RPG Enemy Project
Hello everyone,
If you've spent any time on the IRC, or watched the gallery over the years, or looked at about a half of my submissions, you probably know that I've been working on a cumulative set of static, in-battle, CC-By-licensed RPG enemy sprites for quite some time now. If you didn't know that, well, hah! I finally got you! You evaded my persistent talking about it until now, but no longer!
The project recently hit a high note with the collaborative dragon set (here: http://opengameart.org/content/rpg-enemies-11-dragons). While in the past I've had fun releasing bits at a time without too much buildup, or with only a bit of IRC discussion, I think the set is at the point where it might benefit from a bit more centralization. Hence this thread, which I hope will provide a bit more structure.
One thing in particular that the set needs is good recolors.
This is kind of a necessary feature for a lot of games, which will get 3x the value out of monsters by reusing them with palette swaps (also for tradition's sake, and because they're pretty fun to do). I am hoping there will be something like two alternate palettes for each monster.
The set is very much open to contributions from anyone. Pieces might be edited for compatibility if necessary, but there's a fair amount of stylistic flexibility. The biggest requirement is that they must be CC-By compatible--while CC-By does have some issues, consistency in licensing is paramount to usability. If and when a better option comes along, I'll do my best to get the entire set ported over.
Concept art is great too, and very useful. Feel free to link appropriately-licensed concepts that you would like adapted. Requests in general are also welcome, though I can't make any guarantees.
So, currently the set contains 67 enemies, representing contributions from 9 artists.
See who did what! http://i.imgur.com/s7dXXoX.png
One last thing: the set could use a name, and I don't have any ideas ATM. Please post any good ideas for that.
nice.
I noticed the effort but never noticed it had been this many. For the name: pixnemies?
WOW o.O This is awesome! Having all these together like this with the graphical credit's seriously makes my job a lot easier getting these mobs in game. I thought I knew every single one of your RPG enemies but looking through all 66 somehow I've managed to overlook a couple, until now.
I'll look into doing some recolorations as I agree that it's necessary to have variety of the same monster. First one that comes to mind is the lone green slime. There needs to be a blue and red slime to complete the varieties for that monster species.
This might sound odd but in the old Dusk game there was an "icedemon" with blue skin instead of red. I'm thinking the blue skin colors of the gargoyle right above your demon sprite (in the image above) might make for a icedemon, or maybe the colors in your icegolem.
As for the name umm... Static RPG Enemies (high color count) or RPG Enemies: Static (high detail) those examples are to the point. Can't think of anything too cleaver ATM either...
http://duskrpg.blogspot.com/
This is the 2D side-RPG-enemies most awesome thread in the world. Hurray!
they get along nicely under a 16-color palette
http://i.imgur.com/SoceQZi.png
Neat stuff. Some of them could use a bit of cleanup, but overall the effect is quite well done.
Hmm, I wonder if this set could be evenually expanded to cover the whole Nethack monster list. If so, I'd be quite happy to compile them into a (large but very nice) Nethack tileset. Some of the larger monsters might have a little trouble fitting, but whatever.
Also, if you are ever running out of ideas for what to make next, I seriously recommend looking at the Nethack monster list. It's a bit sparse on graphics (duh), but it's quite diverse in flavor.
@pennomi nice suggestion.
Even if he just does all the natural creatures (the felines, the cocktraices and the canines) that would be a big help. It's probably there in OGA but making them in a single style would make it nice, cohesive for game devs.
Thanks for the comments, guys!
First thing: I noticed I'd forgotten this guy: http://opengameart.org/content/3-form-rpg-boss-harlequin-epicycle I added it to the full sheet, haven't put it into the credit file yet (it's just by me, so that's simple).
I appreciate the name suggestions, but they seem a bit on-point, as it were. Better than what I'm using now, but not quite what I'm after yet.
@ Pennomi: that is a good idea, but a very large monster list. I'm open to aiming some work in that direction, but it would help to know which ones are needed as fully new critters (as it seems the number could be cut down quite a bit by doing basic recolors for many of the variations, and some bases are already covered).
By the way, in terms of future plans, generally there are three things I'm hoping to work on.
1) a set of robots/mech things, in the tradition of games like FF6. So far there is Blarumyrran's robot, and the robot and turret I made based on it. I also have a half-finished mech kicking around.
2) insects. Everyone likes spiders, beetles, etc.
3) humans. So far the only true human we have is Blarumyrran's wizard. We could use a few more.
People's interest will kind of determine which way I go. I've already got the robots started, so I'm leaning that way for now, but that's not set in stone.
@Redshirke http://opengameart.org/content/3-form-rpg-boss-harlequin-epicycle%C2%A0 leads to nowhere :( I get a page not found when I link to that page.
You know what I shared, natural creatures (that includes humans too :D ) .
Found the problem. The link is correct, but the auto-hotlink thing added a space at the end for some reason. It should be fixed now.
:) Yep, the Nethack list is pretty huge. On the other hand, it does really cover its bases...
The most obvious things from the Nethack list I would want to see:
Fantasy races/classes: Hobbit, dwarf, gnome, elf. Thief, wizard, knight, etc.
Monsters: Various ghosts, various elementals, minoutaur, lich, mummy, snake, rat, bat. My guess is that some of these could be collected from elsewhere on OGA?
Either way, it's already an excellent set! Keep up the good work!
@Pennomi: While it would be possible to assemble a lot of those bits by scavenging from here and there, I've been pretty good about finding anything that's compatible to this style, and it should already be here. No need to have really severe stylistic mixing if it can be avoided. The real point of work here aside from the drawing is going through the list and deciding which monsters can be represented by recolors of each other, and once that's done, which ones can't already be covered by what's already in the set. While I'd be happy to have a go at chipping away at a list like that once it's made, I'd rather not also have to spend the time generating the list. The ones you've mentioned in your post are a good start, but more specificity will help quite a bit.
@Redshrike: Yeah, I did think about making a list. Then partway through I realized that it would take a LONG TIME. But since you're interested in a comprehensive list (and I'm not really an artist), I think I'll go ahead and itemize everything that IS done and COULD BE done.
Be back in a few hours! :)
Here's the red and blue slimes I said I'd do and I liked this dragon of yours so much I made a red and blue recolouration of it also :)
http://duskrpg.blogspot.com/
Thanks, and nice work! I'll add them to the main sheet once I get back to my computer.
I love theses and I'd love to do some recolours but there's no global palette (I can't even losslessly index the whole set together) and there no comon material ramps which makes it difficult. I might do some dirty hue-shift recolours but that'll only add even more colours to the problem.
Red warrior needs caffeine badly.
Yeah, I have the feeling recolors will have to be done one by one, probably with hue shifting. Which is kind of a pain, but there you have it.
Here's the palette I came up with to do those recolours. It was a little bit of a pain but I had fun. The slime has 12 colours! It was actually pretty easy but as always with pixel art, requires decent amount of time. I made up my own technique to get the colours but my method might be called "hue shifting". I'm still a newbie at this kind of art so I don't know all these terms yet.
http://duskrpg.blogspot.com/
Got a bit carried away trying to cull and unify the palette. Will try again from scratch aiming for 64.
Red warrior needs caffeine badly.
Cool! It's an interesting effect; while I generally prefer each with its individual palette, the globalization does have some benefits. Your set inspired me to have a go at it myself (with a bit of help from IRfanview, and a bit of hand tweaking).
http://i.imgur.com/mjj6k9p.png
Some more recolorations. It's hard to come up with an individual palette for each monster but I love lots of colors!
http://duskrpg.blogspot.com/
If you guys do recolors why not add a little texture ? Heres a random one:
@Mumu Hey I love that, thanks a lot and more please! I'm not in the practise of adding texture like that. I like your colours but thought I should point out the fact that you essentially doubled the number of colours in that sprite. Which is awesome, but when I do recolours I'm thinking of names to call them in Dusk so I know the re-colouration makes sense as a new usable asset. I'd call the original by Redshrike (elderly rat king) mine is (young rat king) and yours is the (filthy rat king).
Some more simple re-colourations.
http://duskrpg.blogspot.com/
Hare are some head swaps ...
More Ice mobs!
Ice demon, ancient ice dragon, and another ice dragon.
http://duskrpg.blogspot.com/
Hey guys,
Thanks for all the awesome recolors. Sorry for being slow to respond here; it's been a busy week.
@Zabin: I like the range of hues. some of them might be a bit too saturated, and maybe "flat" (that is, mostly one hue value) but overall I think they look quite good.
@Mumu: hehe, those are great! I love the cannon-head especially.
I will get these added to the sheets on the first page when I get a chance. Unfortunately the computer with the original files is currently out of commission, though it should be fixable.
Hey Redshrike,
I've been pretty busy also.
Yeah I'm a little unhappy with a couple of my recolourations, I don't like my recolourations on MrBeasts dragon or both of Blarumyrran's dragons. The rest I think look pretty good. I'll try and improve the ones I'm unhappy with.
http://duskrpg.blogspot.com/
Hi again :-]
I wanted to show off here a little of what I've been poking at slowly over the summer.
I've learned some new things, got better at animations, mostly by looking into subpixel art.
I haven't been able to update my Dusk blog with anything new for a long time, or the chance to try and motivate the Java developer who's upgrading the old game to continue his poking at it, pretty much because this summer was pretty crazy (eventful) for me and here's what's happened in a nutshell this summer if your interested: Quit working for a mean guy, moved to a new house, changed source of income, no easy access to internet, riding my bike for exercise, swimming, enjoying the weather, met a nice girl.
Dusk has been in the back of my mind for 13 years and I will never quit talking about this neat old game until it see's the light again. Thanks to a couple guys it's seeing some light. I want to thank them and give them my apologies for my absence as of late. I enjoy the nice weather when I can so once winter is back I'll be inside playing on the computer again.
Anyways back on subject. I gave some of Redshrikes RPG enemies a simple 3 frame animation to bring them to life. I think a simple 3 frame animation like these are perfect for Dusk. I haven't showed anybody these yet and I'll email Notzed after this post to see what he thinks about it.
There's a couple 2 frame animations also: OGA's mascot Sara, Blarumyrran's Battle for Wesnoth serpent, and a cute doggie Bertram got from TMW forums and is using in his game Valyria Tear.
Since NotZed implemented animated tiles in Dusk the first thing he asked for was a water animation so I tinkered around and my attempts sucked. So I took Len's beach animation he made for his game Whispers of Avalon combined it with rhyging5's ocean animation for Battle for wesnoth, plus a little shallow-deep water I made and came up with this. There's some obvious flaws in it but I got it to the point it's not embarrasing to show off. It should be easy (1 day of work) to polish it up and fix most the flaws. All the art used for the water is licensed GPL or CCBYSA. I plan to contact all the artists of all the art you see in this gif preview and submit it to OGA when I can. (probally won't happen for a couple months from not having easy access to the internet.) My main hope is that rhyging5's will dual license his art with CCBYSA. If not, it'll just be in a seperate submission.
I'm being rushed and I've typed too much already, anyways I hope you guys enjoy seeing some new stuff I've been poking at ;)
-Zabin
http://duskrpg.blogspot.com/
Wow man, you've really been trucking on this! Those animations are a lot of fun--I hope that you'll put them up on OGA. And of course, I am looking forward to seeing what you do with the project as a whole.
Re: this forum topic in general. I have definitely let this project fall by the wayside in recent months. I've had a lot going on in terms of pixel work, etc, and kind of lost momentum. I am hoping to get back in the swing of things soonish, though.
Hi Zabin :)
Great to hear some from you. :D
And don't worry, the fact you met a girl is justifying alone your lack of activities, right? ;)
The animations look great, I do hope Redshrike and you will keep on with this.
Best regards,
Looking forward to any updates.
Hey everybody :-]
Nice to hear from you guys and yes these animations are fun to make and yes women are a great distraction :-P
Ok I haven't made any new animations but I did draw up an example map to show how I think it all matches style even though there is no color palette. Let me know what you guys think. Oh and I was trying to name these guys so if you have any suggestions for the ones I didn't name or the ones I did please help me name these guys! Peace!
http://duskrpg.blogspot.com/
Heya!
Nice example! I especially like the work done on water!
The monsters names are more than ok to me. ;)
I hope your distraction will keep distracting you (even if not too much). Life is so short, after all. ;)
Best regards,
The map is great but a little to crowded. What porogramd di you use to make it ?!?
I used Tiled to map that area and your right about it being too crowded. This was intended to show how the assets worked together and was not really meant to look like a scene in a game. All 67 of Redshrikes enemies are crammed in there as well as a couple other odd sprites off of the site.
What I wonder is if other people agree that even though there's probably thousands of colors and no global color palette, does it all work together? I think it does but that's just my opinion.
http://duskrpg.blogspot.com/