pink shooter

[Jetrel]

well. Let's rechristen the newly awakened forums with a healthy bout of what we do best: pissing contests over pixels.

As you may all be aware, I want the undead to look scary, not silly. There are a few units they have that bug me, still. One of the worst offenders is this guy:

Personally, I kinda like the unit idea, and even the shape, it's just the color that throws it off.

The following two undead archers look great to my eyes:



I have attached a proposed recoloring of the bone shooter. It includes a first version, in which NOTHING changes except the color, and a second version that switches up the bone in his hand a bit, which I feel makes it more threatening.

[Circon]

Sure. Agree to both.

[Ayin]

*sigh* You have a secret plot to make all units brown, don't you?

I vote no. Colour is one of the main ways to distinguish between units. Units should have bright, easily distinguishable, plain colours. That is, green, pink, purple, blue, not brownish green, greyish pink, or other variations around the theme of grey.

By the way, I like the new arrow position. (Why wasn't "new arrow, current colour" an option? :p)

[fmunoz]

Agreed with Ayin, colur makes way easier to distinguish units, evven if the indiviadul units looks a bit weird.

[Circon]

But pink is jsut stupid. Purple is acceptable.

[sanna]

If you don't like the pink, fine, change it. But not to something that is so similar to the coloration of other units. Give it another, and yes quite bright, color.

I really like the new bone/arrow, definitely use that one!

[eugenelim]

I like the new bone / arrow. It makes more sense in that position when the archer is getting ready to fire his bow.

I'm neutral about the colour change, but I agree that pink is definitely the wrong colour for an EVIL, UNDEAD remains of a corpse.

[scott]

old color
new bone

[Darth Fool]

Of course, the old bone was used as a club (see animation frames) not as an arrow...

[turin]

Of course, the old bone was used as a club (see animation frames) not as an arrow...

it seemed to be implied to be an arrow.

For me, the new color is less than perfect, but it is definitely better than PINK! How is a friggen undead archer PINK?!? >(

Same goes for vampire bat, too. Can that be expected to be fixed soon too, jetryl?

[Jetrel]

For me, the new color is less than perfect, but it is definitely better than PINK! How is a friggen undead archer PINK?!? >(

OK, I'll make a revision 2, with color leaning more in the direction of the blood-red on the soul shooter. I'm glad people didn't mind the new arrow.

The only concern is that it has contrast between the shoulder plates and the breast-plate-type-area. - black shoulder plates with a red chest may work fine, or potentially a black chest with red shoulder pads.

Same goes for vampire bat, too. Can that be expected to be fixed soon too, jetryl?

Yep. My idea would be to have a brown level-0, a more crimson level-1, and possibly a black level-2. It was the unfortunate choice of putting the "blood" titled unit at the higher level that forces me to have something to transition along a path that leads to red and then to black.

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My criterion for designing units are to FIRST make sure the unit looks good, and matches the color scheme of their race. Then I can work on making them "easily" distinguishable from each other, a highly relative term to begin with. As has been made clear many times, I come from a very different school of sprite/videogame graphic design than some other people here do.

This is not only in my means of making sprites, which are wholly alien to most other people on this project (my primary tool is not the pencil, but the brush, and many areas on my sprites are composited of multiple transparent layers which blend together), but this is also in my basic design schemes.

I am an advocate of cohesive color schemes, at least for the bulk of a units armor. Some of our races follow these very well - the dwarves for example, or, shockingly, even many of the drakes, now. (good job, neo, btw).

It is alright for a unit to have bits of flair/accents in a different color, and for certain flambouyant-by-nature units to be brightly colored - the fencer/duelist for example, or wizards dressing in purple robes, in fact I encourage this.

I think the best reference for what I think unit colors should look like would be those LOTR movies they made recently. All else disregarded, they had wonderful costuming, and I really liked their use of color. Legolas had a much better outfit than most of our level-1 elves, and King Aragorn looked ... intimidating, dressed in his full black and silver armor.

One direction I *never* want to see wesnoth go in the the inviolable mess that is games like Secret of Mana. If we have pink rabites and purple sparklebunnies prancing around in anything but a deliberately humorous user campaign, uhm, I'll go hardcore and turn you purple, too, just to teach you a lesson.



relevance: Regarding the undead, I think all units should be a combination of black, red, dark brown and greys, and possibly some slate blue thrown in for armor, or general metallic color used there.

Bright colors* detract from the primary goal of these unit graphics, which lies in making them appropriate to what they are being used for.

* do note that bright red is an exception, and the use of purple for their magic is fine - I actually rather like it. However, once again, the magic should remain consistent in color.

[sanna]

My criterion for designing units are to FIRST make sure the unit looks good, and matches the color scheme of their race. Then I can work on making them "easily" distinguishable from each other, a highly relative term to begin with.

Am I understanding you correctly when I think that what you are saying is that gameplay should take the back-seat to units looking good?

IMO, easily distinguishable units are the essence of gameplay. Good-looks are eye-candy.

While I most definitely don't mind eye-candy and thoroughly enjoy all the great graphics that is part of Wesnoth, I think that the line must be drawn when it has negative effects on gameplay.

[turin]

My criterion for designing units are to FIRST make sure the unit looks good, and matches the color scheme of their race. Then I can work on making them "easily" distinguishable from each other, a highly relative term to begin with.

Am I understanding you correctly when I think that what you are saying is that gameplay should take the back-seat to units looking good?

what he's saying is he makes them look good, then he makes them distinguishable. the end result is it makes the units look better at no cost to distinguishability (when done correctly).

IMO, easily distinguishable units are the essence of gameplay. Good-looks are eye-candy.

While I most definitely don't mind eye-candy and thoroughly enjoy all the great graphics that is part of Wesnoth, I think that the line must be drawn when it has negative effects on gameplay.

i agree here... this is why i'm not a great fan of the new mermen; they're not distinguished enough. but i think jetryl is a skilled enough artist to accomplish the task at hand.

[Jetrel]

Am I understanding you correctly when I think that what you are saying is that gameplay should take the back-seat to units looking good?

IMO, easily distinguishable units are the essence of gameplay. Good-looks are eye-candy.

While I most definitely don't mind eye-candy and thoroughly enjoy all the great graphics that is part of Wesnoth, I think that the line must be drawn when it has negative effects on gameplay.

That's the thing - easily distinguishable units - which are a good thing, would be of primary concern if this was a Real-time strategy game.

But this is a turn-based game, and not only that, a turn-based game where you can simply mouseover a unit and everything about it is shown in big letters to the right. You can afford an extra moment to move the mouse over one of the ... at most, five or so in any normal situation ... undead archers in an area to see if it is level-1 or level-2, although I would hope by my graphics to not have the need to do this anyways.

You will be mousing over your units anyways, as we currently have no means of displaying traits in the unit graphic, and in any event a decent strategician will want to know EXACTLY what xp and hp his unit has, not the rough guess provided by the bar displays.

Additionally, whenever you attack, the stats and combat capabilities are shoved right in your face. The only way to make a mistake, is excessive haste.


Frankly, I wouldn't mind seeing a small mouseover of potential attacks when you drag the move cursor over an enemy - using small icons of damage type and small text showing simply hitpoints in the top line, and then attack damage, type via icon, and hit chance for each attack.

This, not as a remedial measure for increasingly homogenous unit graphics, but as something done to make the game easier for newbies, and more scalable by rote of drastically reducing the time needed for people to learn what a unit's immediately relevant combat capabilities are.


This is why I think the "gameplay" argument is spurious - I don't think it affects gameplay at all.



That said, I have NO OPPOSITION to unit distinction - I think it is a very good thing, and important to the polish of the game. However, I'm going to put the following mantra in bold, hopefully to emphasize it's importance to me. I have always, and will always continue to follow this in any game I design where it applies:

Under absolutely no circumstances, should a unit be made to look bad for the sole purpose of differentiating it.

I can only assume that francisco made the early bone shooter purple&pink rather than being the same color as the regular skeleton because he felt they needed to be easy to tell apart. However, as the soul shooter clearly demonstrates, there are other means to this end, which possess none of the drawbacks.



In an ideal world, I would like to have a unit that is easy to tell apart AND looks good.
However, if I was forced to chose only one of these qualities, "looks good" will always win, in my not-so-humble opinion.

I think, however, that we can be in an ideal world, which renders this argument moot.