The first sprites of our own
The player character got its own art: a doll made by Jhonatan, our artist, with a full suit of armor (the Dark Armor) and the sword swing. Until now every hero was assembled from sprites borrowed from LPC, a free art library.
Why
The idea was to build the whole game with borrowed art and swap it out later. Jhonatan sent a first batch early so we’d have the minimum to work with and find out soon what the rest of the art will demand. It paid off: his format is quite different from LPC’s, and it was better to learn that now than with a hundred finished sprites.
How it works
The doll is built from two 16 px units. The head takes the upper one, and body and legs share the lower one, 8 px each. The armor comes in pieces (helmet, body, legs) and each piece fits by the center of its strip. The helmet has no animation of its own: it just moves up or down 1 px along with the head, so instead of one sheet per movement the script reads the head’s height on each frame and moves the helmet.
The sword is an effect drawn separately, centered on the character, with a reach of one unit in the attack direction. On the upward swing the character is drawn on top of the sword. There are three directions, down, side and up, and left is the mirrored side.
We didn’t rewrite the doll. A script converts what Jhonatan delivers into the same sheet layout the game already used, with the anchors already applied, so the artist keeps delivering the way he prefers and the character code barely changed.
Equipment stays the same underneath. Metal helms, plate or mail armor and plate pants show up as the Dark Armor, and daggers and swords as the new sword. A piece that has no drawing yet doesn’t show up. Monsters still use LPC art for now, and you can switch the hero back to LPC by changing one line of config.
The new doll is 32 px tall, against about 48 for LPC. It’s drawn at 1.5x, which on screen comes out to exactly 3 pixels per art pixel, with no blur.
Next step
Armor on the swing, hit and casting animations, and the bow, so the Mage, Archer and Acolyte get their own look too.
Changes
- Own art in the paper doll: player, Dark Armor and sword from Jhonatan
The artist's first sprites (32x32 player in two 16 px units, armor in pieces, sword slash FX) live as delivered in assets/art/src and are converted by tools/art_import.py into sheets with the sprite_spec layout, pivots baked in, so PaperDoll keeps working unchanged. dolls.json gains a style switch (mushrog/lpc) and a look_map that translates worn LPC gear into the new art. Mobs stay LPC. Visual public material is now allowed.