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[Manveru Taurënér]

Awesome stuff, though probably best to scale it back a tad. Personally I'd say:


Definitely show wear

Contaminants probably limit to blood (the only one that can be intuitively understood and most impactful).

Quality levels I'd say limit to a set of 3 (those that matter from a gameplay standpoint however slight, ie "regular", masterwork and artifact, and try and keep it from overpowering the material color)

[Superdorf]

- Wear is excellent.

- Contaminants are decent, and could probably be standardized to a couple spatter-patterns colored as relevant. Blood is... maybe a bit too shiny on the swords? Looks like fruit punch or something.

- Quality levels are kinda confusing. Quality in general is difficult to quantify, visually-- masterworks go undecorated in-game, as often as not. I dunno you can effectively depict that on a pixel-by-pixel scale.

[Zesty]

I don't think the contaminants is useful information, unless it has combat relevancy. Poisoned weapons would be good info to have and it'll presumably be easier to poison weapons in the future.

The quality differences are very nice to look at and you can still tell the material easily. When the battlefield is littered with copper, iron, bronze, and steel items, it's important to be able to distinguish by the material and I think you have a subtle enough difference in quality that it won't get in the way of that. Contaminants would make that more... busy, I guess?

Poisoned Weapon Attempts. Not skilled at all as a pixel artist at all, just proof of concept.



You can still tell it's steel at a glance. Clear green poison sheen on half. Quality/wear level won't get in the way of that.

I don't know how you solve the problem of quality levels looking visually distinct without adding a visual style that would only really fit for "Decorated" objects. Quality, Wear, Material, and Contaminant (as long as it matters for combat effectiveness) are important pieces of information that would be nice to not have to fiddle in menus to see. As much as I'd hate to say it, sacrificing a visual look for quality may be for the best. But it'd be cool if there was still a "decorated" and "artifact" sprite even if you can't get a unique sprite for the 6 other levels of quality.

[voliol]

The question is how the game should discern between important and nonimportant contaminants. Venoms should be visible, and I’m pretty sure people want blood to be as well, for the gorn eye-candy. I suggest solving it with a material definition token: something like ”IMPORTANT_CONTAMINANT”. Contaminants with it (poison, blood, ichor) show up on items, and contaminants without it (vomit, water, mud) don’t.

As for artifacts, I assume individual graphics for them is low-priority. Using these sprites but using secondary material colors for the details (so you don’t get a gold-encrusted silver-encrusted item) should suffice for a rich experience. Especially if the other quality level sprites don’t make it in, then flashy 2-color artifacts will be easily recognizable as such. Of course, this implies creating an artifact sprite for all other items, which may be above what’s planned.

[Egan_BW]

I'm of the opinion that things shouldn't look different from how they are if possible; an unadorned steel sword made by an amatuer doesn't really look different from an unadorned steel sword made by an expert, at least not at this level of detail. There are separate systems for decorating items and for item quality, so higher quality items aren't ones which are prettier, per se, just better at performing their function. In the case of weapons and armor, serving on the battlefield and not falling apart.

This comes from my fundamental assumption that it's more important that the graphics show what things actually look like rather than try to get across gameplay information. Nobody's going to convince me otherwise of this, and likewise I won't try to convince anybody who disagrees.

[Zesty]

and I respectfully disagree, but do think some pretty things to look at is nice as well. The less we fiddle with menus during play to get our information, the better. But that doesn't mean everything has to be purely functional.

[Cruxador]

Wear, contaminants and quality level.



We are currently discussing if any of these would make sense ingame. It's a little bit of extra work doing this for every item and the final sprite might be less readable. Especially if three states mix.

This mock-up shows a sword and a breastplate with 0%, 25%, 50% and 75% wear (100% and the item is destroyed); as well as each quality level and four contaminants to test, vomit, blood, water and mud.

At the bottom you can find a few example with a mix of two or three states.

Please let me know what you think about it.

They look great. I share the concern about too much work but if you reckon it's reasonable, it would be cool to be able to see those details. Support for non-red blood might be another step, but it would be cool if the four contaminate masks could take any four different contaminants with color sourced from the material. Might be a bit of a niche ask, but everything coated in blue blood would be tremendously kino. That kind of setup means you could also have less in other cases; limit the full complement to weapons and armor, while mitigating the added work on other things.

You absolutely can actually adorn any item with gold in vanilla using a workshop.

I know what he means. The visual adornment doesn't fit the decorations on the item. On the other hand, it's a fairly universal way to show value improvement: Add a ton of gold/gem nicknacks.

In principle, I agree; the graphics should align to what's actually there in every case. But that's not very practical to do for items, both because of pixel count and because of the extreme number of potential variations, either one of which could put the practical kibosh on such a plan by itself. I think the embellishments in your sprites are non-specific enough that the conflict isn't a big deal.

I don't think the contaminants is useful information, unless it has combat relevancy. Poisoned weapons would be good info to have and it'll presumably be easier to poison weapons in the future.

I don't agree with the premise here. It's not just about showing information. If that was the case, a logographic aesthetic would be preferable, but the plan with the Kitfox release is to move away from the ASCII paradigm in favor of aesthetic.

I'm of the opinion that things shouldn't look different from how they are if possible; an unadorned steel sword made by an amatuer doesn't really look different from an unadorned steel sword made by an expert, at least not at this level of detail. There are separate systems for decorating items and for item quality, so higher quality items aren't ones which are prettier, per se, just better at performing their function. In the case of weapons and armor, serving on the battlefield and not falling apart.

This comes from my fundamental assumption that it's more important that the graphics show what things actually look like rather than try to get across gameplay information. Nobody's going to convince me otherwise of this, and likewise I won't try to convince anybody who disagrees.

I agree in principle, but since I don't think it's reasonable to show decoration accurately in-game, taking into account the cost (in artist time) to benefit ratio. Dwarf Fortress supports a ton of decoration and it's just not reasonable to expect a sprite to be made for rings of hanging onyx and a bird bone image of three dwarves standing around a carp. The carp is laughing. That being the case, why not use the visual variation to show something else? It's not like high quality items wouldn't be decorated necessarily, after all, and the sprite has to be based on either a decorated or undecorated item at some point.

One "compromise" which I think would be best of both worlds would be to make the increasing levels of fanciness correspond to value (or deviation thereof compared to the base item before considering quality and decoration modifiers) instead of quality directly. That way, it's as accurate as we can reasonably get while still being very functional. Of course, you need to loo[k] at the item to see it properly but that's always the case.

[[HYBRID BEING]]

Wear, contaminants and quality level.



We are currently discussing if any of these would make sense ingame. It's a little bit of extra work doing this for every item and the final sprite might be less readable. Especially if three states mix.

This mock-up shows a sword and a breastplate with 0%, 25%, 50% and 75% wear (100% and the item is destroyed); as well as each quality level and four contaminants to test, vomit, blood, water and mud.

At the bottom you can find a few example with a mix of two or three states.

Please let me know what you think about it.

Awesome, but maybe it would be better to reduce the number of sprites? For example, leave only two wear variations - 100% and 50% (or maybe even 75%), and leave out every other quality grade (which one it is, btw - core or total quality?). I think that would make difference more striking.

I agree that items shouldn't look like they are decorated with gold and jewels with they are just of a higher quality. It would look good for decorated items and artifacts, though. Additionally, artifacts could have an "aura" of sorts, as a visual cue (although, I'm not sure if it will clash with magic in future).

BTW, I don't think that tying sprites to value is a good idea, because it would make high quality items look no different from highly decorated ones.

Alternatively (or maybe additionally?), some kind of a health bar could be used to indicate wear, and something like medals in the corners - quality (like chevrons show veterancy in some RTS games (: ).

And what about other contaminants? Things could get really messy when there are a lot of them

[Pillbo]

Please let me know what you think about it.

I love it. I think it will add visual distinction between creatures and I don't think it's too hard to read. Like the quality levels too.

[Schmaven]

The quality, contaminants, and wear levels look great - adding some nice character to the warriors like this would be really cool. 

[Starver]

I was wondering if a "*bling* glow"/masked-halo overlay would work better for... well, either quality or value, whatever is thought important. Or Artefacts only?  Only on isolated[1] representations, if it helps.

I know that other games give something like a brownish (bronze/basic), white/tint-of-blue (silver/good), yellowy (gold/excellent), tint-of-blue/white (platinum?/epic?)... whatever... "quality/tier" indicator, sometimes as an item-glow, sometimes as tile-border[2]. Those that don't just render the object (major areas of its wash) in that key colour, but of course that's reserved for actual material. It's not exactly subtle, and I forget if there's any other use of a Glow already demonstrated elsewhere for something else.  We're not likely to get radioactive contamination needing visualising anytime soon, are we?

I do return to my original comment of what you did being beautiful. If those can be usefully used[3] I'd still be happy. (Though I also admit I saw nothing different between 0% and 25% damage of armour.)


[1] i.e. not worn, so standalone infographic definitely. In a stock/beneath-interrogative-cursor/tradescreen list (as applicable), too. Whether whilst on the terrain floor.. depends on compatibility with other effects.
[2] Perhaps another suggestion for the footnote-1 'standalone' representation?
[3] Other comments about decorations not being suitably decorative... well, if it was modification-quality thennin lieu of reliable "menacing spikes" at that scale, it'd reasonably fit. And coexist with a base-quality glow for indication, perhaps?

[voliol]

For the completeness of this thread, here's the picture of all weapons Meph posted on reddit:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Other than having all weapons, instead of just short swords, superior and exceptional weapon have green respectively purple gems, and artifacts have a yellow glow. Masterwork training weapons have a certain swagger to them.

[Starver]

Ah, though I'd not (that I recall) seen this particular example (set), maybe that's why I was wondering if I'd actually seen the glow already.

If this is still current, then as you were and ignore that part of my last post.

[ror6ax]

A suggestion for ease of identification of lower-grade weapons.

[Shonai_Dweller]

A suggestion for ease of identification of lower-grade weapons.

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