User:Rotonen/tmw-cr-graphics-guideline

When you create pixel art for TMW CR projects please follow these guidelines to avoid personal frustration. Pixel art which does not follow these guidelines has no chance of getting into the game.

Licensing

• All graphics must be released under the GNU General Public License v2
  • For inspired and derived work you need to be able to provide us a full traceability chain of authors
  • Your work can be used for any commercial projects by anyone who desires to do so, but they have to properly attribute you as the author of it
    • This makes it incompatible with most commonly used Creative Commons licenses
    • Some people see this as an offending bit of licensing
    • Others see this as a chance of getting their name into a commercial project and getting great advertisement and visibility for their talent
• The pixel art must be made by you or derived from TMW's (or any other license compatible source's) existing graphics
  • We cannot accept pixel art ripped from undisclosed sources as this might get us into legal trouble
    • No matter what your interpretation of it might be: RPG Maker tiles and sprites are not free for us to use

Scale

• The player is approximately 1 x 2 tiles big
  • The exact pixel dimensions are not specified until we have a playerset

Universal Graphical Guidelines

• Outlines: 1px, Colored. We use 3 kinds of different outlines:
  • Ground level: should have the dullest colors (no outlines everything blends into each other) (Example)
  • Objects level: stands out from the ground level (with more contrast and maybe even a light outline)
  • Beings (players, monsters) and item icons level: stands out the most (heavily saturated with dark outlines)
• Perspective: top-down 45° view angle. (Example)
• Light Direction: South-West (Example)
  • Objects should be fully lit (Example)
• Wind Direction: From West to East
• Drop Shadows:
  • Large objects on outdoors tilesets have a drop shadow to the northeast
  • Flying creatures have a drop shadow incorrectly below them to visually aid locating them
    • The drop shadow for flying creatures is a plain circular shadow
  • Shadows should be pure black (#000000), and have an opacity of 30%, the edges have a opacity of 15%
• All submitted work should come with an author tag
  • Here goes an example of an author tag and a link to an article with all of them

Tilesets

• Do not use vanishing point projection. All objects have to be drawn in zero-point perspective (Example)
  • The perspective is the trickiest thing about tilesets and we cannot accept perspective conflicts
  • Some hints on perspective
• Sketch geometry in Inkscape, texturize later
  • This is not core oldfashioned pixel art, but we've taken this route because this is the path of least resistance for us and actually gets things done
• Walls, borders, etc. should have 8-way tileability
• Clearly organic parts should have variety tiles available, for example: grass, dirt, borders of organic things (water edge, sand/grass transition [8-way!])
  • Man made objects can be made more uniform, but should come with decal tiles for deterioration etc.
• Tileset objects larger than 1 x 1 tiles should go into a separate 2x, 3x, etc. tileset
  • For example an object 2 x 3 tiles large goes onto the 3x tileset
• All tiles on a single tileset should have the same warm / cold feeling
• When contributing to a tileset, match the used palette as much as possible to get the same feeling

Creatures

• You may mirror the creature sprites, as long as the lighting is correct
• There is no size restriction, please go berserk if feel it is appropriate

NPCs

• NPC's should be in the same style as the player sprites.
  • NPC's do not and should not be constrained by player pose and body shape.
  • Shadows should NOT be used for NPCs, shadows are reserved for large objects or flying creatures.
  • Some NPCs not in the same style as the player sprites may be accepted if appropriate.

Icons

• There are separate inventory icons and drop icons
  • Inventory icons are 32 x 32 pixels
  • Drop icons can be of any size
    • Drop icons of weapons should have the weapon sticking out of the ground

Equipment

• There is no playerset yet
• Weapon sprites will use motion trailing Example
• No thought work about equipment has been done so far