Just to let you know... real soon now we'll release p14 - which is going to be the first prerelease with graphics, sounds and NotEye fully integrated. Naturally things still are in a flow... the music is far from finished and Lucas is working hard to get ahead, Jochen and Zeno are fiddling with various enhancements for the NotEye integration and Krys is fine-tuning many of the graphics, giving the cute dog another overhaul, adding details, working on variant tile sets and other stuff. So - once it is released - please take p14 as a first alpha prerelease of the final version.
Here's yet another teaser of the (almost complete) monster tile set (do you spot what's missing?):
Just to give you an idea about the things that keep us busy: Jochen, Krys and Zeno e.g. have been investing quite a bit of thought and work recently to fiddle with the transparency of the leaves on trees. A detail, but a detail that adds a lot to the final appearance.
Read ya soon about the release!
Missing?
ReplyDeleteGiant Bees
Invisible Stalker :P
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ReplyDeleteBees seem to be in second column sixth row from the top.
DeleteSo they are. My bad.
DeleteThe female dark sage maybe? :)
ReplyDeleteCan't wait!
ReplyDeleteExcellent graphics -- as a graphic designer and sometime illustrator, I know the amount of work that is behind these.
ReplyDeleteI have just one concern -- animation? How are you going to handle that issue? I fear that having a screen of these gorgeous pictures remaining static and just "sliding" across the corridors may be an anticlimax compared to the beauty of them...
Indeed the overall design is just asking for all the individual pieces to be animated and I realize that it might hurt the graphical version's reception.
DeleteVarious ways to go about adding some animation are being discussed, unfortunately it's not my area of expertise and it certainly is beyond the scope if this campaign.
Funnily enough if we just went for simplistic square icons noone would have minded the lack of movement I suppose;)
Shopkeepers seem to be missing (or is it me?) and there should be 12 (?) of them for all races. Same is true for the Dwarftown priest who is always the same race as the char. There's one dwarf that looks suspiciously like a priest, which can break the consistency?
ReplyDeleteAlso, some guys look almost indistinguishable from each other (quickling royalty, werewolves I guess). Other than that looks pretty solid, great job!
I don't think that's what Thomas had in mind, but very well spotted none the less ;) These pieces are indeed not on the image.
DeleteJust one human shopkeeper for now (not counting ratling traders). One race for the priest as well - he looks like a dwarf for now. Added this to my TODO list, although there are still quite a lot of things with higher priority there.
Creatures of one race like werewolves (werewolf, werewolf lord, werewolf king) etc. were painted individually but usually share the pose and overall theme due to time constraints. I preferred it this way rather than just use algorithmic recoloring.
I tried to make them easy to distinguish from each other, but if you find some of them too similar in game I'd really like to hear about it. That's one of the critical areas that we have to get just right before the final release.
Honestly the priest part always bugged me as nonsensical.
DeleteWill try to give feedback (although I don't really like tiles as a concept) as soon as prerelease is out. It'll probably take much time simply to learn to identify monsters :D
On an unrelated note, will it be possible to post individual monster images on ancardia.wikia.com?
The graphics look great. It will be fun to "see" ADoM in a whole new way.
ReplyDeleteOne comment though, something that's wonderful about ADoM is the massive amount of gear you can play with. One thing that would be truly awesome would be updating sprites.
Take a look at a game like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, or Tales of Maj'Eyal. In those games your character (and enemies) actually display what gear they're using. Wield a sword and you SEE your character with a sword, change to a staff and you can see the weapon (with varying staff pictures). Your armor shows as well, which is amazing. You really get a more personalized feel as you play.
I know something like that would be a lot of work, but perhaps it could be something you look at down the road. I would love to see that sort of thing implemented. Seeing my weapons and armor on my character would be amazing.
Sprites will be static as a dead eel for now ;) But I totally agree with you. Making a kind of "What You See is What You Got" sprites is definitely being looked at and something we'd just _love_ to have somewhere down the road. ADOM II is an obvious candidate since it's got detailed monster inventories, unlike ADOM I. (correct me if I'm wrong)
DeleteWe've got nice clean high res sources for all the weapons/armor and such, so that's a good starting point. But from what I gather there's quite a bit of programming work involved as well.
Still, I really hope we'll get to add this sometime in the near future.
Oh, and it also kind of interferes with animation ;) so there's a lot to think about when designing this part of the game.
Delete