For what I mean about both face and fitting to reflect gender,
this is an example that comes to mind. Not brilliantly obvious (but best illustration I could immediately find) but when collecting equipable items[1] you get armours (or clothing) that you can give to any character, mix-and-match with weapon/tool of your choice (and ring and amulet and 'special' items if/when you have them.
The icon for them is "male" body shape (plump and hearty) but placed on the default female body-shape (more svelt) then it
barely changeds in basic design[2] but conforms to the body it applies to. (No armour or worker-uniform gives the "peasant clothes" default, IIRC, rather than underthings. Apart from the cartoonish sexual dimorphism of their cartoon imagery, you can't say they haven't tried to be inclusive. They even feature mutiple skin-colours and hair-styles (and facial hair for males) on a pretty random basis[3].
But that's mostly done with vector-graphics (and vector components that are anchored on a vector wireframe 'skeleton' to walk around the castle, deal with "room problems" and rush into battle, if I'm any judge) where the final result, according to pinch-zoomed level, is quite a lot higher-res than the Steam sprites. And a lot less varying in the minutiae of mix'n'match equipable items (as sets). Being vectorised, the flood-filled skin-tones are trivial, and a female with long pigtails (e.g.) just doesn't render them when the headgear is incompatible (see "Leah" as represented as both Archer and Mage on that link, and if given the platemail from James, her equivalent visor - in the same pointy-bascinet style but of a shape rescaled to fit a female head - leaves no part of her 'normal' imagery unreplaced).
Compared with the ragdoll "Bill"s (including the female ones) in Hill Climb Racing 2, where legs, torso, head, hat and any "equippable item" (the latter two optional) can be mix'n'matched at whim, but no attempt is made to 'blend' the components, drawn to be used as a set of three to five 'theme' items[4], such that you can have a dark-skinned female head on a 'naked' male torso (the "Naked" set actually gives him legs with boxer-shorts) that further clashes with zombie-flesh legs (if that can be seen beneath the ripped trousers that I'm sure are part of the legs). If the head has pigtails/punk-mohican or is a "giant squidhead" and you also equip a hat (which might be a pair of glasses or other headware) then there's also no designed-in adjustment to head or 'hat' to make them not technically look wierd where they mis-mesh and the hat-overlay doesn't fit the head it 'covers'. (Quiff emerging from backward baseball cap's forward end is ok-ish, any hair/headstyle protuding from the space-helmet in various places just looks wrong.) Don't worry about that, though, as the "hat" often comes off in a race (sometimes I did it deliberately, scraping it away by a careful mid-flight rotation on a chosen bit of track, being careful not to hit the head and DNF the race).
...ANYway, neither of these two examples really apply to DF (this side of a vectorised rewrite, which I've never seen mentioned as being on the cards) and the pixel-restraints these 32x32 tiles gives (give or take the odd over-tile exception) gives little scope for fine-tuning and requires hand-finished art (e.g. of greaves of various materials and core racial bodyplans) to cover each eventuality rather than 'mere' procedural adjustment (development time or in-game) to cater for the variety of options involved.
I'm not sure I'd consider further doubling(ish) the workload to genderise every element that might be genderised a good use of my time, if for some strange reason I was drafted to the Mephday team to work on the base sprites and add-ons. I'd rather go with a male/female(/neutered/intersex/whatever-as-required) symbol as ephemeral tile-decoration. I know some character-traits (dead, undead, etc) are being put into 'versions of a character' graphics as distinct resources, and am unsure if I've ever known how they planned to indicate hunger/thirst/etc as applying to them, so I don't know if 'floating tags' is the way they intend to go (next thing: health status bar, eh?
) and so these are just my rambling musings. As usual.
[1] It being one of
those Reward Chest games, though up until the point I quit it due to crashing and unplayability on my old tablet I did quite well without ever
buying chests/etc, albeit spending far too much time grinding in-game tasks.
[2] Ok, so the female "Tank" armours tended to go to for "Madonna bra" cones, in platemail versions, but it wasn't the "Shield Maiden who is barely wearing more than a plate-mail bikini" trope, or even pasties and g-string, where the comfort
and protection can only be minimal to the extreme. Mostly it was tastefully done, if you accept that all the males have beerguts and all the females are models.
[3] I never did notice if children, begat through pairing dwellers and unequipable by anything in their basic child-form until suddenly attaining adult status and size broke or maintained racial modifiers... game limits to population (and throttles to "retry" a child even if the option to "exile" a cast-member was taken, to make room for one prior to the next castle-upgrade) meant that I never bothered to make note of this game-play irrelevent feature.
[4] Purely aesthetic, or otherwise, with as little effect on a race as the paintjob/wheels chsen for a given vehicle, the performance of which just depends upon the vehicle chosen, 'invisible' performance upgrades and up to three 'add on' items (with their own invisible upgrade system, beyond their presence as bolt-ons).
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Topic: Steam/Itch.io tileset - Mayday/Ironhand - Discussion and Suggestions (Read 460081 times)