Back when I started playing DF, I was new, and fresh, and VERY intimidated by the default Ascii graphics. Then, I discovered the Dystopian Rhetoric graphics pack that came with Guybrush Square 16x16 installed with it. And life was good.
The character set was brilliant, well made, obviously the product of hard work and forethought, and I got great use out of it, but over time, something began to bother me: My monitor was 1440x900, and these were the days before [GRID] and [FULLGRID] in the init file, so my DF window wasn't as big as it could have been.
I NEEDED to have my DF window fill the screen. It was driving, and driving me mad. So, I did some math, and discovered that a 18x18 tileset would fill my screen horizontally. So, I went to the wiki, and found THIS:
maus's 18x18 conversion of his 9x9 "Nostalgia" tileset. After some quick-copy-paste work from Guybrush_Square, I had a servicable tileset that filled my screen, but was still "Graphick-y" enough for the purposes of at-a-glance item recognition.
But then, the madness started. It all started when I thought, "Hey, I should make channels more obvious, so they aren't easy to confuse with periods on the ground". I did this. Then, it was touching up cut gems to make them sparkly. Then it was smoothing-out the scaled-up 9x9 font into a true 18x18 font, by hand. Redrawing the doors. Mussing with the ' , ` and . tiles to make them have a background of dots, while still being readable as punctuation. Making shrubs more obvious, while again, servicable as quote marks in text. Messing with > and < because I was too dumb to remember which-stair-was-which. Making traps stick out more. Making wave/sand tiles darker so that yellow and white sand didn't blind me.
Edit after edit. I change my dorfs because "only miners have picks, I need to make them more generic". I darkened all the ground tiles, and brightened up my dorfs, because I couldn't see rangers and marksdorfs outdoors, or recruits/wrestlers and miners/metalworkers indoors. I made my Zero into a coffin. I removed the "shirt" sprite from the "[" spot. I put a mask on my "_" character to better see channel designations (Thankyou Sphr, a brilliant idea, by the way.) I tilted my barrel on it's side. Then flipped it back. Then redrew it completely, but mostly the same. I made my "weight" symbol more recognizable as a palm tree, because I was on a tropical map, and the incongruity bothered me. Made my levers look a little more like "o's", and making "on/off" states more obvious. Adding markers to make the " { } " forbidden brackets more obvious. Making my smoothed floors prettier. I started studying the multitude of well-made 16x16 tilesets, and adapting good ideas into my own.
But that wasn't enough for me. It became a matter of pride. I started editing tiles, just to be able to honestly say they were "mine". Changing tiles that were otherwise perfectly functional. Redid all my trees for no reason. There were stretches where I'd sit down to play DF, notice something I hadn't changed yet, and close down, open up paint, and spend the next hour tweaking stuff. Sometimes I'd delete a tile, and end up redrawing it almost the same, for lack of ideas.
But dangit, it was MINE, and I was PROUD. Heck, I changed my Forum Avatar into my "Guard" tile. (Though later, my dorfs lost weight.)
So, here it is:
I present it for the purpose of you guys telling me what is horrifically wrong with it. Even though the introduction of grid-size changing has made my work somewhat irrelevant to the original purpose it fulfilled, I figured I'd still toss this out there, because it's finally in a state that I feel I can take a little pride in.
Primary Goals are:
> A compromise between "graphicality" and text-readability that doesn't inhibit either excessively.
> An attempt to create a "Graphic Heavy" tileset for those who prefer/can-use 18x18 tiles. A sort of "paralell" the the standard set by Guybrush in the 16x16 realm.
So, uh, are there any glaring problems? Things you especially like maybe? I dunno, popcorn?
Special thanks to:
maus for providing the base font to work from. While every (non-blank) tile on the sheet has been modified to SOME extent, most of the plain-text is just a sharpened/enlarged version of the 9x9 font he put on the wiki.
Guybrush, for the characterset I started the game on, and lots of inspiration. A comparison to his 16x16 tileset shows a strong connection in theme and influence. Also, despite my obsessiveness, I think HIS axe is still on my weapon rack.
Dystopian Rhetoric, for the graphic set that helped make the game sane for my n00bie self. While I no longer use a graphics set, due to there being no 18x18 one that I'm aware of, I owe a debt to this guy, since without his help in my introductory phases, I may never have come to enjoy the game as I do.
Klein for his stairway Idea, which I found charming, and highly effective.
Sphr for the idea to add a mask to the "_" sprite to make channel designations more obvious for what they were, and for the novel idea of leaving punctuation intact on a dotted background, for a compromise in readability in both the play and text fields. (Though I've seen others use this method as well, it was in examining Sphr's set that it first dawned on me that I'd like to copy it.)
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Topic: Critiquing my 18x18 Tileset (Read 1284 times)