LPC Enemies?
I noticed there is no concept of LPC enemy sprite sheets yet. Enemies are typically drawn as large or much larger than battler sprites in games. Smaller ones for when there are multiple enemies on the screen, and larger ones for bosses. Unfortunately, most (but certainly not all) of the pixel art enemies I see on OpenGameArt.org are much smaller than the LPC sprites, and the "bosses" look puny compared with them. We would need to somehow have standards for enemy sprites while not restricting their size too much. They need to be "in scale" with LPC sprites.
For example in RPG Maker MZ, battler sprites are typically 32x48 while enemies range from 64px to 384px in both width and height and are often of odd sizes.
Our enemies could be animated! But they typically require only one or two attack animations, and the types of attacks can be varied. A combat idle animation, a spellcast animation, taking damage animation, and death animations would also be nice. I'd also like to see a standard four direction walk animation for those who want to have their enemies wander around their maps.
Another open question is whether enemies should be front view or side view (facing right, typically). We could have both, but that is double the work for artists.
Enemies typically do not need clothes / equipment. Variations on an enemy, however are common. Usually recolors, higher strength versions, different sizes, etc.
While we could use the character generator, there are some downsides. First, most of the animations provided are unnecessary. Second, enemies often have special attacks. Third, enemies would be needlessly restricted to the same size as the battlers. Fourth, they would generally be humanoid in shape.
I think there is a concept for enemy sprite sheets, but it may not be a very robust concept. The LPC enemies generally do not need any equipment or clothes, as Guarav says, so they are generally simple animations + North,South,East,West facing frames. To illustrate Guarav's point: Non-humanoid LPC monsters
A few other enemy spritesets are more involved, such as William's wolf but, as Guarav says, most of the more complex enemies are humanoid, like a goblin or minotaur which are modifications of the LPC character base. Not a bad thing, but also not the kind of enemy that adds a lot of diversity to the foe list.
I don't have very good answers to these questions, but I am very interested in the discussion:
SpellcastingSpecial Attack,--Medicine StormI was thinking at first we let some people submit some stuff and then deciding whether a "character generator" is even the right thing for enemies.
Right now, there aren't even standards for basic things like borders and padding, and which animations are placed where in the image or how many frames per animation. This makes it hard to use varied monsters in a game. We have to move things around in an image editor. We could add a whole database to tell us this stuff for each image, but that is a lot of work, and leads to inconsistent capabilities with each monster. So what the actual standards are is less important than that there are standards.
As far as dimension standards go, yes we don't want to be restricitve. But I'd really like to see some bigger enemies! William's wolf for example is what I'm currently planning to use for my LPC demo game. But I wish it was even larger.
Yes for movement we definitely want at least 4 directions. For battle, one or two directions might make sense. Front view, side view, or both? Or do we really want all 4 directions so that enemies can directly battle in any direction right on the map? The more directions, the more animations, the more work.
But I want to hear what the community thinks, especially the artists, not to impose anything.
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In terms of Animations:
- Moving
Obviously this is pretty standard.
- Idle
Not really necessary for the most part, but it could be a simple bob.
- Taking Damage
Hard to say. Taking damage might be useful, but it can be reflected with a red overlay or something like that as well. We don't necessarily need a "I took a hit" animation.
- Death/defeat
Similarly, not really necessary for enemies. Typically enemies just "fade away" when being defeated. This is not necessary and completedly optional.
- Basic Attack
- Spellcasting Special Attack
At least Basic Attack is obvious. A special attack isn't really all that necessary.
- Optional Auxiliry Action (just a slot for an additional attack or atypical feature. many monsters won't use this slot but it's available if needed)
I'd argue this would be the "Special Attack". Not sure what else would fit this category.
4-directional attacks would be nice, but isn't necessary.
I think overall, people just haven't been as interested in making enemies. Personally its the same for me. I haven't even theorized much on how much non-human enemies I would want anyway, but it is something I need to explore more.
Its kinda hard to set a standard with an open format. The best thing to do is to probably commission a few extra things. See if anyone is interested in taking commissions for LPC style enemies and making them larger.
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Talking to @JaidynReiman, he feels that making enemies might be more difficult than making regular characters becuase we are not building on a common base. Do artists here agree?
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Yeah that's basically my thought. And there's no realistic solution to that problem. Because there's no way to make a "base" you can build off of, you need to create a lot more stuff from scratch to create a variety of unique enemies.
Sure, you can create new Wolf variations, but its hard to make something brand new out of that. Maybe something like a Cerberus or Hellhound could be a wolf variant, though. So there are ways to make some potential varieties from existing assets, but you can't make a slime from a wolf. Or a proper minotaur. (Best bet for a Minotaur right now is using the Minotaur head on character sprites.)
Using character sprites for Goblins and Orcs helps to reduce the requirements a bit, but then they're a lot smaller than a common "enemy" sprite you might see in other games. Creating a larger one effectively requires you to, again, redraw it from scratch.
And that's not even delving into big ones like dragons or other such things.
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The character base conventions are useful because the assets are modular and can be combined in interesting ways. That’s not the case for the current enemies/monsters. You could establish some very simple conventions, like the order the animations and directions (N/E/S/W) should appear but beyond that…
I think the humanoid monsters are basically solved. You can draw new heads easily and place using lpctools (soon to all the new frames too once Jaidyn figures out the offsets). Tails, wings, etc. can be placed similarly. New body types that still have the same basic proportions (and thus can use the same weapons, accessories, etc.) are conceivable (e.g. leshen, rock elemental, etc.).
I could imagine making some modular monster assets! You could have body shapes (e.g. canine, dragon, equine, etc.), different types of heads, feet/hoofs, wings, etc. But it would probably require some thought and experimentation to figure out what could be readily combined. But might be neat to try.
Some other more complicated but not quite humanoid LPC-style enemies (in addition to the wolf):
https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-imp-2
https://opengameart.org/content/flying-dragon-rework
https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-golem
Adaptable to LPC style:
https://opengameart.org/content/plant-and-mushroom-enemies-charset-and-battlers
https://opengameart.org/content/slime-monster-pixel-art-for-top-down-rpg
https://opengameart.org/content/pixel-predator-plant-mob-character