Instead of just sharing my art this time, I decided to write a full out blog post about my work on Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and my thoughts looking back on it two years later.
The moment I started writing about my work on the game all of my old nagging feelings and wishes about roguelike development came rushing back. The genesis of this blog -- my recent realization of the folly of condemning work to obscurity -- definitely put some fire behind my words as well.
This essentially turned into a post-mortem of my time contributing to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup's development back in 2010. If you are unfamiliar with DCSS, it is one of the few enduring open source roguelikes out there. Here's a link to the project's homepage:
http://crawl.develz.org
Note: you can click any picture to see a larger version of it.
DCSS
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup was the first project where I worked primarily on character design and creation. I decided to opt for something more akin to what games like Diablo do. My goal was to keep the theme of several character types intact, but to create largely unique art for each variant. In the picture you can clearly see how the designs in each row build off of each other. Several of these were already established and only had to be overhauled, but the elephants and the creatures on the bottom two rows all had no precedent in the game. Purely through iteration, 6 designs turned into 30.
LensCrafters should pay kickbacks to the developers of tile-based ascii roguelikes...
...and it doesn't have to be this way. I played a lot of DCSS on a laptop leading up to me working as an artist on it. I clearly enjoyed it enough to dump several weeks of development into it. I also have enjoyed other roguelikes such as DoomRL. Even if you're a fan of these types of games, let's take a step back. Try playing the tile version of an ascii roguelike for an hour on a modern computer at a reasonable display resolution in 2012. Now go apply ice packs to the burning craters that used to be home to your eyes. Besides the inevitable squinting to make out anything, the uninterrupted uniformity of the visuals takes quickly its toll on your vision. I'll admit I am partially to blame for this. My dungeon tile set is primarily dark, brown, and grey. Not exactly a great combination for eye health. In my defense my main mistake was expecting the momentum of my art overhaul to radically change how the art was displayed for the better. The older, super high contrast visuals were easier to make out, but I think they were an eye sore for different reasons.
Now that isn't to say I didn't have a very positive experience overall while working on DCSS, and there are some great dedicated people working on it. However, I have to admit I was extremely frustrated with the restrictions placed on tile development. There are many limitations you wouldn't expect. This is because everything is 99.9% subjugated to the design and limits of the ascii version. The following are three of the biggest issues I ran into:
- No sprite scaling. This is why if you run the game at 1080 the sprites are still at their native size of 32x32 pixels. It's possible to add scaling that retains hard edges in pixel art, but from what I saw there was zero drive to implement this.
- Animation frames hard-locked to turn count. I briefly pushed for untying animation frames from turn progression. That would allow any animation, such as torch fire, to play constantly instead of just being updated one frame per turn. It would also stop animations from flickering 1000 frames per second whenever you moved across a room. I was told that from a programming standpoint, it was going to be too much work to be worth it. If it had been introduced into the tech, there are so many graphical elements that could have been created alongside it (monster idle animations for one).
Here's a quick mock-up using the animation frames I created that are already in the game. Look how much just animating the torches independently of turn count enhances a standard scene. To tie this into my first point, you can also click the picture below to see how DCSS would look if all the tiles were scaled up 200%.
- Lighting effects (or any visual that spanned multiple tiles) were a big no no. Tying lighting to specific tiles (ie. torches) could have added a nice visual flair without adding a glut of work. The rationale that prevented the addition of a lighting system was that it would give tile players more tactical information than ascii players. An example would be seeing torchlight casting out from an unexplored area and being able to visually judge the distance to an unseen wall. Therefore, no art could extend beyond 32x32 pixels.
Lighting could go a long way in making the game more visually interesting. As it is, besides torches (my own addition to somewhat improve this), it is nearly impossible to avoid levels look very monotone and monotonous unless each tile could be hand-placed with tile art in mind. Because the game has been out for years there is simply too much created level content to go back and redo it all by hand. Not to mention when making prefabs, only wall *types* are chosen as they are created via text files. The RNG picks the art variation per tile (remember, the tiles are just window dressing for ascii).
My only regret related to this point is that I probably should have radically improved the brightness and contrast of the dungeon art once it was clear that a lighting system was never going to happen. At that point I already had spent several weeks working on DCSS art in my free time. All in all I had already made about 60 tiles. Before I left the project I agreed to let all my art be open source with no restrictions so that anyone could modify or use it as they saw fit. To this date, two years later, it has remained untouched. I truly hope someone takes my dungeon art and either overhauls it or replaces it with something better.
Here's another quick and dirty mockup I just made with very basic lighting effects to show how they can help add nice flourishes to the scene visually.
In closing
I truly respect the hard work of the guys behind DCSS. I feel we did great work together and while I've written at length about the things I wished for, there were definitely several small effects added to go along with my tiles thanks to the very talented Enne Walker. My criticisms are intended to try and make people reconsider their ideas of what is possible in this genre visually. Sure, graphics aren't everything...but there is already a substantial and ongoing effort behind creating and maintaining a working tile version that -- so why not take it further? The tile version should be free to grow and discover its own unique potential, balance with the ascii version be damned. I seriously doubt a venn diagram relating ascii and tile players would have much, if any, overlap. Even for that group of players, I'd like to think they'd appreciate having a slightly different experience when switching between the two builds.
So why not push the limits farther? Why not aspire to create better atmosphere and reach more people? Maybe I'm expecting too much from these existing projects. They are obviously bound to many existing expectations from the hardcore group that beats and re-beats the same game for years. I definitely think it is more likely that the real future of the indie side of this genre will be forged by new games like Dungeons of Dredmor and Binding of Isaac that branch off the roguelike concept and make something new. Imagine if a guy as talented as Derek Yu (
http://www.mossmouth.com) had free reign to make DoomRL (
http://doom.chaosforge.org) from the ground up instead of just working within its confines.
With all that said, I can't help but think that there are a ton of pixel artists out there who fill their blogs with awesome game art that will never get used for anything. Any one of them could answer the call if there was a boundary-pushing environment to work and innovate in.
