Yeah, I remember reading about the TV adaptation of the Earthsea trilogy. Something similar just happened to "The Hunger Games"; very specific about what type of actors could audition for the movie...
Two things that are sorely missing from LPC assets:
- enemy sprites.
- female combat outfits.
...and I do not have the skill to address it. (Although I am tempted to have a go at one of the unfinished sprites that was submitted - the orc)
For the record, the skin/eye tone in the base assets is meant as a placeholder to be customized with the rest of the character, not as some stereotypical ideal.
That's ok, I guessed as much, but it bothered me. My wife and children are not caucasian, they play the games that I make, and it matters to me. Appropriate role-models and all that.
I had assumed that most programmers even with no art background could probably do a color swap easily enough, though ofc not being from that side of the game dev world I'm not always sure.
Allow me to enlighten you ;)
I work with a large team of developers, and there is only one guy on our team besides myself who would know how to use GIMP. I doubt he knows what pixel art is.
I haven't played many other LPC entries, but I have seen a lot of screenshots, and in my opinion they all show the same thing: Use the provided graphics and that's it. Even with a 30 days timeframe. (Guilty of this myself BTW; I changed the concept for my LPC entry because I didn't want to draw any new graphics)
As a general rule programmers are not arty, and artists are not programmers. Horrible generalization, but I've worked on both sides, and I've even found that (other) developers have an aversion to using graphics software...
I spoke to some other devs on the LPC IRC channel and this came up a few times: Using Tiled to make maps is tedious and tiresome. Pixel pushing is tedious and tiresome. Avoid both if you can.
Programmers are lazy. They will use the provided graphics and no more. (If they even notice the lack of skin-tone variety)
So I would prefer it if a variety of skin-tones are provided by default. No excuses.
This is also why I think a 'super' combined spritesheet is a fantastic idea. Lower the barrier and get more people to start using these graphics.
Hmmm...best place to observe the 'pistonhead' is perhaps in my online LPC entry. Look for a dark-skinned girl with (short) blue hair wearing a red top. (aka student_a.png) When she walks north her head stays in one place while her body 'pumps' up and down... From memory it's a flaw in the base female body spritesheet. I remember correcting it in some other spritesheets...
It's less noticable in student_b.png, because her hair covers her neck.
But you can imagine what happens if there is a 'mistake' in a base art asset, and other people start building and layering on top of that base asset. Nothing that can't be fixed though.
Could also just be a personal gripe, or maybe I've just spend too much time peering at those sprites up-close ;)
But the studentA/B/C whatever is from either the base assets or the online demo, can't remember. I wasn't happy with the animation on that one, has a piston-head when walking north.
But I'll be glad to help you with the recolouring for the non-walking stances, really easy to do in Gimp, there's a colour replace option for that.
That's how I did the dark base sprites - Picked the colours from the studentA/B/C sprite and then used colour replace on the base_male and base_female images.
For the tanned sprites I added a layer in Gimp, set the layer to either multiply or overlay, and then you just have to bucket fill it with a colour. The tricky part is picking the right colour so that it looks ok.
Not quite, I pulled the XCFs apart into separate spritesheets, because I'm heading toward generating random 'customers' for my entry. The code is there to do it, but not used at the moment.
So the submitted version of my entry uses only fixed 'finished characters'.
I have made a start on pulling apart the sprites and XCFs into recoloured spritesheets that I could then layer on the fly in the game. I have also recoloured the base male and female sprites to have a variety of skin-tones (and eye-colours) because the world is not filled with pale blue-eyed caucasians. Yuck. We really need to kill that stereotype..
Also, a number of the spritesheets do not line up...and the ones from the base assets have some ugly animation - check the female sprites as they walk north, looks like they've got motor-piston heads...
Ah, and a number of spritesheets have stray pixels, cleaned some of those up a well...you don't notice until you see them walking around on a coloured background and there is suddenly a strange thing flashing above their ears :)
So feel free to have a mosey in my repository, and use whatever you want.
I was also thinking of building an online character builder so that players could create their own 'shopkeeper', and if I did that I would add a button that would allow you to download that character as a spritesheet for use in your own games.
There were some in the base assets. I recoloured and cleaned up a whole bunch of sprites, and I made some base body sprite sheets with different skin tones.
You are free to use them, after all, that is the point of the CC assets :D
I used to play LARP, and one of our players had a girlfriend who jokingly said "I would only play LARP if I was wearing a chainmail bikini..."
So he made her a chainmail bikini (Yep, handmade little rings, the works, hours of work)
and so she had no choice but to join in wearing the bikini. (She wasn't a very good sword-fighter, had bodyguards from memory)
So take it from me; it's impractical, it's best worn on warm nights/days and it doesn't offer much protection, but...it is incredibly distracting!
-5 Dex for male opponents.
Yeah, I remember reading about the TV adaptation of the Earthsea trilogy. Something similar just happened to "The Hunger Games"; very specific about what type of actors could audition for the movie...
Two things that are sorely missing from LPC assets:
- enemy sprites.
- female combat outfits.
...and I do not have the skill to address it. (Although I am tempted to have a go at one of the unfinished sprites that was submitted - the orc)
That's ok, I guessed as much, but it bothered me. My wife and children are not caucasian, they play the games that I make, and it matters to me. Appropriate role-models and all that.
Allow me to enlighten you ;)
I work with a large team of developers, and there is only one guy on our team besides myself who would know how to use GIMP. I doubt he knows what pixel art is.
I haven't played many other LPC entries, but I have seen a lot of screenshots, and in my opinion they all show the same thing: Use the provided graphics and that's it. Even with a 30 days timeframe. (Guilty of this myself BTW; I changed the concept for my LPC entry because I didn't want to draw any new graphics)
As a general rule programmers are not arty, and artists are not programmers. Horrible generalization, but I've worked on both sides, and I've even found that (other) developers have an aversion to using graphics software...
I spoke to some other devs on the LPC IRC channel and this came up a few times: Using Tiled to make maps is tedious and tiresome. Pixel pushing is tedious and tiresome. Avoid both if you can.
Programmers are lazy. They will use the provided graphics and no more. (If they even notice the lack of skin-tone variety)
So I would prefer it if a variety of skin-tones are provided by default. No excuses.
This is also why I think a 'super' combined spritesheet is a fantastic idea. Lower the barrier and get more people to start using these graphics.
Hmmm...best place to observe the 'pistonhead' is perhaps in my online LPC entry. Look for a dark-skinned girl with (short) blue hair wearing a red top. (aka student_a.png) When she walks north her head stays in one place while her body 'pumps' up and down... From memory it's a flaw in the base female body spritesheet. I remember correcting it in some other spritesheets...
It's less noticable in student_b.png, because her hair covers her neck.
But you can imagine what happens if there is a 'mistake' in a base art asset, and other people start building and layering on top of that base asset. Nothing that can't be fixed though.
Could also just be a personal gripe, or maybe I've just spend too much time peering at those sprites up-close ;)
LPC Entry
http://madmarcel.github.com/yoas/index.html
Student A
http://madmarcel.github.com/yoas/res/img/sprites/full-characters/student_a.png
Student B
http://madmarcel.github.com/yoas/res/img/sprites/full-characters/student_b.png
I'll have to play Polymorphable now :)
But the studentA/B/C whatever is from either the base assets or the online demo, can't remember. I wasn't happy with the animation on that one, has a piston-head when walking north.
But I'll be glad to help you with the recolouring for the non-walking stances, really easy to do in Gimp, there's a colour replace option for that.
That's how I did the dark base sprites - Picked the colours from the studentA/B/C sprite and then used colour replace on the base_male and base_female images.
For the tanned sprites I added a layer in Gimp, set the layer to either multiply or overlay, and then you just have to bucket fill it with a colour. The tricky part is picking the right colour so that it looks ok.
Not quite, I pulled the XCFs apart into separate spritesheets, because I'm heading toward generating random 'customers' for my entry. The code is there to do it, but not used at the moment.
So the submitted version of my entry uses only fixed 'finished characters'.
I have made a start on pulling apart the sprites and XCFs into recoloured spritesheets that I could then layer on the fly in the game. I have also recoloured the base male and female sprites to have a variety of skin-tones (and eye-colours) because the world is not filled with pale blue-eyed caucasians. Yuck. We really need to kill that stereotype..
Also, a number of the spritesheets do not line up...and the ones from the base assets have some ugly animation - check the female sprites as they walk north, looks like they've got motor-piston heads...
Ah, and a number of spritesheets have stray pixels, cleaned some of those up a well...you don't notice until you see them walking around on a coloured background and there is suddenly a strange thing flashing above their ears :)
So feel free to have a mosey in my repository, and use whatever you want.
I was also thinking of building an online character builder so that players could create their own 'shopkeeper', and if I did that I would add a button that would allow you to download that character as a spritesheet for use in your own games.
Here's a link to my HTML5 entry, Ye Olde Village Shoppe:
http://madmarcel.github.com/
If I do any more work on this 'game', the updated version (hopefully with some actual gameplay ;)
will be listed as a separate entry on that page.
Alas...
Javascript console says:
Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token +=
lpc0.dart.js:8169
There were some in the base assets. I recoloured and cleaned up a whole bunch of sprites, and I made some base body sprite sheets with different skin tones.
You are free to use them, after all, that is the point of the CC assets :D
They're in the repo, which I've just put up :D
Here:
https://github.com/madmarcel/yoas/tree/master/res/img/sprites
It's 2am in the morning, 17 hours left until deadline. No way am I going to make it. (But I was expecting that :)
Have created a live demo here, feel free to have a look:
http://madmarcel.github.com/
Still have to fix link to YOAS repo and clean up artist attribution. but I might have time for that tomorrow.
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