Unit sprites for Invasion from the Unknown/After the Storm

[Iris]

I spent a good part of the last weekend working on some pending sprite revisions for IftU/AtS.



From top-left to bottom-right:

1, 2, 3: Demon Zephyr; wings courtesy of Neoriceisgood, who doesn't really know I'm using them. (1) is the male variation, (2) the female one, and (3) is part of an experiment with drawing tattoos on sprites.

4, 5: Anlindë in her level 2 (Elvish Ascetic) and level 3 (Elvish Mystic) forms. The latter is one pixel too tall - will fix at a later time.

6-13: Elynia(tm) with attachable/removable color wings - batteries are sold separately. I'm checking whether it is possible to break the monotony and use a different palette for Elynia's wings than the one Jetryl shall use with the Elvish Sylph and Shyde. However, Espreon and JW seem to be inclined towards #6 (cyan/Jetryl's palette).

14-15: Shaxthal Sentry Drone, using a new, experimental palette (only 15 colors each! what a bargain!) that should allow me to get rid of the extra PNG files used for the surface variation, since I should be able to use Wesnoth's ~RC(palette1=palette2) image function (it's ~PAL(palette1>palette2) in trunk) to recolor them at runtime instead. I also bothered to modify its shape a bit.


It's not mere coincidence that Anlindë's hair is the same color/palette as these demons'. Regarding sprite sizes, the demons are intentionally larger than other sprites - and this is something that will be eventually applied to the entire demon tree.

Of these sprites, #1, 2, 4 and 5 have been committed already to the wesnoth-umc-dev repository. #14 will be committed as soon as I write down the definitive palettes (surface, nonsurface) so that they can be used directly in WML, thus eliminating the need for committing #15.

[doofus-01]

Elynia's leg position seems a bit odd, like she's pointing her left knee inward but spreading her ankles? Maybe it makes sense with the standing animation, but I would have thought she'd hang her legs down more.

My two cents on the wing colour: Avoid using 7 or 11, they look too fleshy. (If that makes sense.)

I didn't realize those were tattoos on the demon until I read your text.

But overall, nice sprites.

[Turuk]

Agreed on her leg, and it also looks as if the left leg is shorter than her right leg. I know this may be with how she is holding it, but the overall view of her piece is that her leg is noticeably shorter.

[ancestral]

It's hard to tell, but if you account for her stance is at an angle… it may be just the shadow is all that needs tweaking.

Hmm, I'm not sure:

(Original on left, modified on right)

elynia.png (5.71 KiB) Viewed 8194 times

[woodmouse]

Wow, those are all so super cool.
I especially like the new Drones, because they're more menacing than they were earlier, at least in my opinion.
IftU will be thousand times better with these.

[Mabuse]

yeah, very good work

[Turuk]

It's hard to tell, but if you account for her stance is at an angle… it may be just the shadow is all that needs tweaking.

True true, but it's still quite a bit odd even if you make that adjustment.

[Iris]

Moving on, these are the new baseframes for the L1 demons, along with a fixed pair for the L2 Zephyrs.

Next step: making baseframes for the other branch of the tree, the Demon Grunts and Warriors.

[doofus-01]

Looking good.

It appears that their toes are pointed inward though. A bit awkward.

[Sapient]

I don't understand the clothing decisions for this sprite... the female demon is wearing something to cover her lower torso but there's no bikini or anything for the top. So you've got this weird lumpish region that doesn't exactly look like breasts. I mean, it's weird. Just give her a top I say. Then it will be a lot easier to tell the male from the female.

Another problem is there's no team color for the L2. Usually, units get more team color when they levelup (not less).

[Iris]

Little update for Elyssa's sprites, and the single-frame Shaxthal Sentry Drone sprite. For the former, it's not quite definitive, but I'm experimenting with colors; it seems to be impossible to match the portrait's color scheme in pixel art, or at least for me.

Let me add a little tip:

If you restrain yourself to a palette of few colors (six in this case), you can make a sprite and let the game engine recolor it for you at run-time. This may be useful if you want to have multiple recolors of a single sprite and don't want to have to update each of them in the filesystem whenever you make a change in the actual baseframe.

These guys (the Shaxthal Sentry Drones) are using the following palettes, excluding the TC pixels and the shadow (which is black, 60% transparent):

• Baseframe:

  

  sentry-baseframe.png (1.94 KiB) Viewed 6977 times

  Code: Select all

  AEDCFF,8680FF,5A00FF,503669,171745,1C0821

• Surface variation:

  

  sentry-recolor.png (2.18 KiB) Viewed 6974 times

  Code: Select all

  D7BE8C,B0974C,675C22,4D3B59,442626,0F0F0F

Around 1.5.8, I implemented a special image functor syntax, ~RC(palette_A=palette_B), that takes two palettes as parameters; the image's pixels are switched from palette_A to palette_B directly, without doing the color range transformation on which team-coloring relies. Both palettes can be either named (predefined) or enumerated (inline).

I changed this syntax in 1.7.0 to be ~PAL(palette_A>palette_B) instead.

</shameless_ad>

Future shaxthal baseframes in IftU, AtS, TSL and TE are going to use this same mechanism.

[Jetrel]

As just a general suggestion on technique, you're using way too many levels of shading in these sprites, and most of the shading isn't in the right place. I.e. you're bleeding tons of time trying to smooth out the shading, and all of that time spent is wasted. No amount of blending will fix it.

My suggestion to you is to drop down to only 3 (YES, THREE) levels of shading until you can place them correctly. Only after the highlights and shadows are in the right place, should you bother blending. Where shading is placed is vastly more important than how well-blended it is. In fact if it's not in the right place, blending is useless.


I know that this will be hard to do, because it feels like you're going to be wasting work making something obviously not final ... but you're already doing that. You're doing lots of work to blend them that doesn't make them better. The sprites you're doing aren't terribly good as they are, and if you embrace the idea that you're going to replace them later, as you get better, you can spare yourself from wasting lots of time on busywork that doesn't teach you much, and you can get better, faster. Stick to treating these like "studies" for a bit.

Don't spend time shading these to death. It doesn't make them better, it doesn't teach you much, and it guzzles lots of your time. If you focus on just the position of shading, you'll greatly improve these.

Good luck.

[Iris]

I am finally getting rid of the Neorice-based demon sprites for the L2 Grunt and L3 Warrior. It's unfortunate that I had to give up quality here for concept consistency and development speed; I tarried for too long trying to come up with poses and weapons for them, and I need to get IftU 2.0 released for 1.7.x soon; After the Storm and Thunderstone are also stuck in development hell awaiting their own sprites from me. For a year.

So here is a partial rework of Elyssa's sprite (bottom left corner, cape is not complete), Skeleton Rider (top left), the new baseframes for the Demons tree (middle) and a very early WIP for the L3 Shaxthal Enforcer. It's really frustrating that I cannot come up with interesting poses for any sprite I make from scratch.



(woo, thread necromancy! And with a fitting avatar... wait...)

[Zerovirus]

Yay! Shadow Master is finally going to update IftU for 1.7!

On other notes, Elyssa looks like she's falling over, mainly due to something wrong with the angling of her legs. I've seen that over the many versions of Elyssa Warlord's sprite, but it never seems to have been changed. I bet more people than me have been saying that too.

You call that Shaxthal Enforcer a non-original pose? It looks awesome! Can't wait to see it in full shading.

The skeleton rider looks cool, but I personally would do away with the headband. That's just a personal preference though. The new armor detail is awesome.

The Demons... They are pretty good, but one thing about them irks me: the outlines. Some of the outlines are apparently in black or a very close color while other outlines aren't... The discrepancy makes the graphic look kinda tacked-together. Of course they will undoubtably be updated over time.

I feel kinda out of place giving critique to the guy who's probably been here years more than me but I hope I was useful.

[Iris]

Not quite finished, since it still needs many fixes, but thought I'd show my progress to Aethaeryn. This one won't be used in IftU unless I get drunk while at the keyboard, but it'll at least appear as a surprise somewhere in AtS. And, of course, it'll be used in Thunderstone Era.

This is the Shaxthal Enforcer, the L3 unit of the Sentry Drone branch. Special technique: tearing your face apart with his claws!

shaxthal-drone-enforcer.png (1.7 KiB) Viewed 5347 times

The preview I posted earlier had slightly different facial traits because that was going to be the War Drone (L3 adv. from Assault Drone) sprite instead, until I came up with a different sketch for the latter... which now looks like crap IMO

Elyssa looks like she's falling over, mainly due to something wrong with the angling of her legs. I've seen that over the many versions of Elyssa Warlord's sprite, but it never seems to have been changed. I bet more people than me have been saying that too.

Making good, humanoid legs doesn't seem to work for me. Specially if I'm not using a generic pose for them. This is, amongst other issues, what doesn't allow me to start animating Elynia's new baseframe either.

FIXME

elynia40.png (5.45 KiB) Viewed 5347 times

I'll eventually fix the issue with the demons' outlines, although some particular cases (e.g. the L2 Grunt's leather armor outline above the waist) tend to look a bit better when TC'd to anything but white - on my screen anyway. It's good to have a little program of my own to produce TC versions of an image without having to use the actual game.

I feel kinda out of place giving critique to the guy who's probably been here years more than me

Knowledge is an endless journey... or so I heard.

Yay! Shadow Master is finally going to update IftU for 1.7!

That has been a work in progress since the very day Wesnoth 1.6a was released last March.

I have achieved less than 5% of the goals for IftU 2.0 in the code, artwork and design departments. If I continue like this, I guess I'll have to push the red button and release this branch early with a smaller version number if I don't want to run the risk of dooming AtS to eternal Development Hell.