All posts tagged with "art"

Dredmor Skill Icons

January 28, 2011 by David Baumgart

I’ve just finished the latest round of revisions to the entire pile of spell icons. This is just one task which is part of the massive spell overhaul we’re doing for Dredmor’s beta 0.92 (when I’m not getting distracted drawing the disembodied heads of founding members of Gaslamp Games).

Man, there are a lot of these buggers, but they do get easier (and better) every time I redraw them. Telling you anything about them would ruin the fun*, so I’ve just thrown together a collection of some of my favorite spell and skill icons for your enjoyment:

Still have to draw animated effects for most of these. Urrgh.

* whereas “the fun” refers to how much fun I have as people try to guess what the hell some of these skills do.

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What is a Warrior to do?

December 1, 2010 by David Baumgart

Combat RPGs don’t traditionally offer much active choice to a warrior character: Do you attack? Do you not attack?

Maybe you get to quaff (but never “drink”) a potion every so often. A player’s agency comes more from the set-up to combat through having a much more equipment-driven character than, say, a wizard. It is compelling to collect and use equipment, but  a warrior really ought to have something to do in combat aside from clicking “attack”.

But this is a known problem, and it has been dealt before, and cleverly.

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Design Dialog

October 13, 2010 by David Baumgart

I’ve long since learned that it’s far better to present Nicholas with a fait accompli which he finds amusing to implement rather than a rational argument for a feature. Allow me to demonstrate.

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Why Do a Job Once When You Can Do It Eight Times in Only Eight Times the Time?

October 4, 2010 by David Baumgart

Quiet? Only outwardly. Our Dear Leader saw fit to allow ye players to select your own resolution rather than be limited to a proper and traditional 800×600 screen. Oh, we have such things in store. You will be able to descend far deeper into the Dungeons of Dredmor than ever imagined previously!

Now come with me and perform a cheap analogue of descending into the dungeon by scrolling down past this large image which is a crop of the title screen painting, showing how I’m expanding it to fit higher resolutions!

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Dredmor Comics: The Curse, page 1

August 9, 2010 by David Baumgart

Okay, done. With page one of five. (This is going to take longer than I expected.)

This is a comic I’m drawing to promote Dungeons of Dredmor which has been written by the talented Mr. Vining, our lead programmer, and illustrated by myself. I’m going to do these as a series so, uh, stay tuned for more in the next … some period of time.

Click the image below to view the full first page.

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Pixelcraft: The Colors of Frogatto

July 29, 2010 by David Baumgart

For quite some time I’ve been intending to write about pixel art technique. Today I stumbled on a pixel-art platformer game called Frogatto & Friends which has inspired me to get on this because I was struck by the game’s lovely art. (I haven’t actually played the game yet, though it is available for free on PC/Mac/Linux, and the code, but not the assets, is open source.)

So let’s see if I can explain what’s going on with the pixels of Guido Bos and Richard Kettering (who it seems also lead the art for Battle For Wesnoth; neat).

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Video Games Podcasts I Listen To

July 23, 2010 by David Baumgart

Or: Why I listen to people talk about playing games instead of actually playing games.

Mostly.

I’m an artist, right? Right. I draw using my computer pretty much all the time. It’s what I do. Drawing (or ‘digital painting’ or ‘pixeling’ or whatever it is) doesn’t particularly engage the part of my brain that involves language unless I’m actually doing higher-level design. A lot of it is just painting away at something or pushing a lot of pixels. Oftentimes it’s not supremely engaging stuff like drawing lots and lots of bricks or painting lots and lots of clouds – all good and necessary things, yes, but the mind tends to wander. So I listen to stuff. Music works oftentimes, and the emotional content of the music often finds its way in to my art. Other times I want to listen to something I can think about, something relevant to what I’d like to be doing: game design.

I listen to internet audio shows about games. For some reason Apple has convinced us that these audio shows are to be called podcasts, and just as I eventually gave in to using the word “blog”, so too shall I adopt use of the word “podcast”.

These are the podcasts to which I continue to listen, with some of my thoughts.

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Against Pixel Art Formalism

July 15, 2010 by David Baumgart

[Begin faux-manifesto.]

Pixel art is for the pixels!

I don’t care for being formalistic about pixel art, of adhering to a limited palette or carefully anti-aliasing my lines by hand, of using all-or-nothing transparency (actually, I do the latter two more often than I’d like to admit). What matters is what I wish to do with the aesthetic of pixels – and what specifications I must meet for the graphics to work at all in the given platform. It is ridiculous to throw away perfectly good tools like brush effects, gradient tools, and overall image adjustments. Tedium is not artistically uplifting.

If the art is about pixels, it’s pixel art. It doesn’t matter how I make it.

I actually followed all the “rules” of pixel art to draw these. Oops. Then I used the adjust levels tool in Photoshop. Ha! I have overthrown the tyranny of aesthetic canon!

There! It’s not a manifesto unless you try to sound controversial in the first paragraph.

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