Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Creature Graphics as Tokens

I took a break from commands and started changing some of the graphics around. I spent a good deal of time last night experimenting with different ways to draw Creature graphics. A full body, colored creature takes a lot of time to draw and can look awkward without animations. ASCII might be good enough for some people but it doesn't really portray what a Creature is very well. So I decided to shoot for something in the middle and I'm not sure how popular this idea is going to be.

Creatures are now represented in game as tokens. They basically look like coins with a simple drawing of the Creature's head in the middle. The Creature's image is overlaid on the token at runtime. So for instance I can have a goblin head portrayed on a rough looking, white token to represent a goblin skeleton. In my opinion it looks a lot better than ASCII but is a far cry from being realistic. But at a glance the player should be thinking "Yep, that's a goblin alright". Here's a screenshot of the token in action:

Photobucket

1 comment:

  1. I like the "token" thing. It doesn't really look "right" though... The tokens look good, but don't really fit the visual style of the background.

    But it sounds like a nice, simple, effective placeholder that should be trivial to remove when the time comes.

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