Official art tasks
In this thread I'm asking, as a developer, any artists to volunteer for specific art-related tasks in Hedgewars. As we're not really artists ourselves, so we highly appreciate any help in this area.
This thread is about tasks specific to the official Hedgewars artwork, not add-ons.
We are tracking all art requests (and “art bugs”) on our bugtracker:
http://issues.hedgewars.org/buglist.cgi?component=Art&list_id=1804&product=Hedgewars&resolution=---
In this thread, I'm only highlighting important tasks:
Highlighted tasks
Improve air mine graphics
We're not too happy with the current appearance of the air mine.For my taste, they are too high-tech and too low on sillyness. Also, they don't look great.
We're open to replacing air mines with something different (that is, the appearance, not their behaviour), but we haven't really agreed on something. Feel free to come up with your own ideas and discuss! Random ideas to replace air mines have been floating around:
- Flutter-Bye (“Zerschmetterling” in German): A robotic explosive butterfly
- A flying can of fine melon juice with an antenna (concept art by alfadur: https://i.imgur.com/Le70kZi.png)
- Anything on flapping wings, as long it's silly (maybe a mine, or a donut?)
But if you can draw us an air mine which just looks nice, we will probably like that, too.
Currently, air mines are based on 32×32 pixel images with 16 animation frames, but we can of course change that, if required.
One important aspect of air mines is that they can either be idle or in “chase” mode. I like to have a clear visual distinction to see whether the air mine is in chasing mode or not.
Please read Air mines in advance to fully understand how they work.
Bug tracker entry: http://issues.hedgewars.org/show_bug.cgi?id=268
More hedgehog animations and images
Currently, hedgehogs are animated very little. We have more animated hats than hedgehog animations. This is absurd!
Basically, we are happy about contributions to anything a hedgehog might do.
Incomplete list of ideas:
- Poisoned-looking hedgehog
- Any form of reaction or emotion, such as panic, shame, pride, ridicule, anger, etc.
- Funny idle animations which play at random. (Examples can be found here: https://hedgewars.org/node/5364)
- Calling in an air strike
- Talking
- Exhausted-looking or bruised-looking hedgehog when it is low on health
- Winning animation which is a bit more sophisticated than just a big grin
- Loser animation (not sure if we ever use it)
- Hedgehog is close to cliff (/node/8963)
- (insert own ideas here)
We might also find use for static hedgehog images if they serve a purpose.
Current hedgehog imagery can be found in /Data/Graphics/hedgehog.png and /Data/Graphics/Hedgehog.
Bugtracker entry: http://issues.hedgewars.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37
Map requests
- Redo Sticks map (http://issues.hedgewars.org/show_bug.cgi?id=177). There is already a WIP map which you can build upon (see link)
- Redo Bubbleflow map to make it conform to Hedgewars Graphics Style (http://issues.hedgewars.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178)
Other requests
- More Forts to give players more fort choices. In 0.9.23, we have 16 forts. I aim for 20.
- Create Voicepacks in your own language. As of 0.9.24, we have 5 languages: English, Spanish, Ukrainian, Russian and Polish.
- More Graves. I'm aiming for 60 graves at least. As of 0.9.23, we're currently at 39.
- Add a few new sounds for weapons (bug 676)
Things to remember
If you want to help with any of these tasks, please take a few things in mind:- By posting in this thread, we assume you are granting us permission to use your work in Hedgewars. If you don't like this, do not post in this thread; you can always create another thread anyway
- By default, artwork in Hedgewars is released under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2. We also have accepted CC BY and CC0 in the past.
- Stick to our style guide.
- You are of course free to use any of the existing artwork in Hedgewars because all previous artwork was contributed by other people who agreed to share
- If you can, please use vector graphics editors to creae your images. If you're done, export to PNG and give us both the PNG and SVG file. SVG files are much easier to edit, should there be a problem
- If we include your contribution, you will be credited and have our eternal gratitude
- Informations for contributors can be found in the Hedgewars Knowledge Base (HWKB)
Post in this thread if you offer your help or have comments on the list above.
Hi, I am a Hedgewars developer.
if you think that any of my stuff is worthy including, then go ahead.
oh hi
Thank you!
But none of your contributions really are about completing one of the tasks listed above.
As for the forts, graves and voicepacks, I have already commented on your stuff a long time ago, you know my opinion. Sorry about that.
Hi, I am a Hedgewars developer.
Hello,
I find pink, nose-less hogs unattractive. Here's how I imagine hedgehogs should look like:
To take it for a spin, save the image as
/usr/share/games/hedgewars/Data/Graphics/Hedgehog/Idle.png
Note that this is just a demo: A bit off, lacking in color, clashing with a few hats that use pink. But you get the picture.
If hogs were nicer, and in a vector graphics format, maybe there would be more interest in working on the animations.
Heh. If you are serious about this, you would need to replace all the hedgehog images in the game. There are quite a lot of them, it's not just the idle animation.
If done well, this could at least become some sort of total conversion.
I don't think sheepluva, nemo or unC0Rr would be OK with changing the color of hedgehogs, it's far too ingrained in Hedgewars.
As an add-on, it might become something (it's just a ton of work), but probably not official.
Yeah, this is a very good and valid point. A lot of things which should have SVG sources don't have them.
So if someone wants to do a re-do of hedgehogs, but with SVG sources, that would be very great and is indeed much needed. But I think simply a more detailed version of the current hedgehogs (not radical changges) would already help a lot.
Obviously, this would be quite a challenging task, however. It might even deserve its own thread.
Hi, I am a Hedgewars developer.
Dismissed right off the bat. Never mind then.
You're welcome to package the brown hogs as a DLC mod for people who share your opinions.
BTW, telling people to put things in /usr/share... whatever is needlessly complicated, not to mention not all distros would necessarily put it there, and certainly not windows.
~/.hedgewars/Data/Graphics/Hedgehog/Idle.png
My Documents/Hedgewars/Data/Graphics/Hedgehog/Idle.png
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Oh, what the heck. 1PLXzL1CBUD1kdEWqMrwNUfGrGiirV1WpH <= tip a hedgewars dev
Oh. an addendum to the above. Some time ago, as I mentioned to you, I did a basic experiment at tinting the hedgehog.
It involved a mask layer for things to protect (eyes, spike edging) and desaturating the rest as much as possible in terms of common colour.
I still have an XCF file lying around. I halted because I'd have to do all the other hog images and it was a pain to desaturate them all plus indicate masking. But if someone completed that, we could then turn your hog image into a mask, and ensure the paws looked right using tinting.
In the interim you could just add it as a mask image just with pink paws.
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Oh, what the heck. 1PLXzL1CBUD1kdEWqMrwNUfGrGiirV1WpH <= tip a hedgewars dev
Here's something I made a while back that some of you will probably find useful:
You could use this to make more poses for the Hedgehogs in GIMP or Photoshop or whatever you use. It won't be as clean as creating new sprites in Inkscape, but I recall askeing around at one point and was told that the original SVGs for the hedgehog sprites have been lost for a long time.
I tried to do some clever color maths to figure out how to mix colors and get the original color and then transform it easily. The problem is that base hedgehog has different hue than spikes, so it's impossible to do with just one color mask. You need at least two given colors, otherwise the spikes will look weird if you want to use the same mask that changes them from pink to purple.
Might sound like overcomplicating, but I used a mix of additive/subtractive blending in my game and the nice results I got inspired me to try it in Hedgewars. Well, I might experiment with it more.
My themes / Theme Editor / Code contributions /
Dank
Link is broken.
Off-topic, but, you have a game? Linky and/or screenie?
mikade
Hedgewars Developer
WRT different base colour - what I settled for was subtracting out as much as possible. The range of tints was still pretty large IMO.
I was using faa4ef as the common colour. The resulting range of colours looked pretty decent I thought. The spikes were darker versions of whatever face was - my main issue was blending of the overlay - I'd tried preserving the purple lines and it just looked pretty bad with very dark colours very pixelated - it might have worked ok with a bit more blending alpha though. I have the XCFs lying around if you wanna fiddle with the result.
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Oh, what the heck. 1PLXzL1CBUD1kdEWqMrwNUfGrGiirV1WpH <= tip a hedgewars dev
My themes / Theme Editor / Code contributions /
Dank
@Star and Moon: Looks useful. Still no SVG, but better than nothing. I could add that into the misc directory of the Hedgewars repository, if that's OK for you.
I like the idea of creating some “template” files for Hedgewars artwork.
Oh, one thing I like to say. It should be obvious, but just to clarify:
From this point on, by posting anything Hedgewars-related in this thread, we assume you are granting us permission to use your work in Hedgewars. For artwork, this implies we would release it under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2. (Note: Such a license is also used by projects like e.g. Wikipedia.)
Hi, I am a Hedgewars developer.
Whether pink or not I think this design is really nice. Having that nose makes it look more like a hedgehog to me and, if the color is to remain pink, the nose helps distinguish the hogs from Kirby.
On the other hand, I find pink hogs already distinguishable from Kirby. In fact their source is by any and every means from
the Russian "Смешарики" show.
(Anyway, this is gonna be off-topic, but would you like to play some Hedgewars with me? I can send you my DLC package in case you want to play on custom themes and with custom stuff from the get-go).
On the topic of Air Mines... what about something silly and low-tech like a regular mine attached to a balloon with tape or string?
https://github.com/Ethanol6/HedgewarsImages/raw/main/Assets/Weapons/AirMineConcept.png
https://github.com/Ethanol6/HedgewarsImages/raw/main/Assets/Weapons/AirMine2.png
It's an interesting idea, although seems to make more sense when the mine isn't moving around. Chase gets tricky. What's doing the movement? Mine? Magic balloon? If the balloon is doing it, that becomes the X/Y of the object, and it probably should have collision and drag the mine around behind it and animate accordingly. And now there's ambiguity as to triggering distances if it's the balloon. So. Probably not the best part to use.
If it's the mine, the balloon gets dragged and has to be tilted. And it seems like it would need a mechanism bolted on to the mine (or evil pulsating balloon) for the "blinky chase light" or some similar animation like a little motor with a fan and sparks. And of course whatever piece is not the collision part, would be "in front" of terrain.
I feel this needs a bit of clarification and would definitely be more work to animate. Something like a flying critter that chases you might be cute and easier to drop-in.
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Oh, what the heck. 1PLXzL1CBUD1kdEWqMrwNUfGrGiirV1WpH <= tip a hedgewars dev
for hurrah.png I thought maybe if they throw confetti...
Hey
What about this air-mine?
https://imgur.com/lvztD1Z
Needs some details ofc... but...
Hedgewars Tournament 2015
Nice one! I like the spikes. Although I think the contast seems a little low. I wonder what it’ll look like in an actual game with the realistic scale. In-game, air mines are obviously not that large.
Also, high detail might be contraproductive since in the game, air mines won’t be much larger than hedgehogs anyway.
Hi, I am a Hedgewars developer.