By the way, I am pleased to announce Memberships are live on my Ko-fi page: https://ko-fi.com/bluecarrot16 . Members get early access to my new art, (starting with the new LPC Sailing Ship, available now!), and members at higher tiers can choose from a set of discounted commission projects here . All art will ultimately be released under a free/libre license on OGA, as always. Thanks for your support!
Never too late; I appreciate the feedback! Thanks also for your support on Ko-fi, your patronage definitely buys greater influence! XD
The ship currently only supports east/west (west is mirrored). North/south would certainly be possible to add. It would be some work but not a terrible amount---basically would need new bow/stern tiles, sails, ratlines, quarter gallery, and stairs, I think everything else could be re-used. Diagonal is not happening (sorry to whoever asked for that earlier :p)
Wield-able/character animated Shears, tongs, chisels, and pliers are all great ideas. I bet I can work those into the south-facing thrust animation, though might not work for east/west. Inventory items/tiles are definitely possible for those items that don't exist.
How about jeweler's magnifying glasses, or a face shield for welding/smithing, or goggles?
I think for fish in the water, there could just be a small/medium/large fish silhouette, like in Animal Crossing or similar. There are side view images of all those fish (and some others) for inventory etc. in the LPC Foods pack.
Thanks for the feedback everyone! Good points all around.
@Evert: any specific weapons or tools you'd like to see?
@FiveBrosStopMosYT: yes, this is exactly what I had in mind for the ladies clothing! Eliza started something similar years ago and I would like to finish it!
@YuriNikolai: are there some particular realistic plants/crops that you'd like to see? In terms of crops, there are a lot of items from my food pack that I could do, but I've definitely done the most common ones already... I would like to do some growing animations for herbs, which would be useful both as crops (e.g. for farming) and for foraging. For non-crop plants, I'd have to do some research/thinking to figure out what would be most useful... for most games, a bush is a bush. I can definitely imagine scenarios where the specific kind of bush would matter, but I'd appreciate some suggestions on which bushes (/flowers/plants/shrubs) would be worth drawing.
Do you have suggestions for expansions to the workshop/crafts packs? I think the next logical ones would be farm, camp, kitchen. Woodcutter/lumber mill? Stonecutter/quarry? Herbalist? MedicineStorm suggested bowyer/fletcher, magic emporium, those could be fun too.
@All: love the idea of having more animals, but to be honest I'm unlikely to do big animals like bears, deer, camels, etc. unless someone commissions them. It's just a ton of work; they're big sprites so each frame takes a long time, plus it would take me a lot of time looking at videos of the actual animals to get the movement right. Every once in a while, I look longingly at these great animations https://opengameart.org/content/animated-wild-animals and think about it though. I will say that bear and deer have been requested numerous times so those would probably be first on my personal list.
Smaller animals are definitely doable though. I've been playing Stardew Valley with my partner recently and I love all the little wild critters. Plus just a few frames can add a ton of personality. I've often thought about revisiting the birds, cats, and dogs. One of my favorite pixel artists recently posted this, which was very inspiring.
Squirrel, rat, raccoon, fox, seagull, duck... fish?
As the year ends/begins, I am wrapping up a lot of projects and looking ahead to next year. I'd like to gauge interest in future LPC art packs.
Tilesets:
Antique office: office furniture for a Victorian-Edwardian to early 20th century office. Think stuff that would show up in an office in Dishonored, or a hardboiled detective's office. Bank lamp, antique telephone, typewriter, filing cabinets, evidence board
Study: think of the independent gentleman-scientist of the post-Renaissance or Victorian era---microscopes, test tubes, telescopes, maps, globes, scales, an abacus, perhaps a phonograph, or even an early film projector?
Hospital: early modern hospital wards, a medical laboratory, a surgical theater; picture the set of the Knick.
Farm: obviously we have tons of crops, fruit trees, and animals; this set would collect and expand on items and buildings to support them---barn, chicken coop, mill, apiary, cheesemaking workshop, etc.
Camp: tents, firepits, camp stoves, primitive tables/chairs/benches, sleeping rolls, drying racks for hides or jerkey
Grasslands/terrain expansion: tall grasses, more terrain varieties
Houses: some more general-purposes houses---updated timber-frame cottage, log cabin, various modular trims in combination with different types of planking (like in the Victorian set)
Steampunk: pipes, furnaces, boilers, smokestacks, gears (maybe...). Could work well with some of the systems I developed for the alchemy pack, and would work great with all the Victorian buildings.
Tavern/Pub: a meeting house, bar, or gambling den; tables, chairs, booze; card and table games, booths. Imagine the Kingfisher Inn from the Witcher, or The Garrison Pub from Peaky Blinders
Ladies: modular dresses, skirts, and aprons. I'd like to incorporate the updates here https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-character-bases into the existing female assets in the spritesheet generator, then base future additions off that corrected base
Pants: Breeches (could be useful for medieval peasants, pirates, Victorian gentlemen, etc.), trunkhose, cargo pants? (e.g. for a steampunk mechanic)
Shirts: gambeson, doublet, waistcoat...
Shoes: tall boots, buckled shoes, sandals for all body types...
Hand tools: basically anything I can squeeze into the existing animation frames. Knives, sickle, cooking tools, fishing rod, crowbar, etc.
Hats and helmets: these are so much easier than anything else and they add a ton of flavor so I love doing them. Lots of medieval hats for peasants, merchants, etc.; "Victorian" hats (deerstalker, newsie cap, leather aviator hats, bonnet, lady's hats, etc.); new helmets (sugarloaf greathelm, flat-top crusader helm, combat close helm); variations of my existing helmets, perhaps in combination with Eliza's, or with parts from there
Expanded weapon animations: e.g. backwards slash and thrust animations for swords
New weapons (open to ideas)
Several of my existing submissions could use some attention and updates as well:
Furniture: updates to wood furniture and upholstery sets to add more modular counters/cabinetry/cupboards, shelves, hutches, cribs/cradles/bassinets, desks, etc.
Trees: apply more consistent art style to all objects; expand to each style of tree has at least 3 variants; add more styles (more realistic too?)
Plants: this just needs to be totally updated. Many of the items are stylistically inconsistent and I think I could do a lot better today.
Crops: expand to add more objects from the LPC Foods pack
Of course, I still have a few projects in the pipeline from 2021 that I'm hoping to finish and release soon:
Ship: modular square-rigged sailing ship; furled and set sails, bowsprits, quarter galleries, shroud ladders, crow's nests; all fully modular, with tons of combinations possible. (This is actually complete and will be available soon...)
Hand tools, part 1: hammers, shovel, watering can
Beach/Desert updtes: I have some re-drawn (and in my opinion, much-improved) cactuses, other succulents, creosote scrub, and a few other items. I'd like to add others too.
By way of disclosure, I am also soon planning to launch subscriptions on my Ko-fi page, https://ko-fi.com/bluecarrot16 . The gist is that subscribers will get early access to my completed art, as well as work-in-progress screenshots and updates via Discord. I will also have a standing pool of projects that anyone can sponsor for a reasonable price. All art will ultimately be released for free to everyone on OGA, as always!
Please let me know what sets you would be most interested in seeing! The suggestions last year were very helpful, and I think I made great progress adding lots of craft shops, ruins, and the sailing ship to the available LPC assets.
OK, I have finished making the jump animations for all the bodies. Now I'm hung up on a silly minor organizational issue... wondering if any/either of you have any thoughts.
To recap, the new version of this submission will include
six "body types": male, female, child, teen, muscular, or pregnant,
six "head types": orc (male, female, child), human (male, female, child), lizard (male, female, child), wolf (male, female, child), minotaur (adult, child), boar (adult, child)
I propose that head_type be promoted to a new layer in the generator, so any combination of head and body type is permitted, and appropriate recolors of the bodies and heads be added as well, based on the palette(s) that Evert comes up with. I'm not tackling that here, just providing a minimal set of recolors of the bodies to match the heads.
For the generator, we settled on this folder structure: ${category}/${subcategories...}/{object}/${body_type}/${variant}.png , where body_type would be one of male, female, muscular, etc. listed above (at present, more could be added), and variant would be the recolor or other variety. hat/pirate/tricorne/male/black.png. For many assets there is now also ${category}/${subcategories...}/{object}/${body_type}.png , i.e. the asset in a standardized palette, which is used to generate the recolors, e.g. {body_type}/{variant}.png . So the rule of thumb is that the variant is at the deepest file nesting, then the body type, then the object type/group. (Of course, not every object has a unique spritesheet for every body type; most only have male and female, and some only male or female. The JSON definition files clarify if a given asset can be used with multiple body types (for instance, male hair can be used with the muscular base, etc.))
The goal of having a consistent file structure was to make it clear where to put new stuff, to make it obvious where to find existing assets, and to make repetitive assets amenable to generating with scripts. For example, since hats would be auto-placed according to body type, then subsequently recolored, it kinda fits the workflow to make hat/pirate/tricorne/male.png first, then recolor that to create hat/pirate/tricorne/male/{black,brown,green,...}.png .
With adding these bodies with modular heads, three complications are introduced:
1) How to incorporate animations/layouts into this heirarchy: The jump animations do not fit on the "universal" spritesheet layout. Several people have expressed a desire to have sheets split up by animation, which would have a few advantages. Splitting and combining spritesheet layouts is trivial with lpctools, so I'm not opposed to introducing this, but I'm trying to figure out the most sensible way to organize things. Should it be ${category}/${subcategories...}/${object}/${body_type}/${animation}/${variant}.png ? Or ${category}/${subcategories...}/${object}/${animation}/${body_type}/${variant}.png ?
2) Likewise, by introducing the modular heads, there are now various body_type/head_type combinations. For example, head_type could be human, lizard, wolf, orc, boar, minotaur, skeleton, etc. For assets that involve the head, a different head_type might require using a different spritesheet (for example, human hair may need to be masked differently than orc hair). Or there might be assets that are unique to a particular body_type/head_type combination, e.g. https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-lizard-headgear . I'm not worried about adapting every single asset to every single body_type/head_type combo, but just figuring out the structure... should it be ${category}/${subcategories...}/${object}/${body_type}/${animation}/${head_type}/${variant}.png ?${category}/${subcategories...}/${object}/${body_type}/${head_type}/${animation}/${variant}.png ? ${category}/${subcategories...}/${object}/${animation}/${body_type}/${head_type}/${variant}.png ?
3) Finally, how should cross-sex body_type/head_type combinations be handled? Take the orc head for example; the "male" orc head is much different from the "female" orc head. But there's no reason why the male orc head couldn't be placed on the "female" body. So do we have something like head/female/orc/female/green.png , for placing the female head on the female body, and head/female/orc/male/green.png , for placing the female head on the male body? or should the heads just be named e.g. head/orc-female/female/green.png (female head on female body), head/orc-female/male/green.png (female head on male body), etc.? The latter scheme seems clearer to me. But for other objects (such as hats or hair)... it seems like they should be organized by body_type then head_type, e.g. hat/pirate/bandana/female/orc-female/black.png . Still not sure where ${animation} should go in all this if you all still want those separated out...
Ideally I want it to be clear to someone who just downloads the whole repo what combinations are possible/make sense. But anyway I am clearly just bikeshedding with myself and going in circles about this pretty unimportant issue... please help me make a decision so I can upload everything :p
Thanks Ben. I'm working on the jump animations, once those are done I'll upload everything. The file organization will be slightly different, to accommodate the additional possibilities.
I also decided to do child heads for the boarman and minotaur, and boy am I glad I did; look at the little minotaur child---it's adorable!! Tried to make the child wolf and boar less intimidating-looking too.
Thanks! I think they're ready? I believe if you edit this submission and add me as a collaborator I should be able to upload the files directly. Or if you prefer I can DM you a Dropbox link or something and you can upload them here.
For jump, you're right, the south-facing head is clearly adapted from the death/hurt animation, but doesn't quite match. I'll experiment a bit to see if I can make it work. I am guessing the hair from that frame will work fine, but I'll test that too. The north-facing squished head doesn't seem to be from anywhere else (and the hairstyles would cover it anyway), so I'd still favor replacing that one with the regular-sized head. I'll upload an example later.
For the skeleton and zombie---I wasn't proposing to re-draw them for the other body types, but just trying to figure out whether there was a way to make useful adaptations within this same general scheme. For example, I already cut out the skeleton and made a headless skeleton base. If someone wanted to make a skeleton orc or skeleton minotaur or whatever, they'd just have to draw a new head. Seems useful? I don't really see a use case for combining the skeleton head with any of the existing bodies, or putting the other heads on the skeleton body, but maybe someone wants to do that?? I guess if someone wanted to draw a female skeleton, they could re-use the head? Perhaps there's utility combining the skeleton head with the zombie body? (Although your wounds already cover varying states of decay pretty well)
For the zombie, I re-colored the non-wound parts back to the ivory palette, which produced an interesting effect that might also be useful. The zombie body has the same silouette as the male, so making a headless zombie is trivial; if someone wanted zombies with different heads, they could make them. Interestingly, if I delete the outlines and slap this overlay on the muscular base, it looks pretty good as well, so free muscular zombie I guess? Doesn't look good on the female or teen base, so I'll definitely ignore that one be for the moment.
Just trying to figure out whether those combinations might be useful/how to make them useful...
OK, I have finished reviewing the headless male, female, pregnant, muscular, teen, and child bases, each in combination with the human (male/female), lizard, wolf, and orc (male/female) heads. I have compared all of these with the originals Ben uploaded here---see comparison gifs below. Basically, I think all remaining differences are either intentional (e.g. slight changes to shading of arms in E/W and S-facing shoot frames), fix small mistakes (e.g. movement of orc head in thurst animation), neutral changes where the new version is more consistent (e.g. north-facing lizard head is shifted 1px up, putting it at same level as human male head; male orc head moves more consistently with the human male head), or are slightly different but acceptable (e.g. minor changes to shading around the neck, where manual edits to the generated spritesheets and/or more detailed special cases would be necessary to recapitulate Ben's version).
There are new combinations possible, e.g. {child, teen, muscular} {orc, wolf, lizard, minotaur, boarman} that are not shown here, but which I also tested and I think they look good.
I also started working on the jump animation (creating offsets, masks, and headless bases). I noticed some of the heads are different (e.g. the last frame heads aren't exactly the same as the cast-frame heads. This is fine, but those will need to be drawn for the orc, lizard, wolf, etc. base. I also noticed that the heads squish a little bit on some of the north-facing frames. I will probably remove this effect for simplicity (it won't be reflected in the hair anyway unless all the hairstyles have another frame drawn. I'll have to see how well the lizard head in particular works with the jump, where the head is displaced somewhat compared to the body. That one might need to be handled specially.
I also haven't decided whether/how the skeleton and zombie should be included in this scheme...
I'll try to finish a draft of the jump animation and then figure out somewhere to upload this so others can explore. Ben, if these look good to you, could I upload the heads, headless bases, and final assembled sheets to this submission?
Just a quick update to say I've made another pass through the female and pregnant bases and I think fixed the issues there to the best of my ability, including improving the necks throughout. I think the female and pregnant bases now look good with all the heads. I identified a few issues that were relevant to the male bases too and applied changes there, but male still needs another pass on a few other problems.
I haven't tackled the jump animations at all, mainly because they aren't in the generator and they don't fit cleanly into the "universal" spritesheet layout used by the generator. Heads are all the same so it should just be a matter of making headless bases and new masks/offsets.
Remaining work to-do on the bases themselves:
Review tests of male headless base with all heads to fix remaining neck issues
Review tests of teen headless base with all heads (uses same offsets and masks as female; if I've correctly copied forward the changes, shouldn't require many tweaks)
Finish headless child base and test with the child heads (human, orc, lizard, wolf)
After that, next steps would be:
Update this submission
Figure out how to incorporate selectable heads into the generator
Write scripts to adapt all muscular and pregnant assets in the generator (1px shifts as described above)
Write scripts to adapt most frames for all female assets in the generator (1--2px shifts)
Manually edit all other affected frames for all female assets in the generator. Will definitely affect all pants, shoes, and shirts. Try to avoid turning this part into a huge project of re-drawing lots more stuff.
At this point, the work may start to overlap with Evert's project, since I'll obviously only want to manually edit one color variant
Re-generate hair and hats/helmets, which might be slightly affected by changed cutouts. Hopefully something resembling a build process will be in place by then.
Post comments all over OGA linking here and begging that nobody make new assets using the old bases :p
Thanks, great ideas for animals!
By the way, I am pleased to announce Memberships are live on my Ko-fi page: https://ko-fi.com/bluecarrot16 . Members get early access to my new art, (starting with the new LPC Sailing Ship, available now!), and members at higher tiers can choose from a set of discounted commission projects here . All art will ultimately be released under a free/libre license on OGA, as always. Thanks for your support!
Never too late; I appreciate the feedback! Thanks also for your support on Ko-fi, your patronage definitely buys greater influence! XD
The ship currently only supports east/west (west is mirrored). North/south would certainly be possible to add. It would be some work but not a terrible amount---basically would need new bow/stern tiles, sails, ratlines, quarter gallery, and stairs, I think everything else could be re-used. Diagonal is not happening (sorry to whoever asked for that earlier :p)
Wield-able/character animated Shears, tongs, chisels, and pliers are all great ideas. I bet I can work those into the south-facing thrust animation, though might not work for east/west. Inventory items/tiles are definitely possible for those items that don't exist.
How about jeweler's magnifying glasses, or a face shield for welding/smithing, or goggles?
I think for fish in the water, there could just be a small/medium/large fish silhouette, like in Animal Crossing or similar. There are side view images of all those fish (and some others) for inventory etc. in the LPC Foods pack.
Thanks for the feedback everyone! Good points all around.
@Evert: any specific weapons or tools you'd like to see?
@FiveBrosStopMosYT: yes, this is exactly what I had in mind for the ladies clothing! Eliza started something similar years ago and I would like to finish it!
@YuriNikolai: are there some particular realistic plants/crops that you'd like to see? In terms of crops, there are a lot of items from my food pack that I could do, but I've definitely done the most common ones already... I would like to do some growing animations for herbs, which would be useful both as crops (e.g. for farming) and for foraging. For non-crop plants, I'd have to do some research/thinking to figure out what would be most useful... for most games, a bush is a bush. I can definitely imagine scenarios where the specific kind of bush would matter, but I'd appreciate some suggestions on which bushes (/flowers/plants/shrubs) would be worth drawing.
Do you have suggestions for expansions to the workshop/crafts packs? I think the next logical ones would be farm, camp, kitchen. Woodcutter/lumber mill? Stonecutter/quarry? Herbalist? MedicineStorm suggested bowyer/fletcher, magic emporium, those could be fun too.
@All: love the idea of having more animals, but to be honest I'm unlikely to do big animals like bears, deer, camels, etc. unless someone commissions them. It's just a ton of work; they're big sprites so each frame takes a long time, plus it would take me a lot of time looking at videos of the actual animals to get the movement right. Every once in a while, I look longingly at these great animations https://opengameart.org/content/animated-wild-animals and think about it though. I will say that bear and deer have been requested numerous times so those would probably be first on my personal list.
Smaller animals are definitely doable though. I've been playing Stardew Valley with my partner recently and I love all the little wild critters. Plus just a few frames can add a ton of personality. I've often thought about revisiting the birds, cats, and dogs. One of my favorite pixel artists recently posted this, which was very inspiring.
Squirrel, rat, raccoon, fox, seagull, duck... fish?
Are there other animals you would like to see?
Hi everyone,
As the year ends/begins, I am wrapping up a lot of projects and looking ahead to next year. I'd like to gauge interest in future LPC art packs.
Tilesets:
Clothing/Characters:
Several of my existing submissions could use some attention and updates as well:
Of course, I still have a few projects in the pipeline from 2021 that I'm hoping to finish and release soon:
By way of disclosure, I am also soon planning to launch subscriptions on my Ko-fi page, https://ko-fi.com/bluecarrot16 . The gist is that subscribers will get early access to my completed art, as well as work-in-progress screenshots and updates via Discord. I will also have a standing pool of projects that anyone can sponsor for a reasonable price. All art will ultimately be released for free to everyone on OGA, as always!
Please let me know what sets you would be most interested in seeing! The suggestions last year were very helpful, and I think I made great progress adding lots of craft shops, ruins, and the sailing ship to the available LPC assets.
OK, I have finished making the jump animations for all the bodies. Now I'm hung up on a silly minor organizational issue... wondering if any/either of you have any thoughts.
To recap, the new version of this submission will include
I propose that head_type be promoted to a new layer in the generator, so any combination of head and body type is permitted, and appropriate recolors of the bodies and heads be added as well, based on the palette(s) that Evert comes up with. I'm not tackling that here, just providing a minimal set of recolors of the bodies to match the heads.
For the generator, we settled on this folder structure: ${category}/${subcategories...}/{object}/${body_type}/${variant}.png , where body_type would be one of male, female, muscular, etc. listed above (at present, more could be added), and variant would be the recolor or other variety. hat/pirate/tricorne/male/black.png. For many assets there is now also ${category}/${subcategories...}/{object}/${body_type}.png , i.e. the asset in a standardized palette, which is used to generate the recolors, e.g. {body_type}/{variant}.png . So the rule of thumb is that the variant is at the deepest file nesting, then the body type, then the object type/group. (Of course, not every object has a unique spritesheet for every body type; most only have male and female, and some only male or female. The JSON definition files clarify if a given asset can be used with multiple body types (for instance, male hair can be used with the muscular base, etc.))
The goal of having a consistent file structure was to make it clear where to put new stuff, to make it obvious where to find existing assets, and to make repetitive assets amenable to generating with scripts. For example, since hats would be auto-placed according to body type, then subsequently recolored, it kinda fits the workflow to make hat/pirate/tricorne/male.png first, then recolor that to create hat/pirate/tricorne/male/{black,brown,green,...}.png .
With adding these bodies with modular heads, three complications are introduced:
1) How to incorporate animations/layouts into this heirarchy: The jump animations do not fit on the "universal" spritesheet layout. Several people have expressed a desire to have sheets split up by animation, which would have a few advantages. Splitting and combining spritesheet layouts is trivial with lpctools, so I'm not opposed to introducing this, but I'm trying to figure out the most sensible way to organize things. Should it be ${category}/${subcategories...}/${object}/${body_type}/${animation}/${variant}.png ? Or ${category}/${subcategories...}/${object}/${animation}/${body_type}/${variant}.png ?
2) Likewise, by introducing the modular heads, there are now various body_type/head_type combinations. For example, head_type could be human, lizard, wolf, orc, boar, minotaur, skeleton, etc. For assets that involve the head, a different head_type might require using a different spritesheet (for example, human hair may need to be masked differently than orc hair). Or there might be assets that are unique to a particular body_type/head_type combination, e.g. https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-lizard-headgear . I'm not worried about adapting every single asset to every single body_type/head_type combo, but just figuring out the structure... should it be ${category}/${subcategories...}/${object}/${body_type}/${animation}/${head_type}/${variant}.png ?${category}/${subcategories...}/${object}/${body_type}/${head_type}/${animation}/${variant}.png ?
${category}/${subcategories...}/${object}/${animation}/${body_type}/${head_type}/${variant}.png ?
3) Finally, how should cross-sex body_type/head_type combinations be handled? Take the orc head for example; the "male" orc head is much different from the "female" orc head. But there's no reason why the male orc head couldn't be placed on the "female" body. So do we have something like head/female/orc/female/green.png , for placing the female head on the female body, and head/female/orc/male/green.png , for placing the female head on the male body? or should the heads just be named e.g. head/orc-female/female/green.png (female head on female body), head/orc-female/male/green.png (female head on male body), etc.? The latter scheme seems clearer to me. But for other objects (such as hats or hair)... it seems like they should be organized by body_type then head_type, e.g. hat/pirate/bandana/female/orc-female/black.png . Still not sure where ${animation} should go in all this if you all still want those separated out...
Ideally I want it to be clear to someone who just downloads the whole repo what combinations are possible/make sense. But anyway I am clearly just bikeshedding with myself and going in circles about this pretty unimportant issue... please help me make a decision so I can upload everything :p
Thanks Ben. I'm working on the jump animations, once those are done I'll upload everything. The file organization will be slightly different, to accommodate the additional possibilities.
I also decided to do child heads for the boarman and minotaur, and boy am I glad I did; look at the little minotaur child---it's adorable!! Tried to make the child wolf and boar less intimidating-looking too.
Thanks! I think they're ready? I believe if you edit this submission and add me as a collaborator I should be able to upload the files directly. Or if you prefer I can DM you a Dropbox link or something and you can upload them here.
For jump, you're right, the south-facing head is clearly adapted from the death/hurt animation, but doesn't quite match. I'll experiment a bit to see if I can make it work. I am guessing the hair from that frame will work fine, but I'll test that too. The north-facing squished head doesn't seem to be from anywhere else (and the hairstyles would cover it anyway), so I'd still favor replacing that one with the regular-sized head. I'll upload an example later.
For the skeleton and zombie---I wasn't proposing to re-draw them for the other body types, but just trying to figure out whether there was a way to make useful adaptations within this same general scheme. For example, I already cut out the skeleton and made a headless skeleton base. If someone wanted to make a skeleton orc or skeleton minotaur or whatever, they'd just have to draw a new head. Seems useful? I don't really see a use case for combining the skeleton head with any of the existing bodies, or putting the other heads on the skeleton body, but maybe someone wants to do that?? I guess if someone wanted to draw a female skeleton, they could re-use the head? Perhaps there's utility combining the skeleton head with the zombie body? (Although your wounds already cover varying states of decay pretty well)
For the zombie, I re-colored the non-wound parts back to the ivory palette, which produced an interesting effect that might also be useful. The zombie body has the same silouette as the male, so making a headless zombie is trivial; if someone wanted zombies with different heads, they could make them. Interestingly, if I delete the outlines and slap this overlay on the muscular base, it looks pretty good as well, so free muscular zombie I guess? Doesn't look good on the female or teen base, so I'll definitely ignore that one be for the moment.
Just trying to figure out whether those combinations might be useful/how to make them useful...
OK, I have finished reviewing the headless male, female, pregnant, muscular, teen, and child bases, each in combination with the human (male/female), lizard, wolf, and orc (male/female) heads. I have compared all of these with the originals Ben uploaded here---see comparison gifs below. Basically, I think all remaining differences are either intentional (e.g. slight changes to shading of arms in E/W and S-facing shoot frames), fix small mistakes (e.g. movement of orc head in thurst animation), neutral changes where the new version is more consistent (e.g. north-facing lizard head is shifted 1px up, putting it at same level as human male head; male orc head moves more consistently with the human male head), or are slightly different but acceptable (e.g. minor changes to shading around the neck, where manual edits to the generated spritesheets and/or more detailed special cases would be necessary to recapitulate Ben's version).
There are new combinations possible, e.g. {child, teen, muscular} {orc, wolf, lizard, minotaur, boarman} that are not shown here, but which I also tested and I think they look good.
I also started working on the jump animation (creating offsets, masks, and headless bases). I noticed some of the heads are different (e.g. the last frame heads aren't exactly the same as the cast-frame heads. This is fine, but those will need to be drawn for the orc, lizard, wolf, etc. base. I also noticed that the heads squish a little bit on some of the north-facing frames. I will probably remove this effect for simplicity (it won't be reflected in the hair anyway unless all the hairstyles have another frame drawn. I'll have to see how well the lizard head in particular works with the jump, where the head is displaced somewhat compared to the body. That one might need to be handled specially.
I also haven't decided whether/how the skeleton and zombie should be included in this scheme...
I'll try to finish a draft of the jump animation and then figure out somewhere to upload this so others can explore. Ben, if these look good to you, could I upload the heads, headless bases, and final assembled sheets to this submission?
Just a quick update to say I've made another pass through the female and pregnant bases and I think fixed the issues there to the best of my ability, including improving the necks throughout. I think the female and pregnant bases now look good with all the heads. I identified a few issues that were relevant to the male bases too and applied changes there, but male still needs another pass on a few other problems.
I haven't tackled the jump animations at all, mainly because they aren't in the generator and they don't fit cleanly into the "universal" spritesheet layout used by the generator. Heads are all the same so it should just be a matter of making headless bases and new masks/offsets.
Remaining work to-do on the bases themselves:
After that, next steps would be:
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