$12256 / $11500
First, I do know about the existing LPC Character Generator. I've used it, I love it. Given I mean to do a lot of character work and customization in The Last Score, though, I needed something a little more robust, and with my current game engine.
The purpose of this creator is threefold: one, to preview and test different clothes / body / animations so I can add to and edit the LPC sets; two, to have a working model I can integrate into The Last Score; and three, to play with and make character tokens.
Given the last point, I mean to publish this as a public web game. It adds the child body and accessories by Nila122, my own skin colors, and so far I've added all eight eye colors for children. The hair colors have been limited to fifteen shades, since it'll be easier to build on, and the original set had a ton of blondes in it.
Further on I'll be adding more clothes, more animations for children, filling in missing clothing animations, and possibly I'll add an LPC adult run animation. If it doesn't kill me first. I may also put in a way to import your own .png files so creators can get dynamic previews of their work.
(Also, one last point: I am working on The Last Score. The four month hiatus was unfortunate, but there wasn't any getting around the medical issues I was having. As of last week I've been able to think and code, so consider this the first of many updates on these two projects!)
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I'm really excited to see this! Please release it for us to play around with :)
Does your tool have the ability to automatically re-color hair like the tools in the Universal LPC Spritesheet: https://github.com/jrconway3/Universal-LPC-spritesheet/tree/master/_build . If so, have you thought of adding similar tooks for re-coloring other clothing?
Finally, not sure from your post if you're aware, but someone has already made a run cycle (at least for adult male and female bases). I don't think there are any clothes for it yet... https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-runcycle-and-diagonal-walkcycle
@bluecarrot16 - Ooooh! A run cycle! Yes! I needed this! ... I can't believe all my LPC searches didn't turn this up. Thank you!
A recolor tool would be a great addition; I'd have to investigate Unity's capability for doing such things. At the moment I'm not doing recoloring to get the basic creator finished, but it's definitely something to look into for later. :)
Idle / run animations added! I've finished up the men, anyway, thanks to Wolthera's run cycle, and I've ported them into the eleven skin tones I'm currently using. Women next!
Also, in case anyone's concerned-- the head-waggle idle isn't actually the idle. It's just the four images that I use for it. Adding in fifteen seconds of standing with the occassional blink wouldn't be the best use of space...
"Alright, which of you smart asses invited the Thalmor?"
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Ears are in for all skin colors / animations! Run and idle cycle is in for women of all skin tones!
The addition of run and idle animation support was a lot of work. I expected it to be, but the three ear types still took me over a day of plunking with it to get everything in and looking good, and I can't do that kind of meticulous work for long periods of time.
Thus, I've made the decision that while I'm still going to support the run and idle sets, I'm going to go ahead and build the character creator before I get everything. Which means clothes will disappear on run, hair will disappear on run and the head-turn part of my idle, among other things.
I'm going to program in a warning system when hair / clothes are selected that don't have all animations present, and I'm going to add in a way to volunteer to help out fill in the gaps. LPC was a community-driven project; perhaps some of the CC artists who still love the set might add in what they can, when they have time?
Otherwise, I'll make my way slowly adding things through myself.
Clothing Finished!
At least, the important things, like selection, changing options based on the body, changing the color options based on the clothing style, jogging back and forth from the body to the clothing menu.
Just a few more things to wrap up before the initial release into the public! Animations, rendering the animation sheet, warnings for missing animations, some UI stuff... oh, and importing all the clothes options, which is my next task. :)
Stay tuned!
Animations are in!
I still need to get clothing options in for my idle / run, plus more than the one hair style, but so far I'm very pleased. :D Take a look!
The Last Score seems like it might be a fun game, it's almost a shame you decided on LPC assets for it I feel, as they don't really have that post-apocalyptic feel.
At least I don't think so XD
But best of luck on your project! :3
Thank you!
I picked LPC in part because of the sheer amount of assets (it's going to be sandbox-y) and partly because the game's not going to come across as classic post-apocalypse... certainly not right away. I imagine it as being similar to cheery-until-you-listen-to-the-lyrics music? It's going to tell a rather macabre story as time goes on, and the resemblance to classic RPGs seemed perfect in my mind.
The idea is that a steampunk doomsday device went off, and that was it. Game over, bye-bye humans. So no grungy gangs scrapping by, no radiation poisoning ruining the environment. It's going to be pretty and overgrown, with plenty of ruins... with lots of bleached bones in formerly populated places. ... What hasn't been cleaned up by leftover science experiments and aliens, anyway.
... Though maybe I should bill it differently.
A steampunk doomsday device went off, and that was it. Game over, bye-bye humans.
Use this text in your game's introduction! It reads out great! XD
Love the concept, but would agree with @Spring about the "post-apocalyptic" description, as that makes me think of "Road Warrior" or something right after the fall of human civilization.
Since you're essentially starting anew, maybe a "savage land" or "pangaea ultima" theme? https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2000/ast06oct_1
No, you're right. Sometimes I forget that just because something happens after an apocalypse doesn't make it post-apocalypse the genre. Which confuses my too-literal brain, but that's nothing new. ;D
I'll think about what to change the descriptor to. Another component I'd like to (eventually) add in is scavenging from the cities before everything is ruined-- reclaiming books, art, instruments, tools, tech, so it's not quite starting over fresh... hmm.
Anyway, thanks for the suggestions!
Soooooo. Long time, no talk. Long story short, chronic illness sucks.
I did, however, redo the Character Creator UI and layout, totally rewriting most of the code, redesigning the UI that had been giving me problems, making it XML based instead of in-game... and the last few weeks have paid off.
Behold. A working web compile of TestBuild001!
It's ugly as hell, yep, but it works and it's an early testing phase and it's mine. I'll put it on my own web server tomorrow, after I blow the dust off of it, and I'll add a link so that you all can play with it.
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In the meantime, I could really use some UI help / suggestions. I've got some thoughts about the preview window (right) being a tiny mini-game controlled by WASD instead of the turn / stand / walk buttons, but as to this thing's general look... I wouldn't mind a designer's help.
More on that later!
It's amazing!
About the UI suggestions, although I'm not an artist at all, for my personal taste maybe if you create some square icons (like the ones for 'shirts' 'pants', 'footwear', but a bit smaller) for each action and align them at the right screen corner on a single collumn would be sufficient. For the icons' images, use some prerendered frame of the action on an specific character (like the ones of the upper part '3'), for example: for thrust, maybe a character with its spear at the frame where it is must forward, or something like that... It could still be reactive with 'aswd' as you described, but I believe that a way to click on the action would be more intuitive and should be kept.
Thanks for the feedback, Farrer!
I could display the 'pose' buttons with the symbol of the pose, but the 64x64 icons are pretty minute, and I'm thinking something bigger might be better. A symbol of a pixel-art bow.
Here's my current wireframe. It's more layout and UX than UI still, and I'm still open to suggestions.
And then when you hit the Esc key or something...
Kind of a rough idea. How to make it pretty, though... I'm drawing a huge blank. I thought I'd have a demo 'room' of pixel art for the character to walk around in, but that still doesn't help me on the menus.
New UI!
Let me know if anyone has any thoughts or something.
Overall it looks good for me (missing just better icons for the actions, but I believe those are placeholders anyway), the brown background on icons looks much better and the background room at the 'little game' seems beautiful.
I'm a bit unsure about the blue texture for background on the left and top... not with the blue colors themselves, but probably with a 'cheap wallpaper' felling that the geometrical figure repetition gave me... I'm no artist at all, so I can't help/suggest much on the aesthetic side and you should simple igore that if what I said makes no sense.
On the usability, a few notes/suggestions:
- Keyboard '1' to '4' are shortcuts to the actions, right? (the numbers on the icons gave me that impression). If not, they should.
- The action icons should set a mouse-over hint with the action name (as sometimes the icons couldn't be so clear of what they are.. ie: if I click the 'broken heart' icon the character will... die? cry? hide its head under a pillow?);
- Although I guess they are for controlling the animation speed, the '+' and '-' icons should control the scene's level of zoom, and the animation speed be controlled direct by the scrolling widget.
- Keyboard 1-5 are indeed action shortcuts-- or they're going to be. Right now they're just action buttons, but that will be an action 'bar', the sort you have in MMOs and such.
- Icons have been changed. The broken heart stays, because it's the best I can do for the 'hurt / die' animation. (Where the character falls over.) Clicking on it once should make it pretty clear?
- The + and - icons are indeed zoom. ^^
Current, implemented game screenshot:
So the interface is very intuitive for me, great!
About the 'broken heart', you're right: click once and you understand the meaning. But, maybe a skull with bones would have a more direct-association with die/death instead? Sadly I couldn't find any on a quick search on OGA to suggest...
Your game looks lovely Eliza..
Is it done in Unity ?
@Farrer: Yeah, bones and skulls would have been good... but right now I think I'll just work with what I have. There's so much to do, you know? I'm going to call that part 'good enough' for the moment, maybe revisit it later.
@Snoopy11: Hey there! It is indeed done in Unity. Data put into the Resources folder, imported in with XML, and a nice dynamic navigation system.
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Update! So, we haven't heard back from the guy managing our server yet, so we've sent him another email for support. I thought it wouldn't take this long, but... ah well.
In the meantime, I've been adding a bunch of the options for the sprites-- only one color / style for stuff I haven't QA-ed to death yet so far to keep it manageable. I've also made a couple of sprite sheets myself that I'll upload to OGA when I'm satisfied with them: Victorian aprons for the girls, a straight, more simple skirt, new hairstyles for the children, ect.
Lots to do still, but the content splurge is a nice break from programming while we wait for admin-dude. More to come!
Rendering is in! :dances:
Just look at all of these little guys!
Sadly, still no word from server-man. Soon, though. Lots of pestering. Stupid c-Panel password locks.
I'm finalizing the color palettes for the clothing, and I'd love some feedback! Here, or on my dev blog (preferably the dev blog-- the images display better there).
i like your colour palette and characters are amazing :)
Ninja Dog
I saw your LPC wishlist and wanted to let you know that I'm working on an "LPC Victorian Gentleman" which builds off the formal wear (collared shirt, belt, vest) already in the set. It's like 90% done, and includes:
I'm finishing up the coats now, then I want to go through everything to check and cleanup. I had a few other ideas (suspenders, bowler hat, deerstalker aka Sherlock Holmes hat, pipe, vest chains, and steampunk-style pistol/hand cannon), but I'm not sure I'll get to any of them, and I'd rather release what I've got sooner rather than waiting another year. One thing I was wondering: does your tool automatically recolor assets if they're in your standard pallet? If not, I know Capbros was working on such a tool, but not sure what came of it. Anyway, if there's some way to automatically make recolors, that'd be great because I hate doing recolors :p
Oh, that's amazing news!! I've been wanting more non-armor-options for men so badly, so this is perfect! Thank you so much!
Right now I don't have any automatic recoloring in my program. I'm using a manual method in photoshop where I have a swatch of all the colors in the asset on the far side, and I just use the fill bucket with the 'contiguous' option unchecked to recolor everything. It takes twenty seconds a file or so.
Husband's getting on my case about just using batch files, but I kind of like having a mindless, relaxing 'click click click done' routine. I'd be so happy to make recolors for the things you're working on; just send me a note!
Also, thanks for the heads-up on Capbros' tool. I'm checking it out now!
When you say 'formal wear already in the set', could you point me to what you're talking about? I don't believe I've seen a collared shirt and vest in the LPC collection.
Edit: Found it! ... Crap, it's an .xcf file. I really, really don't want to download GIMP just for a file conversion. :( I love my photoshop.
These are the LPC character assets I can't get to due to GIMP formatting-- If any kind soul would take the layers and make sprite sheet .png's out of them, I'd be so, so happy. @_@
Exported all layers (including the base ones, in case they are different from the ones you use, for easy comparasion) and uploaded each png here.
Keep up the great work!
Squeeee!!!! Thank you so much! This is awesome! I have glasses now! Glasses! ... And I really needed that dress shirt and long-sleeve blouse. Into the Creator with them.
Some of these were high on my 'need to acquire' list. Thank you Farrer!
Eliza, do you know about the LPC universal spritesheet https://github.com/makrohn/Universal-LPC-spritesheet? I found the formal sprites in that collection (or rather jrconway3's slightly more up-to-date fork https://github.com/jrconway3/Universal-LPC-spritesheet)-everything is already broken up into separate PNGs and nicely organized. jrconway also wrote a tool to automatically recolor hair styles; I haven't used it, but might be worth looking at.
Speaking of which, I hope you'll contribute your fixes to the set back to the community somehow ideally as a pull request against one of those repositories! Otherwise, someone will have to go through all this work over again :(
@BlueCarrot16 - I've scoured the Universal Spritesheet several times... somehow I managed to miss the formal set. I swear I'd gone through every folder, too. Still, Makrohn / JRConway's collection doesn't include everything; a chunk of the things Farrer unlocked weren't in there, as well as Nila122's armor and clothes sets and all the children pieces, which are actually very well made.
A pull request is a really good idea. I fully intend to release everything on OGA once I finish QA-ing the set as well, but I didn't want to start releasing the pieces until it was more complete. I'll probably go by body type, since I'm over halfway done with the women right now. (Besides, I don't have a choice about that with the SA license. :D ) So look for a full, scoured women's kit in the next month!
Hi Eliza,
Sounds reasonable. I'm planning to make a fork/PR against those repos to add some of those things, as well as some of my own sprites.
Also, I just released my LPC Gentleman set: https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-gentleman . I didn't use your color palette since I was so far into it when you posted it, but I might try to recolor them to fit your palette if I have time. I hope you'll release your Victorian lady set soon! :p
I just saw your new kit come up! I'm super excited about it, and I'm going over everything now. Thank you so, so much for all the time and work you put into this!
As for recoloring-- going through and doing color consistency checks are part of my QA process that I do for everything anyway (checking for stray pixels and the like) so don't even worry about it. Shifting to my palette once that's done is a couple of mouse-clicks.
I'm super excited for a Victorian Lady's set! Also-- I'm going to try to add on a swing animation for your cane.
I think ladies' clothing is a lot more complicated, which is why I haven't attempted it :p But there's at least a good start with the Sara set, which I see you're dissecting apart.
A swing animation would be great! I'm not very good at the weapon animations, which is why I didn't include one. I also tried doing cast, but it looked kind of strange since the hands sorta open up and point to the side...
I totally cheat, with these sprites... I take the best animated stuff and I copy the techniques to other things, then tweak it until it looks right. I'm completely dependant on the Character Creator to test what I'm working on at various speeds and image resolutions... I wouldn't have been able to animate anything decently without it. I don't know how anyone else does this stuff.
On another note-- I've finally cleared up the issues with my server, and I've put a copy of the Character Creator online! A very buggy version, with buttons running off the page and the rendering button crashing the whole system, but it's up nonetheless! I'm going to spend a few days making it playable before I release the link to the public. :D
It's not "cheating"...it's "learning"
Silly goose!
But seriously - this is looking great.....well done.
@Boom Shaka - Thank you so much! I am learning... in a cheaty, copy-heavy way. Slowly. ;)
In the meantime, this is funny:
I've got three "alt" bases now-- muscular, androgynous/teens, and pregnancy. The latter two are my new stuff I whipped up off the female base, while the 'muscular' one is an older walkcycle that never got any assets made for him. It's based off the man's sheet... but it goes off enough that the standard legs and torso pieces won't fit him. Poor guy.
However, I've gone through all three alt bases and added in all the options / accessories that will work. And... erm. The "muscular" options are... interesting.
My husband has decided that this one is a Gentleman Stripper.
This one actually makes a darn good looking gladiator. I might have to extend the base to swing animations. And make the poor man some pants.
This man is too sexy for his pants.
Hi everyone!
Where can I find this super nice character generator?
manu
Unfortunately it was never released :( And the author is not really active on this site anymore. There is a similar generator here https://sanderfrenken.github.io/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gene... that is being regularly updated. You can read about it a bit more here https://opengameart.org/forumtopic/lpc-updated-spritesheet-generator .
Fair warning, there are some problems with the attribution, which we are trying to address over here: https://opengameart.org/forumtopic/lpc-spritesheetcharacter-generator-at... . Those should be resolved in the next few days though (hopefully!)
Yeah-- sorry about that. I got really close to finishing it, too. :(
Unfortunately, the reason I had so much time to devote to it was the same reason I disappeared: I was seriously sick for about four years. I found myself stuck in bed 24/7, taught myself C#, the Unity engine, and pixel art and had at it. Eventually my condition progressed until I couldn't do... pretty much anything.
The good news is that I'm in remission!
I probably won't recover fully for a good while, so I'm loathe to make any promises about projects, that said. I've also peeked at my code and was appalled at the hack and slash under the hood. I was programming on some serious brain-fog back then; it'd probably be better to redo it from scratch.
The other issue I have with the character creator is some issues with the LPC set itself. It's a community project with no set color palette or ramps, and curating my own standardized set has a lot of challenges. On top of that, I'm finding myself wishing that the animations were much more dynamic.
I may remake the Character Creator for a new, smaller, revised LPC set with much stricter restrictions, but again... that's ambitious, I'm not recovered, and I've learned not to promise too much while I'm still shaky. We'll see if it goes anywhere.
(But I suspect people might very much like the new animations I've made so far.)
Glad to hear you're in remission! Hoping your recovery continues without significant setback
xoxoxo
Thank you all for answering.
Yes, I knew about the online LPC generator, I was just interested in getting a offline version :)
have a nice day everyone!
@ElizaWy I hope you'll be better!
manu
@ElizaWy: what are the odds! I was going through LPC stuff a couple of weeks ago when I came across some of your stuff (again). There was a fairly abrupt stop to the assets you posted and I remembered you had mentioned being ill at the time and clicked through to your blog link to see whether you had posted any updates there and found the link was dead. I had wondered what had happened (I had a good friend who was chronically and progressively ill pretty much since I met her and whenever I come across a story of someone who is ill, I'm curious to know if they're doing better). I know, random person on the internet saying stuff, but I'm glad to hear you're actually recovering (somewhat)!
I get what you're saying about the standardisation (or lack thereof) in the LPC palette. It's something we all struggle with. I'd be interested to see what you came up with, if and when you're up to posting that - but your health has to come first, so no pressure.
Thank you everyone! I appreciate it!
@Evert: So few people are aware of chronic illness, it's really nice to hear that. Thank you!
We'll see what happens with the LPC set. That palette is probably next on my list; I'm thinking a 96 color spread at the moment, but we'll see. Might have to bump it to 128, but I don't want to go higher than that.
Otherwise, I've made my unisex model the primary base, reduced the head size by a few pixels, painted a bunch of new hairstyles, more realistic plate armor with a much reduced metallic ramp, made a new one-handed swing animation with a good amount of torso twist and weapon smear, and I'm close to finishing a smooth, weight-shifting run. None of this will get used if I don't release it with a solid base assets kit, though, so... we'll see. :)
Happy holidays, everyone!