Late one night, we set our scene:
David: Added dire asparagus and a crate of evil sprite. I’ll let you figure out what to do with them.
Nicholas: … “dire asparagus”?
David: I’m going with my gut on this one.
Nicholas: Probably wise.
Nicholas: I wonder what goes in the crate of evil.
Nicholas: I’ll do something for it.
David: Surprise me.
Nicholas: Will do. Maybe it releases evil.
Should I even try to justify this?
I’ve been drawing icons for skill abilities in Dungeons of Dredmor. When creating your character at the start of the game, you choose seven skills for yourself. As you advance these skills through use, you gain new special abilities. Today I’ve drawn up some abilities for the axe skill and will discuss icon images and giving the skills their names.
To quickly take up a tangent on the design decision to have these skill abilities: In RPGs mages have traditionally had the most diverse abilities which translates to having more enjoyable game-choices to make. Do you cast fireball? Teleport? Ice shield? Do you “paralyze nerves, shatter bones, set fires, suffocate an enemy or burst his organs”? Meanwhile, a warrior can choose to either attack or not attack. And why would you ever not attack? Yes, the warrior is ideally more of an item-driven class, but why deny certain character archetypes whole swaths of gameplay, be it special abilities/spells or item management? Compare Diablo 1 with Diablo 2 and you see the solution Blizzard took: Give every class spell-like abilities. (And give every class useful item progression.) New editions of D&D, even, have taken up the spell-like ability for non-magic classes. The lesson is clear: It is important to give the player important decisions to make in the course of playing the game.
And now for the icons:
These are the sub-abilities of the axe skill. Each gives a unique combat effect or shaped area-attack. As originally planned, these icons are displayed at 32×32 pixels in-game, the smaller size in the above sheet, but it does the painted icons some harm to shrink them so much. It might be more appropriate to draw these as native pixel-art at the target resolution (as I did with the spell icons), but I feel it loses some character — and takes a lot longer. Time is money, friend.
As for naming, everything in Dredmor is rightly a bit silly. If a name can contain a pun or a joke, I’m all for it. If it sounds awesomely overblown, it’s good. If it just sounds like it belongs in a cheesy fantasy game, it’ll do. At some point a name feels right, it’s like writing a gag in a comic strip or coming up with a good zinger. This is not to say that everything in Dredmor is really all that good, I’m just trying to do my best with what I can deliver in a reasonable timeline. To borrow a line from Hemmingway, “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit.” … And that goes for the art, too.
Let me take you on a tour of my thoughts about each ability icon.
I’ve had this comic kicking around for a bit. From left to right is Daniel, Nicholas, and myself.
Click the image for the full comic.
All done? Okay:
The particular issue behind this comic is an ongoing matter of what versioning software to use, and behind that, how to choose what tools to use to coordinate work, and behind that, what makes which tools best for collaborative development. This is a bit of a mess of a question that I’ll wade through with the power of anecdote rather than some kind of comprehensive answer.
(I should add here that I am aware that Git has a mac version with a GUI. Please feel free not to send me any more helpful messages.)
With Nicholas and Daniel off on some remote island in the Pacific, myself in a lovely northwest metropolis, and Derek in some dark place south of the border, we need software that harnesses the full power of The Internet to effectively work together. For communication we use some combination of IMs, Google Wave and Docs, a dusty wiki, email, and occasional face-to-face meetings when schedules permit. For project files we’re presently using SVN and there has been talk of moving to Git, as evidenced by the above comic.
Now the point of the original disagreement which led to the comic is that I’m an artist; While I do know some coding and technical tricks, I hate the idea of having to learn to deal with a new command line interface for versioning software (or whatever it may be). I have plenty of work to do already and would like to avoid major investments of effort unrelated to my specialization in the whole enterprise. And this is to say nothing of what might happen when we bring more, less techy artists in on Gaslamp projects. Of course, as established, Git does have a GUI for my ilk. But there will be other software used in our future projects and I think that usability issues may arise, especially as we run a zero-capital startup and end up using a lot of open source software or homebrewed tools.
Teaching a particular command-line interface to an otherwise uninitiated artsy type takes important development time away from all parties. There is a balance to be found between finding/developing tools that make the work of the development team easier and the act of development itself. I saw just such an argument made for in-house tool development (down a few paragraphs) by Eskil Steenberg, the one-man team creator of Love. On the other hand, if I recall an off-hand comment correctly, Nicholas expressed skepticism at the viability of Eskil’s approach to tool development — just as it might turn out to be efficient to create one’s own 3d modeling suite, it might just as well turn out to be a tool too hopelessly personal to be useful to anyone but the maker.
(And I haven’t even started on our appalling sprite format that’s created a content pipeline through some ancient graphics software which causes me existential pain. Sacrifices have to be made for the team, of course, so I weather this. For the team!)
Balance in all things, and most important from my perspective: choose tools with good UI design. Good UI decreases the overhead of effort involved in both learning and carrying out the task at hand (and doing it well is even better).
As for teamwork, you could really just take the first two text boxes of the comic and fill them with the Gaslamp-conflict-of-the-week while making sure they’re between the two appropriate personalities. These things write themselves.
Dungeons of Dredmor has not been an easy baby to deliver in terms of art direction; The core game art was a patchwork of assets produced by a handful of artists over several years before I ever showed up.
Now it’s never a simple thing to corral multiple artists on one project. I went to art school so I know how difficult my people can be, to say nothing of the generally unreliable world of small-time freelance video game artists. Original art direction was done by the fearless beating heart of Gaslamp, the Mr. Nicholas Vining, whose past travail I probably don’t envy. But he is merely a programmer of humble means; I inherited the job of creating a unified artistic direction for a largely unfinished game made of a diverse set of assets drawn by artists I’d never even talked to. With that, I have had to set a stylistic tone for the game that I could stand to look at, work on, and which could be completed in as timely a matter as possible.
It’s comforting to imagine an ideal situation in which I can art-direct the look & feel of a game from the ground up, everything perfect and in place, well planned and timed, with simpering sub-artists to do the boring parts (the next game, I tell myself, the next game). But by necessity Dredmor became a matter of what I could save of the original artwork and what I would redraw all by my lonesome. It’s been a practice of artistic triage: some sprites shall live, some must be left to die. Game features had to be expanded or added or attenuated or even cut outright based on what my artwork could do with the old artwork in a reasonable time-frame.
Much of what had to be decided came down to what I could draw most easily. My strength lies with drawing GUI assets, items, tilesets, and background splash paintings. Animated sprites, on the other hand, I’ve avoided like the plague due to a bit of a case of burnout on the previous Gaslamp project over a matter of a few hundreds of frames of character animation that we won’t speak of again. Still, some new or revised animated sprite work may yet be necessary and time heals all wounds.
So far we’ve retained the original animated characters drawn by Bryan Rathman and Tim Wexford — and one by Jon Wofford, if my information is correct. Daniel Harris drew the original UI art and background paintings, Anthony Joas drew some of the original items, and Tim Wexford also drew the original tilesets … all of which I’ve almost entirely displaced with my own redrawn UI, items, and tiles, though in many cases the design direction of the original artists is strongly evident.
And let me not forget to thank the multi-talented Nicholas for his programmer art. Every dungeon, after all, needs a foundation.
In all, I hope that my efforts will present the best artistic product possible from a drawn-out, confused, and altogether educational experience.
old and new menu backgrounds
old and new dungeon tileset
Ahoy!
My name is David Baumgart and I’m the art guy here at Gaslamp. As such, I’m going to show lots of cool pictures unlike the boring text everyone else is going to post.
To start this off, I’d like to talk a bit about eyebrows. Yes, eyebrows! — In particular about how the eyebrows of the protagonist of Dungeons of Dredmor have evolved into the fearsome beasts they are.
The hero and most of the characters in Dungeons of Dredmor were designed and drawn by Bryan “Falthorn” Rathman who now works at some game developer called “Blizzard” or something, which means we’ll never, ever see him ever again. From what I hear (he did this work before I joined the team), he took inspiration from the stylized characters of old Lucasarts games, and you can see something like Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle in the whimsy of his work. See here the raw hero sprite, standing:
From Bryan’s sprite, I’ve done various splash screen paintings for the game. My interpretation of the character has evolved as time has passed (as has my digital painting skill, no doubt). It’s not always been easy, because his distorted style is unlike what I’ve worked with before. Every artist has their ways of doing things; As I’ve done freelance art for video games, I’ve had to work in styles set by other artists before I’ve arrived on the job, so a degree of flexibility is necessary and even a bit of provocative fun to prod me out of my usual style habits. Have a look at this collection of clips, paying particular attention to the eyebrows:
In that last image there, the eyebrow thing starts to take on a life of its own.
I was trying to liven things up a bit there; Dredmor is rather a silly game that deserves a spirited hero with equally heroic eyebrows. In truth, aside from trying to capture that sense of whimsy, the eyebrows came about as a matter of how to fit exaggerated facial expressions into the various small UI images. See here:
These are a health indicator, a couple skill icons, and an achievement (which, upon closer inspection, lacks the over-the-hair exaggeration of the mature form of the Hero’s Eyebrows).
I’ve drawn comics before and have found that you have to give each panel a reason for existing — a gag, or at least a mood. Obviously UI icons are a bit more subdued than comic-panels, but as the spirit of the game demands, ridiculously huge eyebrows have turned out to be an excellent device for making the Dredmor hero an expressive character all his own.
[And about last week: Remind me to never again do the web dev guy a favor and finish off his scotch. It doesn’t end well.]
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