1) make an animated gif of your character, showing all the things he can do, blown up so it's like 64x64 or something so it looks nice and chunky. I use ImageMagik for this, but people all have their own ways, there are endless forum posts about it
2) download Tiled, build a demo level with your assets, screen shot the result and blow that up too (doing the Tiled exercise will help you figure out what works and what doesn't work; I bet you have something like that already so it won't be too much work)
3) add both of those images as previews.
Then I think you will get some more eyeballs on this.
[editted - I realised I sounded too down on you and I didn't mean to!]
I got some reasonably splattery effects fairly easily. That's the first gif. The idea there is that the last image in the animation can be left as a decal, and it's quite nice.
The problem comes when you try and add it to the LPC character. First, there is no 'hit' animation, which meant there was nowhere to tie the impact to. Secondly, blood is very 3D, but the character fills up the space and it looks terrible.
But, look, here is an attempt. There is a demo which is the second gif; I used a home-rolled sorta impact anim (using the necromancer, who seems to have come from the generator and is a pretty typical character) and then I have added in the two animations which make it up. The idea is that there is a foreground animation (20) which you put in front, and then a background animation (21) which you put behind, and which ends up as the decal. You wouldn't move it with the character, you'd just spawn in a single location, and then if they are moving you should get the full 3d effect with a nice splatter behind.
I have been staring at this for so long I can't tell if it's any good anymore (I think probably it isn't), so I'm going to put it up here and you can tell me what you think. On the plus side: I am now much better at gifs! Also, I made an explosion to test my particle renderer rewrite, and it's rather good. LMK what you think.
I did a bunch of impact effects using the LPC palete, here and here. There is a lot there. It's all designed to be run at a higher framerate than the gifs show (because I couldn't figure out how to make good gifs...). It doesn't have that lovely cartoony look of LPC, though, so it might not be what you want, but it worked well for me.
So for the cards, I think you'd want to probably put a mockup together yourself initially, just in terms of the shape and size, and then come back here with the actual dimensions you want. I was able to quickly throw together a pretty simple mockup using Inkscape, but I quickly hit the wall where I didn't know what icons, stats, layouts and whatnot you would want. So maybe, go and have a think about that?
Oh and credit where credit is due - the image here is gman2099's. The noise textures are screamingbrain's
Hey bluecarrot. I was interested in trees, and it occured to me that perhaps a tree tileset exists that would let you build big, real-looking trees but with a limited set of tiles. I think it's an interesting problem, so I had a go, and made this trunk and branch set.
It's very rough, as you can see, it's just there to show the structure; I think you'd use it by layering leaf blobs over and under one or two layers of wood. It's very different to how LPC trees look today, but I do think your new stuff is tending to more realistic rather than the quite abstract look of a zelda clone.
Is it worth doing some more work on, do you think?
Hey! I'm not going to do this for you because I don't have the time, I am afraid. But, what you are asking is actually pretty easy.
You have two options.
The first is to manually recreate your maps in Tiled. Tiled has exactly the solution you need, which it calls 'terrains.' I appreciate that this is not what you asked for, but it's worth thinking about, because a decent workflow there will mean you can then start creating new maps this way.
The second is to recereate the algorithm that Tiled uses yourself. If you read the link, you can see it talks about some key concepts: these are edge vs corner vs mixed tilesets; flipping and rotating; and probablity.
Essentially you'll need to go through your tileset, and mark up each tile with its corner and edge types (obviously depending on what type of tileset you have); then you take your ascii map and figure out what the corners or edges would need to be; then you choose the best tile you can find from your tileset. I say the best, because the number of tiles required for a complete three material set is quite large and you may find you are missing some. Read about Wang tiles here to find out more.
Then you either want to output as an image or as Tiled file. I would do the latter, because you can edit it later. There are libraries for writing TMX and TSX files in a lot of languages. Python or Lua might be a good choice for this, but you know your toolset.
And then you are done! If you do end up commissioning someone I guess at the very least you can point them to this text.
Hey! This is actually a good first submission.
If I were you I would
1) make an animated gif of your character, showing all the things he can do, blown up so it's like 64x64 or something so it looks nice and chunky. I use ImageMagik for this, but people all have their own ways, there are endless forum posts about it
2) download Tiled, build a demo level with your assets, screen shot the result and blow that up too (doing the Tiled exercise will help you figure out what works and what doesn't work; I bet you have something like that already so it won't be too much work)
3) add both of those images as previews.
Then I think you will get some more eyeballs on this.
[editted - I realised I sounded too down on you and I didn't mean to!]
So blood is hard.
I got some reasonably splattery effects fairly easily. That's the first gif. The idea there is that the last image in the animation can be left as a decal, and it's quite nice.
The problem comes when you try and add it to the LPC character. First, there is no 'hit' animation, which meant there was nowhere to tie the impact to. Secondly, blood is very 3D, but the character fills up the space and it looks terrible.
But, look, here is an attempt. There is a demo which is the second gif; I used a home-rolled sorta impact anim (using the necromancer, who seems to have come from the generator and is a pretty typical character) and then I have added in the two animations which make it up. The idea is that there is a foreground animation (20) which you put in front, and then a background animation (21) which you put behind, and which ends up as the decal. You wouldn't move it with the character, you'd just spawn in a single location, and then if they are moving you should get the full 3d effect with a nice splatter behind.
I have been staring at this for so long I can't tell if it's any good anymore (I think probably it isn't), so I'm going to put it up here and you can tell me what you think. On the plus side: I am now much better at gifs! Also, I made an explosion to test my particle renderer rewrite, and it's rather good. LMK what you think.
Oh cool. Blood is a bit harder, my particle physics renderer doesn't really have a decent setting for that. I'll have a play.
How are these for clashes? (Sorry they are so tiny, I continue to be not very good at gifs)
Also, I agree with castletonia, that is a very fine screenshot
I did a bunch of impact effects using the LPC palete, here and here. There is a lot there. It's all designed to be run at a higher framerate than the gifs show (because I couldn't figure out how to make good gifs...). It doesn't have that lovely cartoony look of LPC, though, so it might not be what you want, but it worked well for me.
These are incredible. I've been playing with them as masks in Inkscape, so useful, thank you!
So for the cards, I think you'd want to probably put a mockup together yourself initially, just in terms of the shape and size, and then come back here with the actual dimensions you want. I was able to quickly throw together a pretty simple mockup using Inkscape, but I quickly hit the wall where I didn't know what icons, stats, layouts and whatnot you would want. So maybe, go and have a think about that?
Oh and credit where credit is due - the image here is gman2099's. The noise textures are screamingbrain's
Hey bluecarrot. I was interested in trees, and it occured to me that perhaps a tree tileset exists that would let you build big, real-looking trees but with a limited set of tiles. I think it's an interesting problem, so I had a go, and made this trunk and branch set.
It's very rough, as you can see, it's just there to show the structure; I think you'd use it by layering leaf blobs over and under one or two layers of wood. It's very different to how LPC trees look today, but I do think your new stuff is tending to more realistic rather than the quite abstract look of a zelda clone.
Is it worth doing some more work on, do you think?
Hey! I'm not going to do this for you because I don't have the time, I am afraid. But, what you are asking is actually pretty easy.
You have two options.
The first is to manually recreate your maps in Tiled. Tiled has exactly the solution you need, which it calls 'terrains.' I appreciate that this is not what you asked for, but it's worth thinking about, because a decent workflow there will mean you can then start creating new maps this way.
The second is to recereate the algorithm that Tiled uses yourself. If you read the link, you can see it talks about some key concepts: these are edge vs corner vs mixed tilesets; flipping and rotating; and probablity.
Essentially you'll need to go through your tileset, and mark up each tile with its corner and edge types (obviously depending on what type of tileset you have); then you take your ascii map and figure out what the corners or edges would need to be; then you choose the best tile you can find from your tileset. I say the best, because the number of tiles required for a complete three material set is quite large and you may find you are missing some. Read about Wang tiles here to find out more.
Then you either want to output as an image or as Tiled file. I would do the latter, because you can edit it later. There are libraries for writing TMX and TSX files in a lot of languages. Python or Lua might be a good choice for this, but you know your toolset.
And then you are done! If you do end up commissioning someone I guess at the very least you can point them to this text.
Pages