Sorry, but I haven't made any progress in GemSet since my last post. I still have to insert all of the plants into the game. I've been a bit...distracted.
The other day I was like "Hey, let's screw around in Python a bit" and then suddenly, so many programming concepts started clicking for me. Now I know how to read text files, work in 2D arrays, handle JSON data, derive classes...I've wanted to learn programming my entire life so I'm really excited that I've been making such rapid progress.
But who knows? Maybe all of this will come in handy for GemSet. I know how to work with images so I could create a custom installer or something.
Anyways, I digress. Even though I haven't worked on GemSet lately, I did draw some Masterwork sprites a while ago to see if I could fit them into the style. Here are the default orc, gnome, succubus, necromancer and hermit:
Hmm...The hermit only only a single graphic, right? In that case, it wouldn't be too much trouble to draw a separate female hermit graphic. I know DF doesn't have caste graphics, but maybe you could create a female hermit that's an exact copy of the male hermit except for the displayed tile? I dunno. Just throwing some ideas out there.
A good compromise might be to make "there's no seasonal pickable growth here" vs "there's a seasonal pickable growth here!" versions of the fruit plants. That's the most valuable information from a player's pov.
Hey, that's actually a pretty good idea! It would only add a dozen or two more shrub graphics so I can definitely manage that.