Potential sprites?
I am as partial to graphics in my video games as the next guy, although the ability to draw escapes me. I have mentioned before that I was considering (still am) commissioning some good, high-quality art for the UI, menus, etc. for Space Mercs. Earlier, I was planning on using ASCII art (as seen in previous screens) as the main means of displaying the game, however.
After spending today goofing around in GIMP, I have started serious thinking about drawing some very retro art, instead. I don’t have the skills to produce really high-quality stuff, but what do you think about this? It might be a little bit more fun, right?
Note: All graphics are drawn and owned by me. Also, this is just a mock up, made by combining elements of my sprite sheet in GIMP. The game's tile engine is not actually implemented yet.
I think it’s cute! Maybe make it a game setting where you can switch between the two. Doesn’t Dwarf Fortress have a user-made plug-in that creates sprites?
I don’t know if it does. I know that Angband/Nethack and a lot of other roguelike allow you to switch between tiles and graphics, but from what I have seen, Dwarf Fortress only allows you to switch to using custom ASCII fonts that look like graphics because they have some fancy char sets. That said, I haven’t played DF in a few months, so I may be wrong! That would be pretty cool.
One problem with doing that, though, is that in this case I’m making the game for the Xbox. The limited screen resolution of most TVs is going to make it hard to display a similar number of tiles or text–I’ll have to totally resize the screen view each time, giving an advantage to text players (unless I blow the display font up to like size 26).
If I can figure out how to do it, I’ll try!