With most of the foundational art assets completed I’m shifted my focus on Dredmor toward producing content for the game. In particular I’m polishing the dungeon tilesets and creating new dungeon objects (as the game items have actually been finished for a long, long time).
Tilesets
Let me take a moment to explain how Dredmor tilesets work (and used to work, and how they will work). Here’s a cut from the first dungeon’s tileset:
For the Great Gaslamp Webpage Revival I’ve started drawing steampunk portraits of the crew of the good ship Gaslamp Games.
(click to view full size)
From left to right: Nicholas, deranged technologist/bootlegger; David (myself), foppish art-lord; Derek, internet-tube engineer; and Daniel, merchant of ludology and man of science.
This wouldn’t be Gaslamp if we didn’t completely redo a major game system once a week.
And this wouldn’t be the ongoing Dungeons of Dredmor beta if we didn’t completely redo between three and five major game systems every week!
Let’s talk about UI redesign.
Here’s the main game UI in Dredmor 0.4:
(Click on any of these images to view at full size.)
Not so bad, right? Rather archaic and clunky, perhaps. But the clunky UI has what we might call character.
We’ve got a little design problem in Dredmor that Daniel has named “fighting arrows”. See the little arrow at the bottom of the screenshot on the left? It points to a blobby-monster just poking its little eyes out from behind a wall that otherwise covers it up. The arrow is a helper icon to make sure you notice that there’s a monster.
No, this is not elegant. We’ve also got issues with doors being difficult to see behind walls. Well then, how do games deal with the problem of stuff hiding behind walls?
One solution which came up was that of Zelda: A Link to the Past — they made it so that there is no ‘behind’ walls. See the right screenshot: everything has a rather subjective take on perspective. The player sees the face of all of the walls, no matter what direction they face! One column is seen from the front, another is seen from the right, and there is even some weird overlapping balcony thing. The world of A Link to the Past has a take on perspective that would make Escher proud, and the game manages to get away with it.
Could we?
A spur of the moment call to a few rushed, jammed-together Gaslamp meeting-type things saw me with a lot of time to blow on the ferry from Vancouver to Victoria, so please enjoy the fruit of my sketch pad:
Top: Sword skill icons. Bottom: “Mystic Mines” tileset revision & dungeon objects.
Not pictured: List of weapons rejected from Dredmor. All credit to Nicholas for the Dwarven Panini Press. The downside is that I might have to actually draw an icon for it now.
It’s been a fairly brutal crunch of art-making for the Dredmor beta, so pardon me if I part with the greatest part of my usual verbosity [edit: Who am I kidding, I’m going to ramble on and on for the fun of it].
I knew it was serious when I started being able to walk into the Tim Horton’s down the block and they knew my order — extra large coffee, black — without me having to say anything.
Part of the polish I’ve been wrapping up to make Dredmor presentable is the Very Important title screen art. First impressions are important; the opening screen has to be /totally cool/ and show off the spirit of the game.
I present to you the evolution of the title screen painting and, in turn, my growth as an artist over the last year and a half.
Begin ye, my week of Dredmor crunching!
I shall drink the black liqueor of Yog-sothoth; yea, that odious brew which gives unlife to that-which-lived-not shall give me life that I may make all the art for which Dredmor thirsts in this week.
(We’re off to a good start, aren’t we? Imagine how crazy I’ll feel by the end of it.)
Anyway, I’ve been drawing some icons for our recently revised and renewed spell list. The art direction has changed: All spells will be drawn, like skills, at a larger size because bigger pictures are more fun to look at (though they still size down to 32×32 for use in the old spell slots). Some spells are new, some spells are old. Some are all new graphics, some are old graphics redrawn. See here:
My, I’ve got an awful lot of work to do. Sixty spells, thirty-one rogue skills, twenty-five warrior skills. And that’s not including the menu art, new and revised UI elements (hey, we have an experience bar now!), new and revised tilesets (including animated liquids), and uh, some more items, a few status icons, spell effects, random things … stuff … and things …
I’ve even got a great idea for a comic for the beta release written down somewhere; hope I can find time to draw it out.
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