Rogue/Roguelike to practice tiles on?

[guest509]

  Hey you guys I was wondering if there are any versions or Rogue out there that I could practice my spriting on. I seem to remember a version of Rogue that had tiles in a bitmap I could edit.

  Anyone remember that one? If not are there any other games that fit the bill, with an easily editable bitmap/tilesheet. I think Brogue has that, right?

[Darren Grey]

T-Engine games like ToME are very easy to edit the tile files in.  And I think DCSS uses a simple tilesheet.

[guest509]

  Looks like Angband and variants do a simple tilesheet as well, which is neat. Those games are pretty huge though. I was thinking of just, you know, like 50 or so images. Not THOUSANDS. :-)

  AliensRL has a .png font file. You can edit that, but then the text on screen changes as well as the tiles. No good.

[Holsety]

Try Infra Arcana or The Slimy Lichmummy.
And show us the result if you feel good about it 

[NON]

Try Infra Arcana

If you edit Infra Arcanas you don't need to worry about color. Could be good if you want to start easy.

If you do, please show me the result. Maybe it's an improved version!

[guest509]

  Lol, it is highly unlikely I'll produce anything worth showing anyonce. I was looking for something to practice on because I definitely need the practice. My skills are weak sauce.

EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions. Slimy and Infra are perfect. Low tile count. Easy to edit.

[NON]

Yeah Oryx did a great job with the tiles anyway.

[guest509]

He sure did. The profile look is cool. Icons work good for Roguelikes I think.

[guest509]

  Hey NON how does color work in your game? As it relates to the tileset.

  I've not played too much, but do different colors of the same enemy sprite denote different baddies? Like is the dog sprite used for jackal, wolf and dog but with just a color swap?

  If so does your code just change the white pixels to a certain color, or are all nontransparent/black pixels changed to whatever color?

  I could figure it out experimentally, but I figured I'd ask.

[NON]

do different colors of the same enemy sprite denote different baddies? Like is the dog sprite used for jackal, wolf and dog but with just a color swap?

Yeah some monsters share the same tile, but use different color. It's like it normally works for ASCII.

If so does your code just change the white pixels to a certain color, or are all nontransparent/black pixels changed to whatever color?

In all public versions so far (uses SDL), the method for coloring the images (whether it's ASCII or tiles) is this:
* Draw a solid rectangle with the color of the monster/item/feature
* Draw the ASCII/tile image on top of the rectangle, but draw only the black part

So it's actually not the tile itself that gets drawn, but everything except the tile

In the ongoing version (uses SFML), I converted the images to png and made the background transparent. The method for drawing them is straightforward now - Just draw the image blended to the color of the monster/item/feature. There's two huge benefits of this.
1. It avoids the color keying of the previous method, I think it was pretty processor-heavy to pick out which pixels to draw. It was especially noticeable for the bigger font sizes (more pixels to color-key).
2. Colored backgrounds! With the old method, the background color was always the background color of the font/tile sheet. But now I can draw any color I want. One use I got of this was that I removed the little blue underscore that was under monsters to indicate unawareness of the player. Instead they have a blue background when they haven't found you yet. Since there's now space available where the unawareness bar was, I added a life bar instead, which I really like (it gets more tactical if you can determine the situation).

[guest509]

  Done some messing about. This is what it looks like. Color switching is a bit of an issue. If you leave in the original grey it acts as transparent, so when your engine does the coloring it will bleed through. I threw together 'ye old grass tile' common in old school RPG's. Throw on a different color and it becomes road, grass, dirt, blood, etc...

  If you wanted someone to do a full tile set, it'd probably be better if each unique object, enemy and terrain feature called to a unique sprite. That way you can edit them individually and not play transparency tricks, you know?

  The transparency thing makes a good exercise in limitations though. Like the spider sprite is going to be a transparent body (later colored by your game engine) with huge red spidery eyes peaking out. Or at least that's the plan.

  No transparency tricks. Pretty clean.


  Some tricks. Multi-use grass tile.


  Many tricks. Shrub and Tree use grass tile type things in the background...too busy?



  Note that making the backgrounds transparent for the wolves and player doesn't work. The backgrounds are always grey, they don't take on the color of the underlying terrain. :-(

EDIT:  Hey NON, it looks like your game is drawing not just the black part, but rather it lays down a background color then draws EVERYTHING BUT the grey color of your original sprites. So when spriting anything you want to switch colors needs to be that grey/transparent color.

[guest509]

  Hey NON is there anyway I can get graphics to display at 8x12 font? That's the best rez for me, but editing the font/sprite sheet for those resolutions ends up with the same issue I had for aliens, it edits the font as well as the game tiles. :-(

  Here's another pic, some small updates. Better dog sprite. One issue though I can't really see everything I want too. Like the dog has teeth and red eyes, but it's too small to see. Maybe I'll make the sprites at 8x12 and blow them up. You'd see everything then...I'll think on it.

[guest509]

  Here's a better pic. I fixed the graveyard by matching the background colors to that which seems to always surround the graveyard (grass green). I've also been able to get the dog teeth a poppin'.

  I made the player and dog backgrounds transparent so you can see that their background color does not match the underlying tile. I can't cheat, like I did with the graves, by matching colors because the dogs and the player are always moving to different terrains.

  Note I'm not showing my zombie and spider sprites. They're fucking terrible. Even by my low standards.

[guest509]

  I think that the biggest problem spriters make is they put too much detail that cannot really be seen.

  For example the Dungeon Crawl sprites are fantastic. They really are. The Gervais tiles are great too, I used them for Cardlike. But if you blow them up to 64x64 on your screen (they are natively 32x32) they look mind blowing. Rendered at 32x they look pretty nice, but you can't really appreciate them unless you blow them up a bit.

  My 'player' sprite above can use a bit of work I think, and I'll not compare myself to the crawl and Gervais sets, but like them the resolution hampers the sprites a bit. You'll never notice that the look on my player's face is one of fear, looking up with a frightened expression. Away from his weapon. If you get a gun you'll see he looks down, away from his gun. I'm trying to give the impression he's all twisted up and looking in all directions freaking out.

  Trying to display emotion with few pixels that can't even be seen anyway makes you respect how the old 8/16 bit guys used to do things. Look at the expressions of Megaman. That was a 16x16 sprite and only 4 colors. One advantage though was that it was rendered at a resolution so that every pixel mattered, you could see every one. In the pic above the dog's eyes are red, and the detective/player's jacket has buttons. You just can't see it.

  :-)

[Holsety]

 I think that the biggest problem spriters make is they put too much detail that cannot really be seen.

  For example the Dungeon Crawl sprites are fantastic. They really are. The Gervais tiles are great too, I used them for Cardlike. But if you blow them up to 64x64 on your screen (they are natively 32x32) they look mind blowing. Rendered at 32x they look pretty nice, but you can't really appreciate them unless you blow them up a bit.

So true. John Attea (the guy who did the tiles for Crawl) did a blog post that said more or less the same thing:
http://johnattea.blogspot.nl/2012/08/looking-back-on-dungeon-crawl-stone-soup.html

Sadly rendering tiles at double size means that your visible play area shrinks by a LOT. (one reason why ASCII is so nice) Example of a game that messed up in this regard is Dungeons of Dredmor. Yes, nice sprites, too bad a quarter of a tiny room takes up the entire screen!

 My 'player' sprite above can use a bit of work I think, and I'll not compare myself to the crawl and Gervais sets, but like them the resolution hampers the sprites a bit. You'll never notice that the look on my player's face is one of fear, looking up with a frightened expression. Away from his weapon. If you get a gun you'll see he looks down, away from his gun. I'm trying to give the impression he's all twisted up and looking in all directions freaking out.

  Trying to display emotion with few pixels that can't even be seen anyway makes you respect how the old 8/16 bit guys used to do things. Look at the expressions of Megaman. That was a 16x16 sprite and only 4 colors. One advantage though was that it was rendered at a resolution so that every pixel mattered, you could see every one. In the pic above the dog's eyes are red, and the detective/player's jacket has buttons. You just can't see it.

  :-)

It's true. Much credit has to be given to ye olde spriters. Some people might laugh at the sprites of Chaos (1985, ZX Spectrum), but it's surprisingly hard to recreate his work yourself...