I'm building a big dropship, but I cannot sprite well at all.
I'm looking to have some person or people basically color in the shape that I am working with.


Basically looking for something similar to the Darkstorm color scheme (black, grey, some blues or reds for detailing), though quite honestly I would rather have whatever person works on it choose if they can do a great job.

The ship I imagine has a few layers of armor plating, mostly big trapezoid shapes. The knobs on the bottom are mount points for a pair of anti-infantry lasers, which will be fully autonomous. The only features I care about keeping are the flat top and the control tower thing on the bottom.

I know nothing about spriting and gib-assembly, but so far the thing flies, has a mining laser to extract gold at range, and shortly will have an AI that can make it stay centered over the gold you selected while mining (without letting autoscuttle kick in).

Here is the mod that I am building it into:

Oh come on. At least try putting some basic shapes in. We need more to work off of than a monotone Final Destination.

A word of advice, the collisionbox for large sprites cuts off after a point, so you may want to break that shape into about 300x300 sections. Use invincible attachables if you like.

Well, you could manually do the AtomGroups pixel by pixel, but that would be more than a thousand pixels for that sprite.

Hmm, allright. I'll cut it into sections that make sense and build a greyscale ship out of armor and stuff.
Watch this space for that, sometime in the next 10 hours.

Allright, I've divided it up into armor sections, and I'm working to make them into separate attachables.
Next I need to draw the frame of course, and possibly the sub-frame core.



Is there any sort of attachable limit I need to be aware of when making this?
It's a little intense, but I've got some code to generate the attachable items' offsets, if I work it right, so I don't think I need to worry too much about the practicality of making a ship with a bajillion attached plates. However, getting people to make them look more like a ship and less like a color brick...

As part of the division process of course the ship went through many many layers, so here's a psd from photoshop of each separate part in its own layer.


Now, I'd like to point out that I have no real preference about the prettiness that gets added to it, but I was evidently thinking about the District 9 mothership when I doodled it out. If it's easier to draw that from scratch and totally ignore this sprite, that's cool too -- the sprite is not as important as the functions the ship has. The only limit is that it looks like it can take a beating, and will divide into lots and lots of gibby-bits.
For reference: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/814625/Cortex%20Command/district-9-trailer-grab.jpg


Oh, and because it's a little unfair to ask for things without any incentives, here is a screenshot and the current working directory.

I believe each attachable counts as a MOID, so the theoretical limit is 255, but to make it playable you probably want to keep it to the low 10s, like 12-16.

Well, attaching all 28 plates to the center makes it lag tremendously, though it breaks up nicely. I'll find some compromise with that later.
I wrote some python to print out all the INI code it needed, so that at least was not a waste of time.