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[Zsinj]

Happy to be able to finally show off hauling of resources I felt it was important to get the characters to be shown to carry the items around to give it that same feeling as the classic Settlers games.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwlWfoQfjwU

[Mephansteras]

Looking really good!

[Zsinj]

Thanks Mephansteras Should be a lot more updates in December than there has been recently to look forward to!

[Zsinj]

Spent this weekend (hopefully) ironing out the last bugs with hauling resources. Onto implementing workshops for crafting next!

[Sirus]

ugh

It looks just like Rimworld and Prison Architect before that.

What is the appeal of this style of character sprite?

[Scripten]

ugh

It looks just like Rimworld and Prison Architect before that.

What is the appeal of this style of character sprite?

It makes various important features of the pawns easily communicable and it doesn't require a lot of animation work. That's kind of like asking why every 16-bit platformer looked the same in the 90's. It mostly came down to people finding a working solution for the situation.

[Viken]

To put it simply, it requires less resources.  Which in a game as complex as KutM is looking to be, is a good thing.  You can have many more characters, many more tasks, and a far greater 'reach' by using less.  Plus, it's far easier to mod how characters look when they don't require much more than the art sheets to be done for them.  Variety is the spice of life, as they say.

[Zsinj]

Absolutely, it just wouldn't be feasible to have the amount or variety of character styles I'm aiming at if they had walking animations. It does help with modding too, anyone can just drop in a few images and the game will use them, rather than having to animate a 2d sprite or 3d skeleton. Props to the guys at Introversion for coming up with it, it's a great fit for the genre and I expect we'll be seeing more games using it in the near future.

[TD1]

Wow, images for diagonal movement.

This is revolutionary for Bay12

[Zsinj]

Wow, images for diagonal movement.

This is revolutionary for Bay12

Haha, yep, only when I first started looking for a sprite artist did I realise that Rimworld uses 4 directions of movement, and Prison Architect has 6 directions (as I've copied here). I came around to realising that the simplified cartoony style of the game shares a lot of similarities with how characters are drawn in comic strips - and in a comic strip a character facing to the side isn't drawn completely side-on, but at a half-rotated angle like this. I think it gives a much better look than with 4 directions of "animation", and it's worth the extra costs in time and assets.

[Retropunch]

Looks great!

One step I'd really like you to take at some point (I'm sure there are more important things first) is to add in the actual frames between the movements. It'd look so, so smooth and really notch it up a level above/differentiate it from Rimworld/PA without a huge amount of work.

[Zsinj]

Looks great!

One step I'd really like you to take at some point (I'm sure there are more important things first) is to add in the actual frames between the movements. It'd look so, so smooth and really notch it up a level above/differentiate it from Rimworld/PA without a huge amount of work.

Thanks Retropunch! I'm not completely sure what you mean by the extra frames here - do you mean more orientations for the characters to face as they turn around? It'd simply be too costly in terms of artist workload and assets at this point (as I'm not an artist). Currently each outfit/profession has a different set of clothing for each body shape (there's 3 each for male and female dwarves), which in turn need art assets for each of the 6 directions currently (though most mirror the left-right assets so it's usually 4 different directions in actual assets). That's 24 different assets for each of a couple of dozen professions that are in development currently, so around ~450 different assets just for clothing currently, that'll likely double by release, and that's just for dwarves. A couple more frames or orientations would double that figure, and for that cost I'd rather include more content in terms of other races with their own unique assets and style.

There's also a perfomance consideration in that these hundreds of assets end up being stored in a single sprite sheet, which is one of the reasons the game happily runs at a smooth 60fps. Adding a lot more assets would mean the sprite sheet is too large to be loaded as a single texture, and I'd have to think about how to optimise rendering and layout for switching between multiple sprite sheets. The more you know!

All that being said, the game is extremely mod-friendly, so if some brave modder wanted to add in more orientations for each character, it'll certainly be possible. Alternatively what you're thinking about would probably be better implemented as simplified 3D models (picture something like Warcraft 3), but that's way outside of scope already

[Retropunch]

-snip-

Yeah, I just meant sort of interim orientations between each direction change so it'd look like they were actually turning.

Certainly this would be for way, way, way down the line, but I think it'd add a lot of visual flair if you did get the time/resource to do so. As you said, this might be better tackled by modders.

[Zsinj]

Yeah, there's always the hope that the game is wildly successful to allow for these kind of things in the budget. As you've said, it's probably very far down the priority list, probably so far down that there's always going to be more valuable things I'd like to get done for the same cost. I'll definitely be making sure it's easily moddable

[Mictlantecuhtli]

PTW