical kind, rather than the weirder more asymmetrical ones. This will have the side effect of making different areas of the game more distinct.
I don't want to come across as too negative, because overall I think you are doing a great job! I love the tavern scene and the little towns in Menta. Just trying to provide some constructive feedback to help you improve :)
Ongoing legal ambiguity about whether using GPL artwork triggers the GPL linking requirement, mandating the game code be made available under GPL. Certainly use of GPL art in non-FOSS software seems counter to the spirit of the GPL.
In general, if I'm going to invest a lot of effort in a big tileset, nowadays I'd rather just make it from scratch and have complete control over the licensing.
Near-final ship tileset, now with better sails and more options!
I have also finished all 4 directions and walking animations of the shovel, but as I was recording the preview image I decided it needed a few more tweaks... too late for those edits tonight, but here's what it looks like...
I have also been playing with some cooking-related animations: chopping with a chef's knife or cleaver, tossing food in a frying pan, and stirring a pot. Chopping definitely works, not so sure about the others yet... Other ideas for animations that could be shoe-horned into the existing motions?
Hi, not a bug, a feature actually---just not really explained (realized I forgot to explain it on the pirate sheet as well)...
The pink mask is to hide parts of the base sprite (e.g. the remainder of the leg) that should be missing. It is designed this way so the prostheses work with multiple bases. To get rid of it, in the generator, click "Replace Mask (pink)". I'll add a note to this effect to the pirate page too.
Great start!
The biggest thing you could improve is modulating the contrast throughout the images. Background elements should have lower contrast, while foreground objects have greater contrast. The tiled floor jumps out because of the high contrast, but the lockers blend into the wall (and into each other) because they are low contrast. A simple way to achieve this is to draw dark borders around foreground objects (it is possible to achieve readable images without this, but takes more discretion); this is what the LPC style does for instance.
Additionally, think about how objects exist in 3D space. It doesn't really make sense that the bottom of the lockers is flush with the wall, but you can also see the top of the lockers (i.e. they stick out). Likewise with the kitchen counters, where it looks like they are offset a few feet from the wall, because the top edge of the counter lines up with the floor line.
Finally, enhance the 3D nature of your scene by thinking about a light source and what objects would be illuminated. In your case, the light source is from almost directly above, so the space under the tables should be in shadow, at least slightly.
Welcome (and whoa, thanks for sharing all the art)!
Castelonia (aka Sander Frenken) and I have done a lot of work on the generator in the last year or so to get everything better organized, get the assets attributed, and add a few features. I will note that there are a few missing attributions after the last major refactor, which one of us needs to go back and fix (the information is all there in an earlier commit, but some files were renamed and thus the mapping was lost).
The generator code itself is a bit of a hack, it may or may not be a good starting point for building a new app. However we have encapsulated most of the "metadata" about the assets in a series of JSON files (i.e., assets are arranged into mutually-exclusive groups, Z-indexes are specified, etc.).
For palette swaps, the main issue is that not all assets use the same palette(s). All the pirate assets I posted recently https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-pirates , for instance, use a common set of colors and were automatically recolored using these scripts https://github.com/bluecarrot16/lpctools . I've attached the different color palettes I used. But not all assets in the generator are like that.
I intend to eventually go through and recolor most things into a standardized palette, then create programmatic recolors of all assets. Haven't gotten around to it yet though... it will be a lot of manual work.
If you are just going to apply some kind of continuous color filter (like adjusting the tint/hue in Photoshop, rather than replacing discrete colors), you wouldn't need to do all that manual work. The results will not be as consistent and cohesive, but it may work just fine for your purposes.
Highly recommend you put together a prototype with existing available art. If this is for a school project, art on this site should be more than adequate. The LPC style has a ton of character assets in a 2D orthographic pixel art style https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-collection and a spritesheet generator here https://sanderfrenken.github.io/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gene... . See also the tips here for how to write a good request here https://opengameart.org/forumtopic/how-and-when-to-write-a-good-art-request if you'd like to get more traction.
Hand tools for farming! A hoe, for tilling soil, and a watering can... for watering... Thanks to SRWG for the commission! I'll be posting these soon. I also did a sketch of an improved shoveling animation, if someone is interested in that.
Made north- and south-facing hammering animations, which was a bit of a challenge, because if you look only at his arm, it is... not really moving how you would swing a hammer :p But I think it ended up working out OK actually! The motion blur and the little sparks kinda draw the eye away from the arm movement. This also makes me REALLY want to try doing an axe chopping animation, because I think 1--2 frames of motion blur could make for a really dynamic and convincing axe swing.
One problem is these animations force the issue of scale---whereas normally we can get away with things being approximately the right size, with these animations, the tables and such have to be exaclty the right height and the character in just the right position or it looks super strange, at least in certain directions. The anvils on the stone table/pedestal things are clearly too tall for the north-facing guy to hit. But if you mentally edit-out the stone table, he can just baaaaarely reach the anvil. I'll have to mess with this a bit.
I tried making a sawing and smaller hammering animation for the woodshop (very rough sketches), and realized the layers get a little tricky too... I think the south-facing sawing would work if the saw was moved to a separate layer on top of the workbench/planks (currently the layers are, bottom-to-top: character > workbench > planks). He can get away with hammering right now, but he's not quite standing in the right place. Not sure whether it's worth it to try and sort all this out. What do you think?
Draft of the much-requested LPC sailing ship! Deck parts designed to be modular to allow different sizes/configurations. Only one size mast and sail at the moment, but could definitely add others. Thanks to castelonia for supporting this work!
Thanks!
Great suggestions FiveBros; I don't have any immediate plans to revisit this set, but here are some other ideas I had brainstormed:
Hey man, this is really great stuff! I meant to post some feedback earlier but lost track of time. A few quick comments (let me know if unclear and I can make additional demonstration images):
- for big patches of grass, water, etc.: you are using mostly the "accent" tiles; this makes the pattern obvious and the tiles look repetitive. Instead, try using mostly the plain version (~8 plain tiles:1 accent tile). For grass, this is just a plain green square. You can setup tile probabilities in Tiled (Edit tileset > Properties > Probability) to paint this way using the Random Mode (D) or the terrain tool. Counterintuitively, the simpler pattern will make your scene look less repetitive and more organic.
- on a similar note, ease up on the ornaments in the necromancer's fort. A lot of the ornaments don't have solid bottom border and are more meant to be used with tiles that have an implied top border. They look kinda strange hanging without that. Likewise for some of the windows, though that's more my bad.
- the geometry of some of your buildings is hard to visually parse. For example, the blue bridge in screenshot_24.png , it's hard to tell where the wall ends and the ceiling begins. Consider using small drop shadows on the right side of an object to emphasize this. You can find some in the LPC Base Assets > UI > shadow.png . Using tiles with harder/darker borders also helps with this problem.
- in screenshot_25.png, the smaller parts of the fortress building should be further forward/down in the image. As it stands, the roofline is longer than the floor line, which doesn't make sense. Also those walls don't really have roof tiles, if you'd like to use them as walls of an enclosed building I would suggest getting rid of the inner row of merlons and draw/appropriate some roof tiles. If they're being meant to enclose a small space, they might benefit from some shadows on the inside.
- buildings work best with the windows when each storey of the building is 3 tiles tall. Buildings that break this rule end up looking strange. You can see this in the building in the southern Menta village, just north of the dock (see image). The white huts on the dock have kind of the same problem, but I think they would look nice with a window on the upper level, as you've done for the blacksmith.
- speaking of which, I love the little blacksmith area. Great use of different tiles and nice little implied space. The only problem I see is that the backing wall is kinda too high contrast compared to the objects hanging there, so it's hard to parse them. That's partly my bad, I'll be making a higher-contrast version of the furnace whenever I get around to releasing the Blacksmith pack. I could make a lower-contrast version of the wall too eventually, but there should be other options as well that let your objects stick out better.
- in the tipsy cat interior, the ceiling moulding looks too thick with both that decorated top row of wall tiles against those thick room border tiles ("ceiling"). I would suggest swapping out the top wall tile for a plainer version, leaving the room border tiles alone.
- finally, I've made this comment elsewhere to pvigier, but it helps to have variable density of trees and to pick one or two dominant species for an area, rather than having all kinds of trees be equally likely. Preferably these should be the more round, symmetrical kind, rather than the weirder more asymmetrical ones. This will have the side effect of making different areas of the game more distinct.
I don't want to come across as too negative, because overall I think you are doing a great job! I love the tavern scene and the little towns in Menta. Just trying to provide some constructive feedback to help you improve :)
Ongoing legal ambiguity about whether using GPL artwork triggers the GPL linking requirement, mandating the game code be made available under GPL. Certainly use of GPL art in non-FOSS software seems counter to the spirit of the GPL.
In general, if I'm going to invest a lot of effort in a big tileset, nowadays I'd rather just make it from scratch and have complete control over the licensing.
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