Pixel artists

[lefnire]

Hey guys, been getting a lot of pixel artist chiming in with desire to contribute (which effing rocks! thanks guys!). I'm trying to figure out a way to process this (or decide on someone?), so I figured I'd start a discussion here.

There will definitely be need for more pixel art. I want it to as closely resemble our current setup (browserquest iconset) as possible. We'll need a female avatar, character customizations (tabards, pets, mounts, etc) that people purchase with tokens, custom weapons / armor, and way later down the pike we'll want custom iconsets for white-label (don't worry about that now).

If you want to contribute, read the bottom of this wiki, reply here with maybe a sample? Just so I know it's the "type" of work Habit wants before sending you on designing a lot of stuff, just to have the pull-request denied. Let's keep the convo rolling, if anyone has other suggestions for going about this.

[Pandoro]

@zakkain, I´m not really sure how it looks on the code part, but from sprite point of view that is correct. The body is split up into skin, hear, head, helmet, body, shield and sword. These are then put into one big css sprite and the parts that are needed are taken from there. So you pretty much got it right I guess :)

[lefnire]

@Pandoro will be coordinating with y'all sometime soon regarding who wants to do what, but for end-game weapons and armor - just for some inspiration check out the "Nexus Kingdom of Winds" library. It's not quite as low-rez as our game, but almost - and will give some end-game item inspiration. Here are the links, just click through the categories at the top (axes, bows, etc) to browse:

• Weapons
• Armor

[lefnire]

Pets in the works! Screenshot, branch

[lefnire]

Our most recent push is a @Shaners release, congratz my friend - your content is live! (And awesome!). Thanks so much for those pets, they're incredible. I granted you a bazillion tokens to test it out (level 4, and assuming you're "Shaners" in HabitRPG). Hit me up if anyone experiences issues.

My next steps are

• Get that lamb in
• Still pending notice on Grumpy Cat
• Get the mounts in (which may be difficult? Do we need new avatar body sprites on mounts, or can we do this with CSS?)

[Pandoro]

@lefnire regarding the mounts we will have to think a little. I think it should be possible to split the pets into foreground and background, but it might be somewhat problematic regarding the legs :-/

I'm worried a little about the fact that the pets might cover up most of the weapon though. For easiness, it would of course be by far easier to place the pet left to the player and the mount to the right of the player, but this would more be like just another pet :(

Let's brainstorm and discuss a little on that.

Also thank you for the great links! A lot of that might be challenging to reproduce, but there are certainly some really awesome things in there!

On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 8:43 AM, Tyler Renelle notifications@github.comwrote:

Our most recent push is a @Shaners https://github.com/Shaners release, congratz my friend - your content is live! (And awesome!). Thanks so much for those pets, they're incredible. I granted you a bazillion tokens to test it out (level 4, and assuming you're "Shaners" in HabitRPG). Hit me up if anyone experiences issues.

My next steps are

• Get that lamb in
• Still pending notice on Grumpy Cat

• Get the mounts in (which may be difficult? Do we need new avatar body sprites on mounts, or can we do this with CSS?)

  — Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/issues/107#issuecomment-13370836..

[caycefischer]

As far as the CSS aspect of this goes, I think we should offer the option to hide/show the mount in the main avatar "view". That way, we don't necessarily clutter up the header with complicated art, if the user wants to keep it simple. Eventually we can implement a proper "Profile" page, where you can see your full character and their mount, pet(s), etcetera in their "home base"

[StanLindsey]

Yeah, profiles are a confirmed thing we will work on eventually and so having the option to tweak your header image is a good one.

[lefnire]

Good advice guys. Toggleable it is then, Zack & Stan. @Pandoro anything immediate you'd like me to do? The "back left" position does kinda muck up the weapon, and cover the pet - any stop-gap position fix y'all can think of?

[Pandoro]

@lefnire :x Not right now, I've got my plate kind of full with some other stuff right now, so I'm not all that up to date on what is really going on with the mounts. Apart from that I don't have anything critical I can think of :x

On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 3:05 PM, Tyler Renelle notifications@github.comwrote:

Good advice guys. Toggleable it is then, Zack & Stan. @Pandorohttps://github.com/Pandoroanything immediate you'd like me to do? The "back left" position does kinda muck up the weapon, and cover the pet - any stop-gap position fix y'all can think of?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/issues/107#issuecomment-13381237..

[lefnire]

Not a problem, we'll figure stuff out when you're less busy, we're in a decent spot right now :)

[Pandoro]

Cool, I'd call our spot better than decent right now ;) I really want to dig into your suggested links! Arg, but I must resist ;)

On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 3:32 PM, Tyler Renelle notifications@github.comwrote:

Not a problem, we'll figure stuff out when you're less busy, we're in a decent spot right now :)

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/issues/107#issuecomment-13382233..

[lefnire]

Our own @Pandoro has developed some guidelines for submitting Pixel Art, check it out!

[ghost]

@Pandoro that is awesome

[Shaners]

Made some more variants plus 2 additional colours for the wolf , cotton candy pink and blue. Will submit a pull some time this week but busy with studying for a mid term and very important design meeting. Also tooling with ideas for a backer only mount, Ethereal Lion, and backer only pet, Dawn Phoenix.

[lefnire]

Yayyyy!

On Tuesday, February 12, 2013, Shane Lister wrote:

Made some more variants plus 2 additional colours for the wolf , cotton candy pink and blue. Will submit a pull some time this week but busy with studying for a mid term and very important design meeting. [image: Pet-WolfFoxBearDrake-Variations]https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2374703/151659/78c7080c-7589-11e2-9ad5-54a7fb9ec283.png Also tooling with ideas for a backer only mount, Ethereal Lion, and backer only pet, Dawn Phoenix.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/issues/107#issuecomment-13472379.

[Infusions]

Hey guys. I've been keeping tabs on this project and when I saw this post, I thought I'd like to contribute somehow. So, here's something I whipped up:

I'm no professional but I think it turned out... unique.

[lefnire]

Also, some free-to-use item icons we may find beneficial: http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/44976.htm

[Shaners]

@lefnire those are awesome, but too high res?

[lefnire]

Yep, you're right. I started to write up a long comment about whether we ever anticipate high rez in the future, but I think the answer has been decidedly "no", esp. as per Alex's design spec

[Pandoro]

@Shaners these are looking great! I'm wondering how we are going to use these? Some kind of developing bets? Or just independent pets?

@lefnire you know my preference regarding the resolution, but if this is really what the people want we should maybe consider? On 13 Feb 2013 07:12, "Tyler Renelle" notifications@github.com wrote:

Yep, you're right. I started to write up a long comment about whether we ever anticipate high rez in the future, but I think the answer has been decidedly "no", esp. as per Alex's design spechttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1P44mjvb1mYlqFvlmpyrVyXAuO90GwxzeQwXfNNVSg9M/edit?usp=sharing

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/issues/107#issuecomment-13475992.

[Shaners]

@lefnire @Pandoro what if I, or someone else, created an HD branch of Habit RPG? Could experiment with 2x the pixels or even vector based sprites then evaluated how much the users enjoyed that look. Based on those results it could then be merged with the main branch and added an option under settings to switch HD on. That way the project retains the original nostalgic feel it's already created but also gives the option for users who would prefer a different style.

The problems I see with this idea are:

• We don't know how many users actually want it
• It might ruin the cohesiveness and feel of the project
• It's a lot of work, everything will need to be remade
• Might be spreading resources too thin, making it less likely either goal will be met
• It might be harder work, less pixels = less choices to make = faster (though where they should go can often be very hard to decide!)
• Might make it less likely the community can contribute

Bottom line is I think it first needs to be discovered, either through a survey on the site or poll, what percentage of users actually want the higher res feature.

@Infusions I like it, it looks nice!

@Pandoro I was thinking independent pets like the wolves already are implemented. There might be better ways to go about it though. Maybe only have the standard colours available to purchase with tokens and the rarer colours pop up as random encounters when the user completes a task and they must use an item (whip, cage, cookie, bait etc.) that they have previously purchased with tokens to 'capture' that rare pet? That would involve a new feature and coding though. Maybe one of the purchasable pet items is tagged with 'random colour' property and upon purchasing the user has a chance for a rarer colour? Just some ideas!

@lefnire @Pandoro as for mounts it may be as simple as splitting the mount into a head element and body element. The head would be layered on top, covering the player including their right (our left) leg, while the body placed in a layer behind the player to be covered up by it. If the mount's head always covers the players right leg there shouldn't be a need for altering the player sprite (besides maybe elevating it.) Not knowing how things are currently implemented it may not be "as simple as" that though.

[caycefischer]

I think there's a different side to the pixel art we haven't really considered—2x for Retina displays. Though there are some issues with 2x sprites as you've outlined, I think eventually they'll have to be made—if HabitRPG is going to look remotely decent on Retina displays, 2x resources are going to be necessary. So maybe the answer isn't making the pixel art more detailed, but making Retina-sized art in the current style (perhaps more detailed to take advantage of that)

On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 12:18 PM, Shane Lister notifications@github.comwrote:

@lefnire https://github.com/lefnire @Pandorohttps://github.com/Pandorowhat if I, or someone else, created an HD branch of Habit RPG? Could experiment with 2x the pixels or even vector based sprites then evaluated how much the users enjoyed that look. Based on those results it could then be merged with the main branch and added an option under settings to switch HD on. That way the project retains the original nostalgic feel it's already created but also gives the option for users who would prefer a different style.

The problems I see with this idea are:

• We don't know how many users actually want it
• It might ruin the cohesiveness and feel of the project
• It's a lot of work, everything will need to be remade
• Might be spreading resources too thin, making it less likely either goal will be met
• It might be harder work, less pixels = less choices to make = faster (though where they should go can often be very hard to decide!)
• Might make it less likely the community can contribute

Bottom line is I think it first needs to be discovered, either through a survey on the site or poll, what percentage of users actually want the higher res feature.

@Infusions https://github.com/Infusions I like it, it looks nice!

@Pandoro https://github.com/Pandoro I was thinking independent pets like the wolves already are implemented. There might be better ways to go about it though. Maybe only have the standard colours available to purchase with tokens and the rarer colours pop up as random encounters when the user completes a task and they must use an item (whip, cage, cookie, bait etc.) that they have previously purchased with tokens to 'capture' that rare pet? That would involve a new feature and coding though. Maybe one of the purchasable pet items is tagged with 'random colour' property and upon purchasing the user has a chance for a rarer colour? Just some ideas!

@lefnire https://github.com/lefnire @Pandorohttps://github.com/Pandoroas for mounts it may be as simple as splitting the mount into a head element and body element. The head would be layered on top, covering the player including their right (our left) leg, while the body placed in a layer behind the player to be covered up by it. If the mount's head always covers the players right leg there shouldn't be a need for altering the player sprite (besides maybe elevating it.) Not knowing how things are currently implemented it may not be "as simple as" that though.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/issues/107#issuecomment-13505521.

– Zachary Kain

Designer, Creative Technologist 416-712-8895 zakkain@gmail.com → view my resume/profile http://zerply.com/zakkain/public

[lefnire]

I'm gonna wait to hear Alex's call on those thoughts Shane. I think it would be a no-go for the first iteration, because as you say it will spread resources thin and we might not make those KS pledge promises. It might be we have to go all low-rez until Habit starts making money, then we hire on a full-timer (maybe one of you) to do a full 2x migration. More I think on it, I think that's likely the way we should go.

As far as z-index-layered mount-head -> avatar -> mount-body, that sounds like a brilliant idea to me! Zack & Alex?

[caycefischer]

That's really clever!

[Pandoro]

@Infusions Sorry I missed this. These look cool :) They just don't really work out with the current general setup :x Great use of shading though! Let's see if we can use these at some point :) How did you do the motion animations? Just trial and error?

@Shaners I have always said that I don't have the artistic skills or time to go to a higher resolution, but also that I don't want to be the limiting factor here. So if anyone wants to give that a shot, I'm fine with that. I just think that it should be either A or B. Making low and high res doesn't make sense to me at all. It will be nice while changing to it, but something which works out in high res, will probably look crappy in low res, or something in low res will take a lot of time to reproduce in high res without it looking too dull. So that would in the end limit is to make something in low res -> create a cooler version in high res, as doing in the other way around will be impossible in many cases. For example think about glasses. Right now glasses are hard to realize, thus if we easily create glasses in a higher resolution, what to do in the lower resolution? So for the general creative side, the high resolution part has no big benefit, as long as a low res model needs to be made at the same time.

I for one have always liked the way stuff looks now and don't really feel for changing to a higher resolution that much. Although 2x will probably still keep the general feeling there is right now. I haven't seen that many people asking for different graphics yet, those that did asked for very different stuff, but I guess the only real way to find out is to do a little mock up and ask people for their opinion in a poll.

@zakkain I must admit that I don't really get what you are saying regarding the retina display? On any display you can simply upscale the sprites and you are done. There is nothing about looking decent or not. These sprites have fixed borders, aligned with pixels, so as long as you multiply the size with an integer, you will get crisp graphics on whatever screen you desire them to be crisp. So maybe I am getting something wrong here ^^; ? Please enlighten me :)

Regarding the pets. the layered approach also came to my mind. I don't think that it will be all that hard to realize, but as Shaners also says, the left leg has to be covered, always. My main argument against placing the avatars on top of the mount is that most of the weapon and a large part of the body will be covered. This is a taste question though :) Technically I think there is no argument against not placing them on top of the mounts. Although this does require the head of the mount to have a certain size, so for example a unicorn with a slimmer face and a longer neck might be harder to realize. But I think when cutting the neck/head at the right pixels it should be doable.

Regarding something completely different: The black borders. Shaners pet sprites got me thinking. Especially for the weapons, a two pixel black border around a sword or spear makes everything look rather black :-/ That is why this morning I thought we should go away from black borders and move to dark colored borders. I made a quick and dirty mock up of one example and I would like some feedback from you. The main pros of this are that in some cases it looks REALLY better and it gives a higher flexibility regarding what can be done and what not. For example no black border for the pony tail is needed any more, as the pony tail will take care of that itself. (meaning we can easily extend the hair cuts for characters.) This mock up isn't that great, the colors should be tuned a little, but if everyone, or at least if most people like the idea. I would change the general setup to support this system asap!

[caycefischer]

@pandoro We should do tests. I do know that zooming in in the browser (a reasonable approximation of retina display) on 1x assets yields blurry results. Can't always trust browser image upscaling. On Feb 13, 2013 1:44 PM, "Pandoro" notifications@github.com wrote:

@Infusions https://github.com/Infusions Sorry I missed this. These look cool :) They just don't really work out with the current general setup :x Great use of shading though! Let's see if we can use these at some point :) How did you do the motion animations? Just trial and error?

@Shaners https://github.com/Shaners I have always said that I don't have the artistic skills or time to go to a higher resolution, but also that I don't want to be the limiting factor here. So if anyone wants to give that a shot, I'm fine with that. I just think that it should be either A or B. Making low and high res doesn't make sense to me at all. It will be nice while changing to it, but something which works out in high res, will probably look crappy in low res, or something in low res will take a lot of time to reproduce in high res without it looking too dull. So that would in the end limit is to make something in low res -> create a cooler version in high res, as doing in the other way around will be impossible in many cases. For example think about glasses. Right now glasses are hard to realize, thus if we easily create glasses in a higher resolution, what to do in the lower resolution? So for the general creative side, the hi gh resolution part has no big benefit, as long as a low res model needs to be made at the same time.

I for one have always liked the way stuff looks now and don't really feel for changing to a higher resolution that much. Although 2x will probably still keep the general feeling there is right now. I haven't seen that many people asking for different graphics yet, those that did asked for very different stuff, but I guess the only real way to find out is to do a little mock up and ask people for their opinion in a poll.

@zakkain https://github.com/zakkain I must admit that I don't really get what you are saying regarding the retina display? On any display you can simply upscale the sprites and you are done. There is nothing about looking decent or not. These sprites have fixed borders, aligned with pixels, so as long as you multiply the size with an integer, you will get crisp graphics on whatever screen you desire them to be crisp. So maybe I am getting something wrong here ^^; ? Please enlighten me :)

Regarding the pets. the layered approach also came to my mind. I don't think that it will be all that hard to realize, but as Shaners also says, the left leg has to be covered, always. My main argument against placing the avatars on top of the mount is that most of the weapon and a large part of the body will be covered. This is a taste question though :) Technically I think there is no argument against not placing them on top of the mounts. Although this does require the head of the mount to have a certain size, so for example a unicorn with a slimmer face and a longer neck might be harder to realize. But I think when cutting the neck/head at the right pixels it should be doable.

Regarding something completely different: The black borders. Shaners pet sprites got me thinking. Especially for the weapons, a two pixel black border around a sword or spear makes everything look rather black :-/ That is why this morning I thought we should go away from black borders and move to dark colored borders. I made a quick and dirty mock up of one example and I would like some feedback from you. The main pros of this are that in some cases it looks REALLY better and it gives a higher flexibility regarding what can be done and what not. For example no black border for the pony tail is needed any more, as the pony tail will take care of that itself. (meaning we can easily extend the hair cuts for characters.) This mock up isn't that great, the colors should be tuned a little, but if everyone, or at least if most people like the idea. I would change the general setup to support this system asap!

[image: border]https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1872333/154030/562ca37c-760d-11e2-9295-ad6ff11da7ab.png

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/issues/107#issuecomment-13510149.

[Pandoro]

Yes this is true, but if that is what you are worried about, then we can simply create the bigger pixel assets by upscaling before hand. I know this works. In fact the images are 30x30 pixels. Meaning each "pixel" in the character are 9 real image pixels (3x3). I guess the BQ artists saved them in a 90x90 format because of the exact reason you mentioned. But going for 180x180 or whatever actual size of the character is fine as long as you can divide it by 30x30, as this is the real minimum size.

Too be honest I don't get why you cannot tell the browser to NOT blur the borders while scaling :-/ this would save me a lot of rescaling all the time and furthermore we could reduce the file size a little further.

[caycefischer]

Oh, I see what you mean. Perfect. Sorry for the confusion! On Feb 13, 2013 1:57 PM, "Pandoro" notifications@github.com wrote:

Yes this is true, but if that is what you are worried about, then we can simply create the bigger pixel assets by upscaling before hand. I know this works. In fact the images are 30x30 pixels. Meaning each "pixel" in the character are 9 real image pixels (3x3). I guess the BQ artists saved them in a 90x90 format because of the exact reason you mentioned. But going for 180x180 or whatever actual size of the character is fine as long as you can divide it by 30x30, as this is the real minimum size.

Too be honest I don't get why you cannot tell the browser to NOT blur the borders while scaling :-/ this would save me a lot of rescaling all the time and furthermore we could reduce the file size a little further.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/issues/107#issuecomment-13510757.

[Shaners]

edit: already explained! @zakkain I don't think retina displays would much of an issue quality-wise, besides the fact that users might be expecting higher resolution assets, since things are already zoomed in for the web / monitor version and that zooming in is actually responsible for the style. Currently the pixel art is built pixel by pixel but when displayed it is zoomed in 3x. This means 1 pixel actually represents a 3x3 pixel grid for the web / monitor version and it's simply a matter of altering this zoom based on device PPI and resolution. So for retina displays since they have more PPI you might use 4x (something the iPad can do natively I believe) which would essentially look the same as other versions but represent 1 pixel with a 4x4 pixel grid.

@lefnire yea I see no issues with sticking with the way things currently are for the time being. If anything the current style is drawing people in!

[Pandoro]

@Shaners btw I like the idea with the pets. I still didn't reach level 4 :p So I'm not sure what is out there and what is not, but buying one and then completing certain quests or goal to get different variations, or buying a random variation really sounds cool :)

[Shaners]

@Pandoro great points! What happens with higher res assets that are impossible at the lower res? Why do the extra work adding a 2x res setting if it's going to be so similar and create twice as much work? The idea is probably best tabled until there is an outcry by users for it or the art reaches a point where the things that need to be done just become impossible at the current resolution <-- far from that point I believe.

As to the coloured outlines, I'm biased so I'll leave my opinion out!

[Pandoro]

@Shaners, aren't opinions always biased? ;)

I should have probably created a better mock up. The colors of the sword handle and the face border really look crappy. When doing this, I will have to tweak it better. In general I think that the face and hair will benefit GREATLY from a colored border. As will the details of the armor when there are many cluttered lines.

But I needed to study a little today. I will get started on overhauling the stuff in a bit. I think it will fit your pets by far better and it will give us "an additional two pixels" to realize stuff with :) We'll see how to result looks and how people like it. it will be some work, but it will be worth the try I think

On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 9:35 PM, Shane Lister notifications@github.comwrote:

@Pandoro https://github.com/Pandoro great points! What happens with higher res assets that are impossible at the lower res? Why do the extra work adding a 2x res setting if it's going to be so similar and create twice as much work? The idea is probably best tabled until there is an outcry by users for it or the art reaches a point where the things that need to be done just become impossible at the current resolution <-- far from that point I believe.

As to the coloured outlines, I'm biased so I'll leave my opinion out!

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/issues/107#issuecomment-13516683.

[lefnire]

I like the idea of a mechanic for exposing / unlocking pets, let's do that. I just wanted to get them in like they are as MVP release. @Pandoro: screenshot.

So yeah, let's stick to the current rez. It's like using bootstrap - will get us as far as possible, and if it every breaks down because we can't work with detailed items in the current rez, well - hopefully we'll have enough money then to cross that bridge :)

[Pandoro]

Aaah cool :) Where did the Cactuar come from <3 I freaking love it!

We will have to come up with some cool mechanism though. If we go for quests, they could be a cool reward. Something like a pet-mod-package. You would find it and you could apply it to one of your pets. It could be a random mod, or a specific mod like a gold-mod or a zombie-mod. Or it could even be pet specific. These could then also be gifted or traded? I'm still wondering if it would hurt the business model if we would have a very small set of free (read gold buyable pets). But lets see how the general pets work out for now and move the discussion elsewhere ;)

On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 10:41 PM, Tyler Renelle notifications@github.comwrote:

I like the idea of a mechanic for exposing / unlocking pets, let's do that. I just wanted to get them in like they are as MVP release. @Pandorohttps://github.com/Pandoro: screenshothttp://gyazo.com/50091158deb957f77668c27d81f636eb.png?1360791577.

So yeah, let's stick to the current rez. It's like using bootstrap - will get us as far as possible, and if it every breaks down because we can't work with detailed items in the current rez, well - hopefully we'll have enough money then to cross that bridge :)

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/issues/107#issuecomment-13519805.

[Pandoro]

Okay... so I started working on the new borders. I think it proves kind of harder than first expected. The system still works the same as it did earlier with the layers. But I'm not really sure which version I like better. What do you guys think? The one on the right most definitely has more options as this strict black border policy is not in effect. However it also looks different than it used to look :x

[Infusions]

@Shaners Thanks :)

@Pandoro Ahh, well what exactly is the general setup? Did you mean this, with the layering and all? Or did you just mean the style in general? Thanks by the way. :)

Also, it was trial and error for the movement. I tested out the animation and it looks alright I think!

[Pandoro]

Well that does get close to it, but the problem is that we cannot take a piece of your pixel art and put it in as a part of the current setup. This will work for the sword and shield, but not for the body, head and skin.

I tried to describe the current general setup in this tutorial but considering more and more people are chiming in here, who knows how it will look in a few days :p Furthermore I am currently working on maybe removing the dark gray borders. This will in the long run give a higher degree of flexibility when it comes to drawing certain things, but it has yet to be shown if people like it or not.

[Infusions]

@Pandoro OH no no no... I had figured that habitrpg was eventually going to shift to it's own original style that still kept the old formatting, so I came up with one in my spare time yesterday... which is this. It's not meant to just be bits and pieces.

I think I might have jumped the gun here though. Sorry!

[Shaners]

Sorry I don't really have time for a proper explanation but as to the coloured lines: a) How BQ is setup, 3 shades and 1 outline colour b) Getting a little too light for the outline colour in my opinion, silhouette doesn't read as well c) In between a and b but more towards a, our grey outline has some hue in it that matches our object d) A transition in the outline from b on the lightest side of the object to c mid object to a on the darkest side of the object

[Pandoro]

@Infusions Hmmm :) Well it might be the case at some point, I guess we should really take a poll for where HabitRPG should head regarding pixel art. I think sticking to the BQ content causes the least of work right now though. There are still a whole set of things we can get from there and use for HabitRPG. And this is the simple problem, I don't want to keep you from drawing a new set. I just cannot support it actively either. Right now we need to get stuff out there regarding the KS promises and we feel that this will be achieved with the least effort by utilizing the BQ content. Because of that, at least for now we will stick to this, feel free to get a new look going though. If the community likes it and you can manage to draw up the same "amount" of armors and items we have right now, we can at some point replace it if the community likes it better :) Otherwise it might be a cool idea for you to also migrate to the current system. You clearly can draw some cool stuff, so you can also contribute by making cool new armor which works with what we have now :)

@Shaners Well what I tried to do was to go from A to c, while trying to make it look a little more like b than like A. Because that looked too much like b though, I tried adding shading like in d, which failed in most cases x) I still need to put more work into this. What are you using to draw the stuff? And how do you get such nice shadings? I find it quite tedious to select color by color and drawing each pixel on it's own. Furthermore one of the problems that I encountered is that it is not always so nice and clear where to apply the "dark side" as in d. Sometimes it is on top, sometimes on the bottom. And sometimes the amount of pixels which needs to be surrounded is so small, that it is hard to make a smooth transition. Especially with the hands and rather small feet I find this hard to realize. I will definitely need to work more on this stuff. I must say after seeing it on my phone and on another screen, it looks more like b, so I need to go more towards c and d if this should work at any point :x

[OldSchoolRPGs]

I love the sprite look and all, but it does seem disproportional in some areas that maybe it shouldn't. And personally, I think making the graphics a bit more like 16-bit SNES graphics or higher would be better than the 8-bit look. You could add a bit more detail and still keep a black border.

Here's an example of some armor and a sword I did for an old MMO to illustrate the look I'm thinking of:

(Pictures just for a reference. I don't sprite anymore.)

I know it would be a lot of work to change everything, but I think the look can be improved.

[Pandoro]

@OldSchoolRPGs well,.. :p See the discussion above. If someone would come and provide cool sprites, I doubt @lefnire would be against using them. I would even like to give extending a higher resolution set myself. However to keep the general style of the game the same as it is now, as I think this is really a feature of the game, we shouldn't go over twice the current resolution. So while 60x60 pixels is still very manageable, right now we lack the people who really want to do it.

[lefnire]

@Pandoro I prefer A with the two female options, personally. The one on the right kinda fade into the background, along the linde of @Shaners' B. What are the flexibilities borderless affords? Maybe if we moved more towards C / D?

[Pandoro]

@lefnire, I totally agree with you. It didn't come out as I saw the stuff yesterday night;) Probably I picked one of the worst to show on here x) Some of the other armors looked better. But the borders in general should be darker. More like C.

The main benefit of being B or D as much as possible is that you simply have more pixels to draw thin things. As I mentioned somewhere, I was thinking of making a lightning bolt weapon. And I thought that a lightning bolt should be rather thin -> 2 pixels maybe, but that does not work, so 1 pixel color, 2 pixels border. So that gave me the idea that if you also color the border, like @Shaners does in many good examples, it could work out better.

But a quick mock-up (This is no serious attempt at making a new weapon sooo ;) bear with me ) shows that it isn't so much better. At least not with my drawing skills right now ^^;

I think this might again fuse with the background. The exact same thing the borders prevented. In fact after thinking about it, there is no extreme benefit regarding the hair either, I can rearrange some stuff and the old setup can deal perfectly fine with the pony tail and other hair options. The hair should just take care of the black border itself, instead of having the helmet layers put a border around it.

I will see if I can make it a little more like D after all and get it too look better. But probably we should just forget about it and think about something else. The idea sounded nice and for some parts it definitely looks better in my opinion! For example I like the hair better, but if it brakes the overall system, we shouldn't waste time on it.

[Shaners]

Just a little preview of something I've been working on. Please note, the body is missing because this is a work in progress. Edit: here it is with a body, not the final colours but gives it more context.

[lefnire]

Yeaaaah, backer mount! And the beginnings of head-to-body separation, so we can start experimenting with this one. Thanks @Shaners

Alright everyone, more people are chiming in with pixel art talent than any other area of the app. @Pandoro and @Shaners, what do you think? Create a separate Trello board for the art department? We need a way to somehow triage tasks, manage info, and direct contributors. My only qualm with Trello is it's private-ish

[Shaners]

I guess semi big update, all pet colour variations plus a polar bear pet and mount. Not really planning on making anymore pets going forward, except for the backer-only pet (Dawn Phoenix if that pans out.) May return to them at some point since I had a few more ideas I wanted to try out and I think others did too.

So what I'll be working on now:

• Backer only mount (Ethereal Lion - if pans out)
• Backer only pet (Dawn Phoenix - if pans out)
• Backer only weapons / armor

For the backer-only armor I am thinking either something dark inspired by this: https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2374703/164653/548cab2c-78d1-11e2-88e1-2ee716d769eb.jpg and this: https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2374703/164654/5d28088a-78d1-11e2-8a17-1cbc6689d856.jpg or something translucent and crystalline inspired by this: https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2374703/164656/7ff7cab2-78d1-11e2-84d2-92e062f6037b.jpg Since the amount of pixels there are to work with are very limited, I'm worried that the concepts will just fall flat though. Will post progress!

@lefnire not really familiar with Trello so can't comment on if that would be a good idea or not. As far as managing and encouraging artistic contributions I think 2 things would really help: a solid design doc (that covered artistic direction and technical restrictions), and a live priority list of assets that needed to be done. With these, contributors could easily get some direction and also have a source that they could quickly check in on to know what was needed the most. Though you wouldn't want to be too strict since a lot of people are doing it for fun.

[lemoness]

The pets are gorgeous! I can't wait to see how they end up developing. Already got my red fox :)

I'm curious - when the mage/rogue clothes start to come out, will those be listed alongside the other armors? For example, when the first level mage hat is available, will it be in my store queue underneath the leather hat with horns?

And do you need people to work on those assets?

On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 10:11 AM, Shane Lister notifications@github.comwrote:

I guess semi big update, all pet colour variations plus a polar bear pet and mount. [image: Pet-Variations]https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2374703/164631/3ed5fa6c-78cd-11e2-8743-f65ac477b55e.png Not really planning on making anymore pets going forward, except for the backer-only pet (Dawn Phoenix if that pans out.) May return to them at some point since I had a few more ideas I wanted to try out and I think others did too.

So what I'll be working on now:

• Backer only mount (Ethereal Lion - if pans out)
• Backer only pet (Dawn Phoenix - if pans out)
• Backer only weapons / armor

For the backer-only armor I am thinking either something dark inspired by this: [image: Yw2Iz]https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2374703/164653/548cab2c-78d1-11e2-88e1-2ee716d769eb.jpg and this: [image: Demon]https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2374703/164654/5d28088a-78d1-11e2-8a17-1cbc6689d856.jpg or something translucent and crystalline inspired by this: [image: Crystal-Armor_250]https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2374703/164656/7ff7cab2-78d1-11e2-84d2-92e062f6037b.jpg Since the amount of pixels there are to work with are very limited, I'm worried that the concepts will just fall flat though. Will post progress!

@lefnire https://github.com/lefnire not really familiar with Trello so can't comment on if that would be a good idea or not. As far as managing and encouraging artistic contributions I think 2 things would really help: a solid design doc (that covered artistic direction and technical restrictions), and a live priority list of assets that needed to be done. With these, contributors could easily get some direction and also have a source that they could quickly check in on to know what was needed the most. Though you wouldn't want to be too strict since a lot of people are doing it for fun.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/issues/107#issuecomment-13683017.

[superbiasedman]

Hey guys. I'm an animator, so I wouldn't be that great about creating new pixel art but I could add animations to existing ones. A few things like maybe having the character react to taking damage, successful habits/tasks and leveling up etc. Just wondering, what's the best system to do this in to fit with how it's coded? A spritesheet of the separate images from the animations, each animation compiled into a single gif or something else?

EDIT: I found the guide for creating sprites, so I'll do up a couple test gifs later to show what I mean.

[Pandoro]

@lefnire A seperate trello board might be good, but honestly there are only a few discussions going on. Animations. Higher resolution or not ??? So a trello board might be a bit overkill. If we really want to get some more people to vote on this, it might be good to post some poll on the KS while it is still live. We should be able to get a good feedback there.

@Shaners Great stuff man! (Are you a final fantasy player by any chance ;) ?) I will take the pets and combine them to a CSS file if that is okay with you. I think this will in general work out better in the long run. I will try to align them a little, as for example the pig should be on a different place than other pets. I really like the sparkling animation. I'm just not completely sure where it is going? Will it be the ethereal lion? Because in that case I must be honest that I find it a bit hard to see the lion in there, and it seems a bit small for a mount maybe? I might be wrong regarding the last point. I really like the idea regarding the backers only armor. I also thought about some purpleish looking armor. Considering you are good at "border-less" stuff, I would suggest that you can give that a try? I don't see why we should exclude it from being possible, just because the other items have dark gray borders. Regarding the guideline, a rough version can be seen in the document Tyler mentioned earlier. This will change a little regarding the hair of the female, but apart from that I think it might serve the purpose you pointed out? There isn't a lot of artistic guidance in there yet, but having the technical restrictions seems good enough for me. Anything else people can get out there would probably be great already. If you have any corrections or suggestions for this, feel free to let me know. I honestly think you are the by far more skilled artist than me, so if you have valuable input into a tutorial I would love to get some stuff in there!

@lemoness This will all depend a little on how the class system will be implemented. Although there have been sugggestions, discussions and ideas, it is not a fixed thing yet. But the items will then be used accordingly. Most likely they will be available alongside the other items. I'm not sure though if you can buy a mage hat as a warrior? Maybe that might be the case though, so that can't really be answered yet. And of course, everyone who wants to work on them is welcome to join in and give it a shot :D @Orangyfresh has made a nice start for them. They just haven't shown up in the game yet because there is no class system yet :x

@superbiasedman This sounds great :) I would suggest making them as gif files. Currently we are using CSS spritesheets to get all the possible armors out there in an easy way. This can easily be extended to gif files and then taking the different animations from 1 sprite. The problem is a little that if you start making animation spritesheets, that means we will have to handle the timing in code and furthermore we will have to keep track of animation spritesheets together with CSS spritesheets. So it would probably be easier to have it in a gif file, that we use in combination with the CSS spritesheets. Considering we have many possible combinations of skin colors etc, it would be cool if you also animate all these parts seperatly? That way we would again overlay the different gif files, so that you could take one gif file for the hair, one for the body and so forth. The only thing I am afraid of regarding this is that the timing of the different gif files might be screwed up :x We will have to play around with this a little I guess! :)