i agree, the boomstick is probably doable.

now, with the legs, it would look a lot more prowly, as exalion said, if they were further apart. then when someone gives you custom paths theyll move much better than they would trying to comply with current CC paths. the sprites are looking good, but could use a little less light grey i think. make the bone with grey through tan. and metal should be dirtier.
dont worry about the little things here, youll learn what looks good with time in spriting. and it is damn different from any other form of art. though it is simmilar to sketching.

anyway, on the coding side.
anything with stabbing/clubbing currently doesnt work, but thats only because we dont have full lua yet. lua should remedy this happily, so with the next build all your knives and clubs will work.
for now, all guns and explosives are very possible. you can direct explosions with clever code trickery [mostly based on emmitters and/or wounding an object] and anything that shoots just about anything else is doable. currently though, we cant arc sprites, but again this will be fixed by full lua exposure.

i would be glad to join in with some of this, and design for it if you like. i havnt sketched much in a bit, be good practice.

I'm glad this has been so well received!

i'm puzzling out some serpent stuff (get ready for some techno-savvy humanoids and robots) and the bear is hard to pin down visually.

here's an idea for a robot i had a while ago that i may incorporate into the serpent's ranks:



I see the serpents being small who design technology to do their fighting/dying for them. More will come. At some point i'd like to have something playable, but there is no rush. For now i'll just keep putting ideas here and accepting yours.

if you have any i would love to hear them.

i love how that looks, especially the head and torso. awesome. i can see the serpent organic troops in scale armour, and its cool.

i really like your ideas, and how they seem to fit together.
as long as all your work is getting written down and can be shown to us, im happy. dont lose any good ideas.

on the subject of ideas, i like the concept of weapons with more than one use, like the bears clubs. actually i just like most of the ideas youve had. the premise with the dropship's doors cutting through the ground is very plausible, as doors do this anyway. you would just have to make the ship sturdy enough to not get displaced instead of the ground, which would work if it impaled high friction spikes into the ground i suppose.

but sadly, most of your ideas involve full lua exposure to be possible. if i get time i might get to work on the sprites, but i probably wont have time.. either way, this is still very interesting.

I should have said this a long time ago but... you're art style is awesome. I love the way you made the first picture. How'd you do that effect?

@ZINC:
i use straight brushes (like a calligraphic brush) and let the brush factor in tilt, pressure and shape dynamics. It's basically a flexible digital palette knife then. I use a wacom intuos3 and photoshop cs3 and a special stylus for anything tilt-related. On everything else it's just the pencil tool in photoshop or a round brush. i dunno, i mix it up.

If you like that style, you should check out this guy, who is one of my idols.
http://www.ashleywoodartist.com/
and yeah, he is a man and his first name is ashley.
get all up out his grill.

EDIT: also, thanks a lot dude. i completely forgot to thank you. hearing that kind of thing is awesome for me. That goes for all of you who had nice things to say, that's a big reason i even keep thinking about this idea.

@GETI:
I like the idea that someone posted about making the whole "styx ferry" landing into a cutscene, then after the cutscene having the evidence (troops, trench and barriers) be wherever the order was placed. I could probably have more fun adding detail and showing the ship from different angles that way. i dabble in animating anyway, so an animated cutscene for whenever a super weapon like that is used would be a lot of fun for me to render personally, without depending on the engine.

If the engine can support the idea, then one day it would be cool to make it an in-game dynamic that was affected by physics and enemy fire and such. I see that particular dropship being the furthest from possible and the furthest from completion at this point though.

also, thanks for the offer to help out making the character sprites into an actor. I may make more sprites for weapons next. that's my next goal, but i need an actor first for scale purposes.

once again, everyone is invited to play with these ideas

yeah the styx is probably a good idea to just be a cutscene, but the normal drops would be cool in engine.
i might draw up some stuff for this later, or maybe sooner.. we'll see. id like to design some stuff, with your consent..

no one needs my consent to throw around ideas. Go nuts.

awesome. as soon as i get home from lunch ill draw something

Serpent things!



I have a few mechs in mind as well. these guys are really fun to think about so far. Bear stuff is officially on the back burner.

awesome, some organics.. i like the idea of the magnetically propelled weapons too, though it would imply they have an inordinate energy source.

I haven't checked back in a while... But I can say that in the current build, it's probably possible with Lua to make a scene with tunnels that will slowly drain the health of enemies and/or occasionally spawn some of these guys.
Awesome campaign mission, that'd be, from either side- either destroy the brain before it can get reinforcements, or else hold out against these tunnelers until those reinforcements arrive.

Also, regarding their ships- they're primarily captured Coalition dropships with stuff bolted on, right?
If so, mind if I try my hand at a sprite of one?

lazy sketch of a juvenile bear.
bloodied from hunting and fighting, with weapons. its a little different from your style, but anyway, here you go.

so the serpents use railguns? That is cool.

Also, for the bears, I think going for a shadowed face with bright eyes and huge teeth (like in your first concept sketch) would look excellent.

yeah i should have drawn eyes in.. ahwell.

Do your absolute worst, and don't stop at my ideas. I would love to see that happen. this goes for everyone who may want to sprite or code any of this.

Of course if it's usable for the mod at large, i may edit it to make it fit in, but i want ideas to travel in two directions here. It's not that i lack my own, but since i don't know how to do some of the most important steps in this creative process i understand that this concept is no longer fully mine. And i'm pretty happy about that.

Oh yeah, serpent update:

I've decided to take a page out of numgun's self-described "enormous beam rifle" book and have fun with that resource. It's pretty clear how everyone else's tech works and i want the serpents to be awe-inspiring in the opposite directions.

prepare for mechs. i have preliminary sketches in the works and i'll post them along with the secondaries when i'm done. I'm more excited about these mechs than i have been about very much in this mod so far.

Another thing i was thinking about: i want these guys to have an over-arching theme, sort of like the bird skulls was my jumping off point for the Crow. Now the bear's will be flesh and fur and bone and such, and the serpent's will be scales, plates and luminosity. Now, i've been knocking around the idea of a fourth and final faction.

at some point in the story of these tribes they will realize that they left something in the "cave of knowledge", which is a planet that they all pillaged in the past. I want to design the inhabitants of that planet that they will all pillage again vying for control of this unnamed power. and i want their theme to be musical instruments. I'm compiling a lot of GIS and Getty photos of odd musical instruments for source material. so that's some big mod news. not big enough to re-title the thread or anything, but, still, it's an idea.