The mansion, this time in almost full be-sprited glory. Statues are crafted to look like they could be facing NW
or SE, though it needs some work. Cut gems have a sprite, but it needs more contrast. Armor stands also added. Real highlight are the doors. Because of the top-down design spec, I had to come up with something, and so these are mode to look like a four-way Gothic-arch style doorway from above. It gets the point across. These are copper doors; plain rock doors have no extra stripe in the middle and no rivets.
Just a screenie of how nice the outdoors looks in general; notice saplings all around; the [SAPLING_TILE], [DEAD_SAPLING_TILE], and [DEAD_SAPLING_COLOR] tags all work, by the way. Next test is the [BUSH_TILE] tag, which will give the wilds even more variance (and free the quotation marks)
Ground level. Things to notice here are the boulder sprite and the new bones sprite. After reassigning all the little critter tiles with silhouettes, I found that creature shells use the bones sprite
but use the creatures colors instead of the usual purple/green/gray for remains. This resulted in turtle shell remains surprisingly showing up with a brilliant green background color when I took this sprite out for a spin. So I flipped the rib-cage portion around and added a silhouette. Now shells are immediately recognizable in your rubbish pile, and actually
look like shell shards of the appropriate color. A happy accident.
On the noise issue: it has been said before that the noise is 'dirty' looking, and indeed it is.
However, it was the first thing I thought of when I saw the (Mayday?) style punctuation gravel backgrounds. I feel it gives the game a grittier feel and fills in the empty black space well. Furthermore, punctuation and spaces are about the only tiles with enough negative space for you to notice much difference at all, and that is most important since those are the fillers for the outdoors (as an be seen in screenie #2). Anything with a silhouette has the gravel removed so it doesn't screw up the effect, and most items are so big in their squares that only a few grains peek through.
It was a few pages ago, but I did mention I will release a 'retro' style version with no special characters, just the slight embossing effect to make it 'pop.' I guess I will add "no gravel" to that as well. It's all PS layers anyway.
Oh yeah, release name for this will be DwarfletterGothic, with the retro style one, obviously, DwarfletterRetro. If there is to be a non-square, smaller version as well, that would be DwarfletterClassic.
If ever I got to a graphics set too, it would include these tiles and be called either Arkham Graphic or ArcanagramGothic. Mmm, typography.
EDIT: Oh, forgot to mention the strange symbol used for traps...a long story. Part of my design spec was to not only provide a visually satisfying experience in Fortress and Adventure mode, but also one for the maps, particularly the world map. Since the empty triangle, the filled triangle, and '^' all are used for mountains, I had to make concessions. Thus the trap/mountain peak symbol is a fancified Dwarven rune reminiscent of the carrot, and the empty triangle is rune-esque as well. So on the map they look good/consistent.
Rationalization/BS: archaic Dwarven is a symbolic language, and the glyph for "large mountain" is the same as for "trap," since, as we all know, big mountains are
very dangerous... Mountains being the ancestral home of Dwarves, they label mountains on their maps with the ancient runes rather than just little peaks. It's like the Inuit: they have numerous words for snow, whereas we only have one, because the properties of snow are important to communicate for them. Dwarves need to know what
kind of mountain that is, not just where it is.
*end of fan-fic BS*
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Topic: What do you think ( a tileset )? (Read 8673 times)