Catgirls

[laerne]

Hello !

My story on why I'm getting back to wesnoth after more than 10 years begins with a snarky remark from my best friend.
“ Why are you trying to use photoshop on windows when you could use an open source equivalent on linux ? ”
“ I don't know, I replied. Why are you play a proprietary final fantasy XIV instead of something open source like wesnoth ? ”
“ I can' t. There aren't any catgirls in wesnoth. ”

Well, I had no further replies, so I guess this slowly escalated in my mind until I'm here to address that injustice.

My interest is primarily making the art, although I'm coding also the minimum WML to have it running. Hopefully I'll convince my friend of find someone else to balance the units. I'm doing it primarily doing this for me and my friend (it's a surprise) but since I'm basically a beginner in pixel art, I suppose I'm also open for critique. I say "I suppose" because my focus will be more on the production than the perfection here, but hey, if the art is broken, it's broken.

As for the addon itself, well, no choices, it's going to be a single multiplayer faction with a bunch of literal cat-ladies, that's the external constraint I assumed. However on top of that I was thinking about theming them in something inspired by the Indian subcontinent. Why ? Because it's different from England, Germany, Japan and that weird blend of middle-eastern setings most fantasy universes seems to get inspired from, because I found the idea of using chakrams interesting and because why not ?

First unit is a chakram warrior, that is proficient both in melee and range. Here's three concept art I made (I made some uglier and rougher ones before that too). Maybe I'll make more concepts (andy maybe they'll look less like dancing...), maybe I'll colorize one of those to make it a unit portrait art, I don't know.

Here is a photo of my attempt to figure out how I should animate that unit for running and standing. I made the heads too large, but that's not a big issue, since it doesn't change the perpective of anything.

And here is the base sprite I came up with (so far). I stumble a bit on an issue when coloring the Shalwar kameez (the clothes) : using bright colors feels much more thematic to my indian inspiration, however the wrong bright color can be misread as another team... I went with this "indian yellow" because :

• It's bright, not muted.
• There doesn't seem to be a "yellow" color team, only an orange one.
• Using the same colors for the scarf, shirt and pants seems too uniform; it almost looks like pajamas.

chakram_warrior.png (11.1 KiB) Viewed 1802 times

Here it is in for team blue:

chakram_warrior.png (11.41 KiB) Viewed 1802 times

Here is an earlier version with a more realistic pose that better match the sketched animation layout I photographed above. However it seemed really hard to read what the left arm of the unit was, so I changed it.

chakram_units.2024-11-11--18-06.bak.png (10.81 KiB) Viewed 1802 times

I quickly tried today to make a standing animation as well. It's weird and janky and I'll definitively change it. The arms don't seem to have the same consistent thickness, the amplitude of motion seems too large, and the tail is maybe missing 2-4 frames to feel smooth enough ? Unless you count test-turning a cube in blender, It's my first animation ever, so i'm not sure what's wrong and what's the best fix. Let me show you what I have already.

chakram_warrior.gif (16.54 KiB) Viewed 1802 times

I must admit it's a bit intimidating to post alongside quite talented pixel artists but I hope you'll take interest regardless of my level.

Thanks for reading me !

PS: Oh, and I ended up doing those pixel art on krita on linux. So much for that conversation.

[Deciton_Reven]

Of course there is a catgirl faction in Wesnoth, just tucked away in the Era of Horrors UMC. They lean more girl than cat looks wise and are more of an early nomadic hunter-gatherer inspiration for their faction, so more takes on the ideas is welcome of course. Artwise they aren't really mainline styled, though, so if you want some inspiration on that side, the Vixens from the Rashy Era do a really good job of dynamic poses in a mainline style. Again though they look more girl than fox though.

[DuncanDill]

Whelp you're already better than me if you can animate. These look great! My only critique would be on some of the shading. I will try post some different shading that is more common across wesnoth art and such.

[Refumee]

@Laerne
Your cat girls look awesome! You don't need to hide your creations

I am looking forward for a full faction. Keep on the good work!

There is also another catgirl faction, the vixens:
https://units.wesnoth.org/1.12/Rashy_Er ... tml#Vixens

I don't wanna discredit the author of creations of the Vixens, but yours look more like a wesnothian faction (artstyle).

Edit: Those are Foxgirls.

[Refumee]

There is a yellow team color, it is called gold.
If you download Wespal you can check them all out.
https://irydacea.me/projects/wespal/

wespal.png (9.47 KiB) Viewed 1735 times

[Ravana]

I added yellow team color for 1.19.0 https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/comm ... e0e6dddb75

[Atreides]

Meow! The more the merrier. I knew of the Era of Horrors catgirls too (got a hundreds of turns long game on a Dominus map going with them for years now) but Rashy's vixens are a surprise, not sure how I've not played with them yet. Vixen=female fox btw so it does make sense they're foxgirls. : ) Real foxes are pretty catlike anyways. Darling critters.

Also glad to hear yellow team colour is making a return! You can search the forums and find the odd history of it. I used to sub "gold" (which is yellow renamed and shuffled off past the first 9 colours) for black in the past by editing the files. Now I just edit the file to enable more than 9 (default) team colours (since more than 9 teams are usable since 1.14 it is a good idea).

[laerne]

Thanks all for the support

DecitonRaven: Oh, well maybe I should have check first. But hey, doing it by myself will be a much bigger argument playing wesnoth to my friend.

DuncanDill: Oh, I'm curious what you'd change. I'm certainly having trouble balancing between having the sprites feel 3D and well delimited/"stroked".


Refumee: Yes, I do try to keep the art close to the official ones of wesnoth. There's a pin-a-reference in krita which is so useful (and you can even color-sample from it) that so useful to keep everything together

Refumee + Ravana + Atreides: I didn't know about that wespal tool... would have helped me not to wrote a python script to convert those colors ^^' Oh, well it's still useful to generate the sprite for the animte script I also wrote.

So yellow/gold is coming "back" as its team color ? Um... I might need to change the shirt color indeed then. Maybe I can cheat by using dark "team colors" for the pants and brighters ones for the shirt ? Or maybe it'll help me to have two use two colors per team : a "team color" and a contrasty "complement" color (Of which I'd do only 3-4) Is there a way to specify a manual way in WML to recolor some, let's say cyan, pixels, to a custom `[color_range]` (which I'm discovering is actually set in WML).

Finally: I did try to animate the unit a bit better, here is what I came up with:

chakram_warrior.gif (26.46 KiB) Viewed 1566 times

chakram_warrior.gif (26.18 KiB) Viewed 1566 times

There's two pose variations and six frames for raising the chakram, but only one variation and two frames to lower it. I think I need to make as many frame and variations lowering it than raising it.

[Refumee]

Meow! The more the merrier. I knew of the Era of Horrors catgirls too (got a hundreds of turns long game on a Dominus map going with them for years now) but Rashy's vixens are a surprise, not sure how I've not played with them yet. Vixen=female fox btw so it does make sense they're foxgirls. : ) Real foxes are pretty catlike anyways. Darling critters.

Also glad to hear yellow team colour is making a return! You can search the forums and find the odd history of it. I used to sub "gold" (which is yellow renamed and shuffled off past the first 9 colours) for black in the past by editing the files. Now I just edit the file to enable more than 9 team colours (since more than 9 teams are usable since 1.14 it is a good idea).

Makisu also made a pretty Vixen
viewtopic.php?t=41363&start=105

[DuncanDill]

Here we go I just changed the shading to be a bit more consistent across the whole thing as well as adding a rim light to elevate the 3d ness

catgirl.png (3.07 KiB) Viewed 1350 times

It also has the colour pallete I used. I changed some of the metal shading, and the hair. The legs and tail where incredibly well done, I didnt touch those at all

[laerne]

Hello.

I really like how you added shades of teals and blues in the dark tones, it really makes them pop. I also like how made the metallic chakram flat but light-on-top and dark-on-bottom, it really makes less of a torus and more of a flat circle.

I tried to incorporate your suggestions, but I like the big eyes, I dunno, I like 'em.

chakram_units3.png (11.41 KiB) Viewed 1062 times

Also, I'm trying to do the double-recolor, but I'm having trouble having the WML work for it:

chakram_units4.png (11.3 KiB) Viewed 1062 times

I'm going to open a topic on the WML Workshop.

[laerne]

Okay so I didn't update for some time even though I was working a lot on the add-on.
I spend quite some time scripting so I batch export the layers I want from the krita file I use to make the sprites, and batch recolor the sprite and batch animate the colored sprites, so that I can quickly test different colors combinations

Below are a bunch of animated recolors:

[DuncanDill]

Wow beautiful

[laerne]

Thank you

And here a first version of the character running south-east. It clearly needs some refinements, like the ears reacting weardly, the tail still being fully static, etc...
But if I can avoid to have to draw mid-frames it'd speed drawing other sprites.