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.

[horusofoz]

@jjjjesse Great originality. Creates the possibility of removing lefthand/shild hard link and make it so user's can select whether to have a weapon, net, shield, etc in left or right hand. I like it :)

Horusofoz "Live to learn. Learn to live." J.W.S.

On 25 February 2013 15:48, Rudd Fawcett notifications@github.com wrote:

@jjjjesse https://github.com/jjjjesse That's pretty cool...

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/issues/107#issuecomment-14026257.

[jjjjesse]

Next we have the robed samurai.

[tmas]

Wow, that samurai is really nice. I wonder how shields would fit with it though...

[jjjjesse]

I may have been a little ambitious with this one, armored samurai:

@tmas Good point! I'll have to consider making something that fits with the set.

[lemoness]

@jjjjesse - WOW, EXCELLENT! Original and fantastically done!

@Pandoro - noted - I'm trying out some new stuff now, and I will try to put the hats on figures in the future :)

[jjjjesse]

Here is an Immortal, inspired from 300. http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbycl1mD9U1rg561mo5_500.gif

[Orangyfresh]

@jjjjesse - Those are great man! I love your style. Because they are look so cool and individual from the other stuff they could easily be used as backer-only armor.

@Pandoro - Yes I have Gimp and that's what I use to make my files compatible. I always check that my heads are compatible with the skins and hairs and that they do not exceed the dimensions we use. As the head layers are above the armor layers in the files I've been referring to guide me, I gathered that heads are allowed to overlap the armor. If this is incorrect than let me know and I'll adjust the heads appropriately. I've checked the rogue head/hat against the default armor sets from BQ and it overlaps a little at the bottom, but apart from that they work. Obviously though, the hat doesn't suit every armor set in regards to looks.

[lefnire]

@jjjjesse this is awesome stuff! Keep it coming, these could provide great variations when we introduce class specializations. I especially love the armored samurai! Stoked to put those sets in the game, thanks.

Re: backer-only armor, we're gonna use @Shaners contribution because it's class-ambiguous.

[Shaners]

Great stuff everyone, things are looking awesome!

Quick one, dark souls blade: Possible backer-only weapon. Animation is looping fast just for viewing, will be tweaked before final.

[lefnire]

Shane. Where do you live, I want to buy you a drink.

On Monday, February 25, 2013, Shane Lister wrote:

Great stuff everyone, things are looking awesome!

Quick one, dark souls blade: [image: anim-darksoul-blade]https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2374703/193426/239bde84-7f84-11e2-96a1-9073b8dfd659.gif Possible backer-only weapon. Animation is looping fast just for viewing, will be tweaked before final.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/issues/107#issuecomment-14070806.

[Shaners]

@lefnire Vancouver Canada, including flight would be an expensive drink!

One more for today, crystal armor set: Possible backer-only armor (maybe if they don't like dark stuff?) or just another tier of armor. Planning to tweak the shine animation on the body a bit for the final.

What's next:

• Backer pet (phoenix)
• Backer mount (revised ethereal lion)
• Misc tweaks
• Backer shield
• Crystal sword / shield??
• Boss art (been playing with a few ideas in my head)

[horusofoz]

Re-opening as with all the activity and great artwork, it should be open for more people to see.

[jjjjesse]

I'm not too sure how receptive you guys will be to this one, I've created a very quirky, floating NPC. I suppose you could call him a misdirected mystic. I'm not sure if it has a place but I had fun with it anyway.

[jjjjesse]

Here's another fun one, I call it "The Bride".

[horusofoz]

Could some of you awesome peeps take a peek at our "New Adventurer (Avatar), Inventory, Achievement And Profile Screen Concepts"?

We want to introduce these ideas but know they need an artist's touch. If even a fifth of the awesomeishness witnessed in this thread can be applied to these concept pieces, these should be ready in no time.

[jjjjesse]

I'll have a look at this tomorrow.

On 26/02/2013, at 11:27 PM, horusofoz notifications@github.com wrote:

Could some of you awesome peeps take a peek at our "New Adventurer (Avatar), Inventory, Achievement And Profile Screen Concepts"?

We want to introduce these ideas but know they need an artist's touch. If even a fifth of the awesomeishness witnessed in this thread can be applied to these concept pieces, these should be ready in no time.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[busterroni]

Since @Shaners made an ice armor set I decided to make a fire armor set. Mine doesn't even compare to how good his looks but I thought I'd try it anyway. I also hope I did it correctly this time :/

[lefnire]

@jjjjesse you are exceptionally good at this!

All, here's are my current thoughts, tell me what you think:

1. We have Backer custom-item requests coming in. We can retrofit some requests (eg, "Dragon Staff of Power" to @jjjjesse's armored samurai spear). For the new items, I think @Shaners @jjjjesse @lemoness @Orangyfresh would be excellent fits. I'll post them here as they come in and see what everyone comes up with.
2. We have Backer profile pics coming in. Based on @jjjjesse's floating NPC and The Bride, I think you'd be very good at designing NPCs for the various roles. Eg, designing a Backer's face in 8-bit, and superimposing that on a NPC outfit (beast-master outfit, town crier outfit, etc). Would you be up for the challenge? If so, email me and I'll start sending them your way.
3. We'll use @Shaners backer gear (the dark set) and backer mount. I think the only thing left now is pet?
4. We could possibly use @jjjjesse's specialized class sets for token-purchased armor / weapon enchantments on class-specific final gear.
5. @Pandoro has been super busy, he'll probably jump in later - but he's being doing mostly design spec and standardization, etc.
6. Holy shit you guys are amazing.

[Shaners]

@busterroni good start. 2d fire is hard to animate, add in abstracting it down to this pixel resolution level and it gets even harder. One thing to keep in mind is that fire or flames are not solid objects but are a gaseous vapour swirling around, usually fairly fast, and disappearing and reappearing constantly. Here is what I think as a particularly good example of animated flame (even seems a bit stylized) https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2374703/197859/629925ba-8047-11e2-8a00-23320c5d4a0c.gif

Check here for a bit of an insight to the artist's thinking: http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/2059/firedesign.jpg You can see more of his stuff here: http://luckeffects.blogspot.ca/

@lefnire Revised to do:

• Backer-only pet (phoenix has been particularly hard but I've made progress)
• Custom requests
• Revisions / tweaks
• Demon / dark shield

[Shaners]

Still far from done but here is a preview of the backer-only phoenix pet. It came out pretty big but funny enough this was the smallest iteration that actually worked.

[busterroni]

@Shaners I've worked on making a better flaming effect, how would I go about compiling the multiple .psd files (or I can change to a different file type) to make an animation? For the first one I used something online but with the newer one it's been acting very strangely, constantly zooming in and out. It didn't take too long, I'll try to redo it tomorrow. Any ideas on what might've happened to prevent this from happening in the future? Nice phoenix by the way! :D

[jjjjesse]

@lefnire, you mentioned someone requesting a 'Dragon Staff of Power', but I thought I'd up one better. Here's the 'Dragon Hunter':

As far as the background, I thought it could go in a miscellaneous item slot, the item itself being a 'Dragon Heart':

Also @Shaners, that phoenix is brilliant... Just sucks how big it is! Maybe it can be used for something else, not a pet?

[jjjjesse]

I also started working on this, I'm not sure what I think of it so far... Thoughts/critique? Should I continue or ditch it?

[busterroni]

@jjjjesse Those both look sick! I love the flame in the first one, I think I need to do something like that for my fire armor. Would you mind if I used your fire as an inspiration :)? The dragon also looks amazing! Definitely continue it. It could be a boss or something :]

Here's what I've done so far, I still don't really like it though :/ It says makeagif.com because I combined all my photos there. I still need to make them .png files.

I used @jjjjesse 's fire idea and I think it turned out a lot better. Opinions?

[wc8]

There's a Phoenix Quest idea out there that has some popularity. I wonder if it [Shaners' phoenix] could be used in the dialog page announcing the Phoenix Quest, similar to Death in the Game Over dialog. Backers could still be the only ones allowed to keep that phoenix as a pet.

[lefnire]

@jjjjesse where did you come from, lol! For the token-store we have planned gear enchantments, pet food (which evolves the pet), etc - so that "misc slot" item is perfect, thanks for providing that along with.

As long as your sprites fit @Pandoro's spec, we should start getting them committed to the repository sometime in the near future

[lemoness]

@jjjjesse WOW awesome stuff as always! Personally, I really like the dragon. Regarding the Kill Bill Bride, though - we'd have to be careful about copyrights if we were going to use that :/ Just a thought. I'm incredibly excited to see your backer NPCs!

@Shaners - I also love the phoenix. I don't see the problem with a backer pet being enormous, since they're supposed to be impressive - and wow, is that ever impressive!

Some more hat edits will be up soon. And @lefnire, I would be happy to try making the weapons! Just let me know.

[Shaners]

Yea unfortunately this doesn't work as a pet so I'll have to scrap it. Maybe can use it for something else in the future. (animation half done)

Does anyone have any neat ideas for a backer-only pet? Or want to try their hand at it? Maybe I'll try out a puppy Cerberus.

@busterroni I'm guessing you're working in PS if you are using .psd files. What you can do is make each frame a layer in one psd file then open the animation window and create the amount of frames that match the number of layers you have. From there you'd show and hide various layers corresponding to which frame you wanted them to show up in and then it's a simple save for web > gif export. And yes your flame is looking a lot better! I would consider altering your colours though since you seem to be using some pretty saturated colours at the moment. If you haven't already I'd start looking into the aspect of colour theory and colour harmony.

@jjjjesse great stuff I really like it! if you are having fun with the dragon I'd say definitely go for it. Boss fights are something that look like will be added eventually and this would be perfect for that. As far as critiques, most of this may just be personal opinion, I think you could add some hue variations to the purplely bits ( pale whiteish horns, pale yellow (or turquoise) belly ), extend the belly scales all the way up to the head, extend the wing membranes and make them more concave, play with adding scale like texture to the body, add some perspective ( we should be in 3/4s top down but this is debatable) by making the closer foot lower, adding some dynamic shape to the tail instead of laying flat, feature the claws more somehow by pushing them out (this usually done with contrast), and play with the neck and haunches a bit to make them look more natural. This is your baby though, don't do anything that doesn't feel right!

[lemoness]

@Shaners Any way you can make that a mount? Hm.

OKAY as per feedback, I've made a slightly smaller hat. This is for the level 1 hat. Here is a comparison:

Just tell me which version you guys like better, and I will roll out a TON OF HATS AND ROBES based on that. :D

[lemoness]

Trouble editing, so double-post - here is a three-hat comparison! Again, tell me which size you like best, and I will base all future hats around that size.

[lefnire]

I like No. 1 personally, but depends on @Shaners & @Pandoro's specification thoughts

I seriously scroll up and down this ticket once or twice a day. It's like my precious. Such awesome art, props y'all.

[lefnire]

Got a change for y'all - all custom sprites now stored in /public/img/sprites. I deleted /public/img/BrowserQuest (including ./habitrpg_mods) since we now have /public/vendor/BrowserQuest as a git submodule. So this thread will now take place in /public/img/sprites. See https://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/commit/e7ddfb889208db336a3e2785c00f6034817e760c

Also, in the future all sprites (as well as algorithms) will be in an entirely different repository called habitrpg-shared, which will be submoduled between both the website and mobile app. But don't worry about that for now, just heads up.

[Pandoro]

Sadly I don't have time to read all of this, but a lot of this stuff looks really AWESOME! I will hopefully at some point get to merge some of this stuff into sprites, but if anyone else wants to do this, in order to speed up the integration process, feel free ;)

@Shaners <3 baby Cerberus :D

I pretty much realized I will not have a lot of time in the next time, so I want to tell you guys some of the ideas I had so that if anyone has no idea what to do, they can pick up some of the ideas ;)

• Creating some cool icon for the tokens. I was thinking some kind of red or green fancy looking crystal. For this resolution will not be the most critical part, so probably you can go for something like 30x30 pixels, as the coins have a similar pixel count.
• A unicorn mount, because.... don't we all need a unicorn mount :p
• A "chocobo" pet, let's not infringe on this, but something similar would be cool. This would also fit the whole color scheme Shaners has been setting up. Also.. a "moogle" like something?
• A little ghost pet, something like the packman ghosts, floating next to you?
• I was thinking of a kind of BIG blade, similar to that what @Shaners did, but also without the "dark" theme with a simple blade color. (Yes yes... I admit I was thinking of FF7...)
• Maybe bow and arrows, but I think this might be hard to realize.
• Thor's hammer, Zeus' thunder bolt and Poseidons Pitchfork.
• I really like the idea of @jjjjesse "dragon heart aura". If @lefnire liks this as well, and of course the community, I think a miscellaneous slot would be really cool to have, also for monetization. This could also take beards into account.
• We should not forget about the backers only items created for them personally. I'm not sure how the data acquisition is coming along, but if I recall right, there are about 8 items and we need something like 5 NPCs.

But yea... great work guys! You are doing awesome! (:-/ This totally sounds like I am judging your work, which I shouldn't considering you are better at this anyways :p )

[lemoness]

I really really like the miscellaneous slot, which allows for a lot of creativity! Since I am still waiting on hat confirmation and weapon requests, here is my personal contribution for the token store ;)

Tail is for the miscellaneous slot, of course!

[Shaners]

@Pandoro Ah yea Mjolnir! I forgot I wanted to work on that! If you doubt my enthusiasm check out the hammer I made for Halloween last year! https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2374703/206391/fc028796-81cd-11e2-8a8b-fab6ffbbd4e0.jpg

[Pandoro]

@Shaners Nice :D I'm excited to see what you are going to make out of it :)

After all your awesome work, we should probably start a kickstarter campaign to pay for a ticket to Sommerville and back for you ;) Then @lefnire can buy you that drink after all :)

@lemoness I guess there is a lot of potential indeed! I think many of the things you made already should probably like customizations of the look? Like the lady costume or the kitty costume? (The first image is broken btw :( ) These could be bought with tokens for example. What else do you think would be cool for the misc. slot? The eye patch that was mentioned earlier in this thread might be realizable and could fit in there, but I guess there could be many different cool "auras" like the dragon heart.

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 6:42 PM, Shane Lister notifications@github.comwrote:

@Pandoro https://github.com/Pandoro Ah yea Mjolnir! I forgot I wanted to work on that! If you doubt my enthusiasm check out the hammer I made for Halloween last year! [image: mjolnir]https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2374703/206391/fc028796-81cd-11e2-8a8b-fab6ffbbd4e0.jpg

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/issues/107#issuecomment-14246143 .

[lemoness]

@Pandoro Sorry, I'm not quite sure what you mean - what lady costume? My red wizard robes? The kitty costume is definitely intended to be for the token store, if that's that what you mean. The hats are all intended to be normally for the mage class, though.

Here's the first image again, hopefully it will work this time!

[Pandoro]

@lemoness I'm sorry... I messed up. I mixed it up with jjjjesse's thing, which wasn't called lady, but it was called "The bride". I should shut up unless I read more carefully x)

Still not working btw :(

The wizard stuff should of course be in the normal store as you also say, at least most of them, maybe some of them are fancy enough to be token bought also, but let's see how many hats we can get together and how many we really need in the end.

[Shaners]

Here is a list of suggestions for pixel art assets if anyone else is looking for ideas:

Pets

• Chocobo-like
• Moogle-like
• Red Panda
• Turtle
• Ghost
• Monkey
• Ethereal Wolf Cub
• Spider
• Falcon
• Eagle
• Honey Badger
• Jelly / Slime
• Bee (would be too big?)
• Rabbit / Bunny
• Atomic Rooster (green rooster??)
• Chicken (Zelda-like?)
• Armoured Koala
• Peacock
• Kitty Cat

Mounts

• Unicorn
• Wolf
• Armoured Kangaroo
• Dire Peacock
• Horse
• Peagsus

Icons

• Token (gem like)
• Fitness or Strength (for tagging tasks??)
• Intelligence or Mind
• Soul or Spirit

Weapons

• Buster Sword-like
• Bow and Arrow (multi-tiered, wood, bamboo, ebony, rose wood, golden etc.)
• Mjolnir (Thor's Hammer)
• Poseidon's Trident
• Zeus' Thunderbolt
• Staffs (multi-tiered, for mage class only?)
• Lances (Ice,steel, fire, coral etc.
• Fire / Ice / Lightning Axes (Maybe there are the result of purchased enchantment?)
• Fire / Ice / Lightning Swords
• Magic Rod
• Spears
• Great Axes (enough room?)
• Great Swords
• Claws

Armors

• Holy Armor (for a Paladin class?)
• Silver Armor
• Mithril Armor
• Monk Robes
• Bronze Armor
• Bandana
• Warrior's Shield
• Magic Shield
• Aegis
• Ancient Armor
• Viking Hood
• Cursed Gear
• Circlets
• Crowns
• Tiaras

Bosses

• Dragon (in progress)
• Lizard King
• Demon Lord
• Lava Giant

Character Details

• New Hairstyles

[Shaners]

Possible backer-only pet, Baby Cerberus: Planning to animate it and play with adding a spiked collar / chains, tweak tail more (make it a spike?) I might make the chest a bit bigger too.

[wildcate]

I second the unicorn as mount, and I'd love to see a peacock (either as pet or, in a giant dire peacock version, as mount). And a normal cat as a pet. And sheep. Sheep are nice! Everyone should have the chance to have a sheep! And is there going to be a normal horse as well? And if a unicorn and a horse are made anyway, then a pegasus could be possible as well with not too much additional work... I'll stop now before I double the list sizes.

[horusofoz]

Special Request: Armoured Kangaroo or Koala ;)

[Pandoro]

@Shaners very nice! Was it intended that the two outer heads look a little more "insecure"? Maybe it would be an option to have the one in the middle look bad ass, the one on the left look rather insecure and the one on the right have another expression? I am not really sure how easy that would be. But it looks very cool already :D It is of course a little bigger than other pets, but I guess for a backers only pet this is very much okay! :)

Another request from a different thread, would be different hairstyles.

[Shaners]

Updated previous post to include more suggestions.

@wildcate there is a sheep already! Scroll up to check it out. Not sure when it will be available though.

@Pandoro yep different expressions were the intention. I figured it would look pretty boring if they all had an angry face so I didn't even try that way. The expressions are also going to be related to the animations I am will apply, kind of related it each head's 'personality'. Hoping this will be more evident after the animation is done but I may play with the facial colours to help this read easier.

[Pandoro]

@Shaners I guess I can stop making suggestions to you, considering you always got it pretty much figured out already :D I'm really excited to see how this works out :)

Regarding the sheep, you can look at it, but it might be a little big. I should probably crop it a little to make it fit a bit better to the characters.

On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 6:29 PM, Shane Lister notifications@github.comwrote:

Updated previous post to include more suggestions.

@wildcate https://github.com/wildcate there is a sheep already! Scroll up to check it out. Not sure when it will be available though.

@Pandoro https://github.com/Pandoro yep different expressions were the intention. I figured it would look pretty boring if they all had an angry face so I didn't even try that way. The expressions are also going to be related to the animations I am will apply, kind of related it each head's 'personality'. Hoping this will be more evident after the animation is done but I may play with the facial colours to help this read easier.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/issues/107#issuecomment-14300840 .

[Pandoro]

Hmmm well, it MIGHT work, but it is pretty big, opinions?

[wildcate]

How on earth did I miss the sheep? It's lovely! And there are sheep that are pretty big in real life, it might just be one of those!

By the way, would whip and cat-o'-nine-tails work as weapons as well? And halberds could be used as a lance/staff variation...

[Pandoro]

@wildcate I guess these weapons would probably be doable yes :)

Does anyone recognize this guy?

[cleave29]

@Pandoro The Goon?

[Shaners]

@Pandoro no keep making suggestions! Even if is something I've already thought of it lets me know that it's probably a good idea that I should keep pursuing.