I like how the greens work together in that image (and I love the flowers), but it's one step brighter than what I have now, which I feel is too bright for me. I'm not entirely happy with how the tree comes out (the one in your screenshot looks fine, the one I'm using doesn't fare so well with the new colour ramp).
Recolouring the floor similar to how you did does solve the problems with it (even going down a step on the ramp I was using before helps), but it does come out "cooler" than it was before, which changes the feel. I can't quite get my walls to look "right" with respect to what I was going for there, may need more tweaking.
I guess I really like two of the colour ramps in the original LPC palette that you had to cut out. :) Perhaps it's just a case of it being different and needing some time to get used to it.
At the end of the day, I personally wouldn't mind using your palette with two extra colour ramps, although that does kind of defeat the purpose of the whole exercise...
Something I have not done but thought about many times is that some colours in the original LPC palette are similar enough that it seems you should be able to merge them to an in-between shade. Is that something you've tried at all?
In a different note: you have a LttP inspired cliff? Cool, I personally can't wait.
You're right, the grass there does look better (some of the tall glass has lost a level of highlight and is a bit flatter as a result, but I unly just now noticed that when looking for it; anyway, that's fixable by hand). I don't really like "jumping between" ramps because it makes recolouring harder, but perhaps there are ways to combine the different ramps in clever ways. Not sure, I'll have to try it out.
For the trees it depends very much on what particular tree you look at. The tall ones on the top right of the scene look fine, but if you scroll down to the park area below the middle, the tall slightly slanted tree looks fine, but the cherry trees look flat (I think it's supposed to be cherry trees, right?). The shadows on the tree from the shootemup set (https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-a-shootem-up-complete-graphic-kit) are too harsh, but that's the same as in mine.
I think the hedges look oddly flat in the recoloured image, I think the hue shift is too small to make them pop. Might be fixable by hand, but I think it needs a colour that is a blend between the green and the shadow colour to work well that isn't in the palette.
The new palette seems to work really well with the bright colour in the market area, so I suspect it'll work well with the food items too. It's not working too well with the pink-ish house just north of the market (comes out too orange, I think), but that could possibly be fixed by hand (it's missing some shading as well, so clearly Gimp's automatic shader isn't good enough here).
What I find amazing about those portraits is that I had to look twice to really notice that some of them were simple palette swaps. So again, a great effort with great utility!
Now, I've done a quick check to see what my game would look like strictly using this palette. I did this in a cheap and dirty way by taking a screenshot and recolouring it in GIMP. I took two scenes: an outdoor scene and an interior scene inside a dungeon. I did very little manual work or touch-up beyond that, which would be necessary. Also note that I use some colours not in the "original" LPC palette.
As I already mentioned above, I'm not a fan of the greens in the outdoor scene. The base colour works fine (and I like it more than I thought I would), but I think the highlight is just too bright. Going the other way, the shadow is a bit too dark for my taste (especially on the tree).
I think I like the house a tad better with your new palette, probably because the different browns now feel more like a cohesive whole.
Looking at the interior scene, the portcullis and statue look fine in the new palette. The floor and walls are, in my opinion, aweful. The floor can be easily tweaked, of course, so it may just be a matter of finding a more balanced pair of base/highlight colour. The main issue here is that the contrast between the two is just too high (in fact, Gimp's original effort was to make the ground a solid colour, and this was my two-second fix; arguably the contrast is too low in the original).
The walls are going to be a pain. The ramp I used here (which was another quick manual intervention to make all colours use the same ramp) is too saturated for the walls, but the other brown ramps are either too dark or too "grey" for my liking.
I'll continue to play around with it. I suspect I'll end up with some sort of hybrid approach, where I use your palette with a few colour ramps from (my version of) the original palette for things like the grass and cave walls.
Great effort! I like the vibrant red and yellow ramps, and it looks like it's a lot easier to switch between different hues than it is with the base palette.
That being said, I'm not sure I'll switch over to this palette yet. I'm not convinced by the grass in the example scene (I think it's too bright, and at first glance the darker greens in the palette are less saturated than the existing greens) and it seems to be missing a colour ramp that I tend to use a lot (for instance in my cave tileset posted here). I'll have to fiddle with it a bit; perhaps I'll end up using it most for characters, which may arguably be what easier recolours are most useful for.
Attached are two quick tests for a crouch animation (the first three frames of the "death" animation with the normal head) and for a shake/turn head animation.
The first I think looks decent enough (but we only have the one direction). The second doesn't work as well with the body angled to the side. With the body facing front I actually think it looks ok-ish. Certainly for being a simple head-swap.
There are "diagonal" walk/run cycles that have heads in intermediate positions, perhaps those would work better or improve the animation - if there were assets for them.
It's interesting to see how many similar ideas there are going around.
I'd thought about using the cast animation as a basis for a swim animation, but I hadn't considered mixing in frames from the grab animation. I think that works quite nicely as a place-holder at least.
I think I made my overhead-carry animation by just taking the arms from the first (idle) frame and flipping them.
I use the 5th frame of the sideways thrust animation as a "present" or "give" frame. It works ok for that, but the front facing frame really doesn't.
I like having the arms in a separate layer also because that's almost always the first thing I do when I want to make modifications or additions: cut out the arms so I can easily animate them separately. Perhaps that's specific to my workflow though.
One neat thing about having arms separate in order to compose something: it doesn't only allow you to combine "walking" and "attacking" (say), it'll also be useful for riding animations (I guess that's really a solved problem, but one of the reasons I personally find these a bit of a hassle is that this separation isn't standard).
About the shake head animation bluecarrot16 mentioned above: one thing I wanted to try but didn't get around to yet is to see how using the head from the neighbouring directions would look. So use the left and right facing heads on the front facing animation. There's a caveat with the backward frame (you need to change the order in which the layers are stacked), and I suspect it will not work well for the side facing frames at any rate.
Two other thoughts:
Some of the animation sequences are long, which is tedious, but personally I really like the 8-frame walk animation. Certainly compared to the most common alternative, which is a 4-frame walk cycle. I don't think that looks very good on higher resolution pixel art.
The shoot animation seems overly long, but part of that is the lead-in and repeat/recover animations. I always find myself having to look up how to use those correctly in the original submission. I'd be nice if there was some uniformity between different animations in this regard (I think the "shoot" and "thrust" animations have leadin/repeat cycles, but the other ones don't).
Do we want to change the layout of the spritesheets?
I like having each animation and direction clearly separate from the other animations and directions, however, I really don't like that the spritesheets turn into these tall and narrow images. I always worry that I'm going to run into some limitation on texture size if these are too far off (then again, spritesheets get loaded into a texture atlas at runtime anyway; I probably worry too much).
It's probably worth thinking and talking about before we end up with different incompatible layouts.
Attached are some of the modifications I made to the LPC sheets. These are flat PNG images, which aren't so useful, but I can't upload the GIMP .xcf files as attachment here, so I'll have to put those up elsewhere and provide a link.
The first is a "push" animation that continues on from the "grab" animation (I don't remember of the top of my head where that's from, but it's here in the LPC collection somewhere). It's just a walkcycle with changed arm positions.
The second is a work-in-not-so-much-progress for a dwarf based on the child base. I think the most relevant thing here are the beard and maybe the modified helmet. I don't think I touched the base itself.
The third is what my "standard" spritesheet looks like with the additional animations in there. I stuck them to the right because I don't like having a "narrow" spritesheet very much and also I didn't want to re-order any of the existing animations.
The fourth is the lift/carry animation I mentioned earlier; it looks like I made this not by modifying the actual base, but by modifying the finished sprite, which is stupid if true.
Ok, I see I didn't really reply to bluecarrot16 in my last message.
My desire for separate layers in part has to do with layering assets, but also to make it easier for someone else to work on the animations more later. I think of it as having the "source" to the final sprite.
Having tools to help automate things like spritesheet creation or taking things like hats and hair and putting them in the correct position is extremely important, but personally I sometimes find these to be unreasonably restrictive. A certain piece of headgear might be labelled "female only" and then I can't put it on a male sheet in the generator just to get an idea for how it looks and make modifications afterwards, so I find that I tend to just use the Gimp anyway.
Oh, great, just what I needed: more stuff to include in my game. It's never getting done, I tell you!
:P
Those are some really awesome additions. I'll put them on my "wish-list" for when I get what I'm working on at the moment done.
I like how the greens work together in that image (and I love the flowers), but it's one step brighter than what I have now, which I feel is too bright for me. I'm not entirely happy with how the tree comes out (the one in your screenshot looks fine, the one I'm using doesn't fare so well with the new colour ramp).
Recolouring the floor similar to how you did does solve the problems with it (even going down a step on the ramp I was using before helps), but it does come out "cooler" than it was before, which changes the feel. I can't quite get my walls to look "right" with respect to what I was going for there, may need more tweaking.
I guess I really like two of the colour ramps in the original LPC palette that you had to cut out. :) Perhaps it's just a case of it being different and needing some time to get used to it.
At the end of the day, I personally wouldn't mind using your palette with two extra colour ramps, although that does kind of defeat the purpose of the whole exercise...
Something I have not done but thought about many times is that some colours in the original LPC palette are similar enough that it seems you should be able to merge them to an in-between shade. Is that something you've tried at all?
In a different note: you have a LttP inspired cliff? Cool, I personally can't wait.
You're right, the grass there does look better (some of the tall glass has lost a level of highlight and is a bit flatter as a result, but I unly just now noticed that when looking for it; anyway, that's fixable by hand). I don't really like "jumping between" ramps because it makes recolouring harder, but perhaps there are ways to combine the different ramps in clever ways. Not sure, I'll have to try it out.
For the trees it depends very much on what particular tree you look at. The tall ones on the top right of the scene look fine, but if you scroll down to the park area below the middle, the tall slightly slanted tree looks fine, but the cherry trees look flat (I think it's supposed to be cherry trees, right?). The shadows on the tree from the shootemup set (https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-a-shootem-up-complete-graphic-kit) are too harsh, but that's the same as in mine.
I think the hedges look oddly flat in the recoloured image, I think the hue shift is too small to make them pop. Might be fixable by hand, but I think it needs a colour that is a blend between the green and the shadow colour to work well that isn't in the palette.
The new palette seems to work really well with the bright colour in the market area, so I suspect it'll work well with the food items too. It's not working too well with the pink-ish house just north of the market (comes out too orange, I think), but that could possibly be fixed by hand (it's missing some shading as well, so clearly Gimp's automatic shader isn't good enough here).
What I find amazing about those portraits is that I had to look twice to really notice that some of them were simple palette swaps. So again, a great effort with great utility!
Now, I've done a quick check to see what my game would look like strictly using this palette. I did this in a cheap and dirty way by taking a screenshot and recolouring it in GIMP. I took two scenes: an outdoor scene and an interior scene inside a dungeon. I did very little manual work or touch-up beyond that, which would be necessary. Also note that I use some colours not in the "original" LPC palette.
As I already mentioned above, I'm not a fan of the greens in the outdoor scene. The base colour works fine (and I like it more than I thought I would), but I think the highlight is just too bright. Going the other way, the shadow is a bit too dark for my taste (especially on the tree).
I think I like the house a tad better with your new palette, probably because the different browns now feel more like a cohesive whole.
Looking at the interior scene, the portcullis and statue look fine in the new palette. The floor and walls are, in my opinion, aweful. The floor can be easily tweaked, of course, so it may just be a matter of finding a more balanced pair of base/highlight colour. The main issue here is that the contrast between the two is just too high (in fact, Gimp's original effort was to make the ground a solid colour, and this was my two-second fix; arguably the contrast is too low in the original).
The walls are going to be a pain. The ramp I used here (which was another quick manual intervention to make all colours use the same ramp) is too saturated for the walls, but the other brown ramps are either too dark or too "grey" for my liking.
I'll continue to play around with it. I suspect I'll end up with some sort of hybrid approach, where I use your palette with a few colour ramps from (my version of) the original palette for things like the grass and cave walls.
Great effort! I like the vibrant red and yellow ramps, and it looks like it's a lot easier to switch between different hues than it is with the base palette.
That being said, I'm not sure I'll switch over to this palette yet. I'm not convinced by the grass in the example scene (I think it's too bright, and at first glance the darker greens in the palette are less saturated than the existing greens) and it seems to be missing a colour ramp that I tend to use a lot (for instance in my cave tileset posted here). I'll have to fiddle with it a bit; perhaps I'll end up using it most for characters, which may arguably be what easier recolours are most useful for.
Attached are two quick tests for a crouch animation (the first three frames of the "death" animation with the normal head) and for a shake/turn head animation.
The first I think looks decent enough (but we only have the one direction). The second doesn't work as well with the body angled to the side. With the body facing front I actually think it looks ok-ish. Certainly for being a simple head-swap.
There are "diagonal" walk/run cycles that have heads in intermediate positions, perhaps those would work better or improve the animation - if there were assets for them.
It's interesting to see how many similar ideas there are going around.
I'd thought about using the cast animation as a basis for a swim animation, but I hadn't considered mixing in frames from the grab animation. I think that works quite nicely as a place-holder at least.
I think I made my overhead-carry animation by just taking the arms from the first (idle) frame and flipping them.
I use the 5th frame of the sideways thrust animation as a "present" or "give" frame. It works ok for that, but the front facing frame really doesn't.
I like having the arms in a separate layer also because that's almost always the first thing I do when I want to make modifications or additions: cut out the arms so I can easily animate them separately. Perhaps that's specific to my workflow though.
One neat thing about having arms separate in order to compose something: it doesn't only allow you to combine "walking" and "attacking" (say), it'll also be useful for riding animations (I guess that's really a solved problem, but one of the reasons I personally find these a bit of a hassle is that this separation isn't standard).
About the shake head animation bluecarrot16 mentioned above: one thing I wanted to try but didn't get around to yet is to see how using the head from the neighbouring directions would look. So use the left and right facing heads on the front facing animation. There's a caveat with the backward frame (you need to change the order in which the layers are stacked), and I suspect it will not work well for the side facing frames at any rate.
Two other thoughts:
Some of the animation sequences are long, which is tedious, but personally I really like the 8-frame walk animation. Certainly compared to the most common alternative, which is a 4-frame walk cycle. I don't think that looks very good on higher resolution pixel art.
The shoot animation seems overly long, but part of that is the lead-in and repeat/recover animations. I always find myself having to look up how to use those correctly in the original submission. I'd be nice if there was some uniformity between different animations in this regard (I think the "shoot" and "thrust" animations have leadin/repeat cycles, but the other ones don't).
Do we want to change the layout of the spritesheets?
I like having each animation and direction clearly separate from the other animations and directions, however, I really don't like that the spritesheets turn into these tall and narrow images. I always worry that I'm going to run into some limitation on texture size if these are too far off (then again, spritesheets get loaded into a texture atlas at runtime anyway; I probably worry too much).
It's probably worth thinking and talking about before we end up with different incompatible layouts.
Attached are some of the modifications I made to the LPC sheets. These are flat PNG images, which aren't so useful, but I can't upload the GIMP .xcf files as attachment here, so I'll have to put those up elsewhere and provide a link.
The first is a "push" animation that continues on from the "grab" animation (I don't remember of the top of my head where that's from, but it's here in the LPC collection somewhere). It's just a walkcycle with changed arm positions.
The second is a work-in-not-so-much-progress for a dwarf based on the child base. I think the most relevant thing here are the beard and maybe the modified helmet. I don't think I touched the base itself.
The third is what my "standard" spritesheet looks like with the additional animations in there. I stuck them to the right because I don't like having a "narrow" spritesheet very much and also I didn't want to re-order any of the existing animations.
The fourth is the lift/carry animation I mentioned earlier; it looks like I made this not by modifying the actual base, but by modifying the finished sprite, which is stupid if true.
I'll come back with the "source" later.
Actually, there is a runcycle: https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-runcycle-and-diagonal-walkcycle
No assets for it though, as far as I can tell.
There's also a current discussion on how to improve the LPC animations that might be slightly relevant here: https://opengameart.org/forumtopic/improving-lpc
Ok, I see I didn't really reply to bluecarrot16 in my last message.
My desire for separate layers in part has to do with layering assets, but also to make it easier for someone else to work on the animations more later. I think of it as having the "source" to the final sprite.
Having tools to help automate things like spritesheet creation or taking things like hats and hair and putting them in the correct position is extremely important, but personally I sometimes find these to be unreasonably restrictive. A certain piece of headgear might be labelled "female only" and then I can't put it on a male sheet in the generator just to get an idea for how it looks and make modifications afterwards, so I find that I tend to just use the Gimp anyway.
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