LordBob's commissionned work

[TheCripple]

The eyes on the wose seem a bit out of place. They clearly need something for eyes, but as is it looks really cartoony. As for the sea serpent, I'm very much in favor of the deep sea fish interpretation.

[Adamant14]

creating better dragon sprites since this what is unfortunately feels more like ugly placeholder and due to size causes many technical problems, among other things blowing up interface.

Just my two cents about the dragon sprites.

Once there was a guy named pixelmind who spend really a lot of time to create a full animated dragon sprite.
But nobody here wanted his work, and now he is gone forever.

pixelminds dragon

[thespaceinvader]

Your two cents are not desired; Pixelmind didn't disappear for that reason; indeed, we had spent some time discussing with him about animating the new Fire Dragon Eternal made.

Re. the Wose, I'd be looking at shrinking the eyes, and making them a much less lurid colour. Otherwise, it's very cool.

[pixelmind]

Once there was a guy named pixelmind who spend really a lot of time to create a full animated dragon sprite.
But nobody here wanted his work, and now he is gone forever.

Well he hasn't fully disappeared but is very busy and has yet to find more time for pixel pushing

[Adamant14]

@ pixelmind:
Good to see you are still there.

@ LordBob
Sorry for hijacking this thread, that was not my intention.

Wose:
The Wose portrait looks great, except the eyes -
they are a bit to big.
And I miss a mouth somehow

Serpent:
I vote for Serpent IV

[nuorc]

LordBob: What's the intention again for the new sea serpent sprite?

I'm confused about the serpent you want to be fish/monster like, while the popular vote seems to tend towards the dragon-y (which most resembles the existing sprite).

[Telchin]

I may be quite late (Lord Bob produces great work faster than I check these forums) and this question might be inane, but is this new generic Wose sprite going to replace the current one, or are they going to be used for different levels? They seem to push in different direction - the old one is more humanoid, this one more monstrous.

I'm confused about the serpent you want to be fish/monster like, while the popular vote seems to tend towards the dragon-y (which most resembles the existing sprite).

I guess that popular vote favors the draconic one, because the unit is supposed to a serpent and not a giant fish. Is the water serpent going to have its own portrait too? If yes, then it would probably make more sense to make the sea one less reptilian to distinguish them. Then again, I have no say over Wersnoth's art direction.

[nuorc]

I guess that popular vote favors the draconic one, because the unit is supposed to a serpent and not a giant fish.

Uh... Uh?

[zookeeper]

I may be quite late (Lord Bob produces great work faster than I check these forums) and this question might be inane, but is this new generic Wose sprite going to replace the current one, or are they going to be used for different levels?

Replace, definitely.

I think it's very good that the new one is less distinctly humanoid. It really looks alien and like a completely different kind of creature than any others, rather than just being a humanoid with bark and leaves.

[Telchin]

@nuorc - Either I misunderstood your post or I didn't make myself clear. I was arguing that a unit named Sea Serpent should look more like a snake than like a fish. Of course, if our great art directors have different opinion I'll trust their judgement.

@zookeeper - That makes sense. Wesnoth already has multiple species that are essentially humans with masks, so I approve of making some of its inhabitans more distinct.

[homunculus]

The wose eyes resemble amber, which is probably not far from what was intended (whatever the thing is called that comes from tree and dries into something like that in the air).

The blue in the shadows made me bit doubtful, as leaves are transparent and should make the shadows more saturated green.
This morning i looked at some trees in the park and the sunlit side seemed more yellow, the lit from behind leaves extremely bright green, the darkest shadows inside the tree dark saturated green.
But the blue leaves were the leaves on the sky-lit side and that was highlight rather than shadow.
Wouldn't there rather be some blue specular on the leaves in the left side of the picture, now the colors look a bit like the leaves are lit from the west and the trunk is lit from the east.

And I am wondering how the wose will look ingame when cut and without background.
The lower part seems to look bare like the legs of a poodle.

a little sketch of my own:

Did a little sketch of a wose with some hanging branches on the south side (the far side from the viewer), exaggerated a bit to make it look like a hairstyle.

wose.png (22.4 KiB) Viewed 4169 times

[LordBob]

The wose will get new eyes (they'll still look like large blobs of amber, only less cartoonish) and some lighting tweaks, but I'm not aiming for something completely realistic this time, hence the bluish secondary light.
As for its aspect ingame, I was thinking of doing someting similar to the elder wose portrait of tRoW: place all key features inside a 500*500 square and let the rest spill out. Does this still work ?


On the matter of the sea *serpent*, my position is as follows: the current description of the unit is vague at best, it doesn't belong to a clearly established sentient race, and AFAIK it's unlikely to get any line other than "BLEUARAAAAARGH" ingame; so I do feel entitled to taking some liberties with the concept.

As for its background, it doesn't have to be an actual reptile and there can be any number of explainations. Considering that Wesnoth's is a medieval setting, uneducated sailors are likely to name "sea serpent" any large creature with enough scales & spikes. They'd be rarely seen because few among the wesnoth people ever sail off to far oceans, and of those who do, even less come back to tell. At best there'd be legends told by half-crazed shipwreck survivors, or rumours of something caught in the distance by a captain who's very glad he didn't get to take a closer look. So there could really be a dozen different species that end up being labelled as "sea serpent", and this concept is just one of them...

Anyway, I'm halfway through the portrait, it doesn't look anything like a serpent, yet I still think it'll be interesting to have. So what we can do is :
#1 if there's a valid story reason to have the water serpent/sea serpent be blood-related reptilian -or even draconic- creatures, I'll come up with specific portraits for them at a later date. In the meantime, one of you talented pixel pushers can craft a sprite that matches this monstrous fish concept, of which we make a new creature named "Monster of the abyss" or whatever.
#2 if the serpents are just random monsters, we keep this portrait and eventually edit the unit description and/or sprite to match it.
#3 or I cast aside the current portrait and start over. But I'm not too keen on this one because it means wasted work and sticking to a poorly defined concept only because it exists, which is rarely a good reason.

Any option's fine by me since this is commissionned work, but I'd just like to have the opinion of the Powers That Be on the subject to make sure I'm headed the right way.

Edit: to further push the point, a preview of the portrait in its current WIP state

[vultraz]

The mouth reminds me of a giant Angular (not sure if I got that right) Fish's; somehow it doesn't seem so 'sea serpent-y' with that mouth, but that's probably just me. I'm kinda in favor of something more dragon-y (IV).

[homunculus]

shouldn't the ratio of sharp pointed teeth to broken teeth be proportional to the ratio of how fast they grow to how fast they break?
i am afraid the growth speed of the teeth would not scale length-wise with the size of the species.

[Blarumyrran]

edit the unit description and/or sprite to match it.

Here's a head.