Some thoughts about new tiles.


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Slime Squisher

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Post Thursday, 8th February 2018, 08:17

Some thoughts about new tiles.

Roctavian is surely a great tile artist, but I think some tiles should be tweaked a bit. Maybe it looks like a "I don't want new tiles give me my favourite old tiles!!!", but I just want to discuss good decisions made while drawing old tiles that was lost in the new ones.

Cacodemon Image always was something fat, nasty and abominable - it reflects it's malmutating essence. The new Image shows it a bit "impy". Also cacodemon was color-coded with yellow and easily distinguishable among other monsters, now it lost it's unique appearance. Also it looks a bit like Image. Caco should be fatter and have more yellow pixels.

Ice fiend Image. The old Image looks more powerful: easily-distinguishable strong wings, torso of a power-lifter, all this details inflicts tremble upon player when you meet it in Ice Cave or see 4-5 fiends coming for you near the Antaeus hut. The new Image is a bit messy: bent knees and spikes on hands hides the strength of a demon.

Image don't have mosquito-like legs, now it looks like flying worm.

Image is a dried and dancing version of a Image. It should stop dancing. And wear a long robe. Previous Image was awesome in long robe.

And please, make Image more like Image! It's a KILLER!!

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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Thursday, 8th February 2018, 09:01

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

Ice Fiend and cacodemon would be fine without the glow imo. In particular, cacodemons are only 2s, they don't need to look super big and nasty. However, the glow doesn't fit with Crawl's low-colour art direction, and also makes the shapes less distinct. Maybe put wings back on the Ice Fiend if it still looks too weak.
That is NOT the torso of a power lifter. Power lifters look like this. They don't have super narrow waists. The old Ice Fiend's design is more like a bodybuilder. Bodybuilders may look impressive, but they're built for looks and not actual power (in fact, they're at their weakest when they're at shows, since they've just been dehydrating themselves to make their muscles more defined).

The mosquito tile has never had much resemblance to a real mosquito, and that's fine because a real mosquito's proportions don't lend itself to a 32x32 tile. I don't think more/bigger legs would improve it.

Old wight tile has a cooler costume, sure, but it also has a terrible pose. The new pose is fine.

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Slime Squisher

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Post Thursday, 8th February 2018, 09:50

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

duvessa wrote:That is NOT the torso of a power lifter. Power lifters look like this. They don't have super narrow waists. The old Ice Fiend's design is more like a bodybuilder.

Yep, exactly what I meant (but used the wrong word)!
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Friday, 9th February 2018, 00:43

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

I don't want to make a new thread for it, but as long as "aesthetic" monster tweaks are being talked about, I want to request(again, like the broken record I am) that titzitimtilzis be renamed back to shadow fiends. It gives them a straightforward language connection to other strong demons, and it makes them actually searchable via bots and the like(not being able to do this with the current monster is a terrible annoyance. No one remembers how to spell that name! That is a bad thing! Obscureness is not an inherent good!), which is especially relevant with how many people subscribe to beem now.

Every time I am playing and want good, up to date, specific info on this monster but it isn't immediately on the screen I have to go on a fucking spirit journey

Image
Image
Image
Image
I'm not gonna guess the right ~10 string random password to find this monster's knowledge bot info, and the knowledge bot search doesn't show me all the demons when I search "demon" either. so I guess let's see if I can get better results with beem.

Image

That's not really helpful either. Let's try the built-in search function.

Image
Image
Image

although I truly respect and admire the tile used to represent random pandamonium lords, that didn't work either. kobolds are hanging out in that listing just fine though.

would be mighty fine if they just had a typable name instead

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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Friday, 9th February 2018, 01:56

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

Shard1697 wrote:I don't want to make a new thread for it, but as long as "aesthetic" monster tweaks are being talked about, I want to request(again, like the broken record I am) that titzitimtilzis be renamed back to shadow fiends. It gives them a straightforward language connection to other strong demons, and it makes them actually searchable via bots and the like(not being able to do this with the current monster is a terrible annoyance. No one remembers how to spell that name! That is a bad thing! Obscureness is not an inherent good!), which is especially relevant with how many people subscribe to beem now.


Tit-missile, Feng-Shui, Hydrolemur... Feng-Shui is how I am calling jumping vampires in my mind right now, I really don't remember what they are called.

In general, I think that clarity is the better part of writing. For some time, "shadow" was bound with "summoning" (scroll of shadows, rod of shadows, shadow creatures, shadow demon). Now the scroll and the rod are gone. The shadow demon could be renamed to caller demon or summoner demon or door/gate demon. At this point, tit-mite could be renamed to shadow fiend, and there would be no problem with shadow creatures, since they would be the only shadow=summoning thing left, and would therefore not represent a trend. It could also be called "demon of darkness" or somesuch.
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Dungeon Master

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Post Saturday, 10th February 2018, 18:20

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

ololoev, thank you for your feedback! I continuously tweak my own tiles, and assessment/evaluation from players is part of my tile-making process. There's a few from this recent set that deserve changes.

Making the cacodemon fatter and yellower wouldn't be too hard, and makes sense: for the current tile, I wanted to make sure it had the rainbow motif around the hands, like mutagenic clouds/neqoxecs/shining eyes.

I have several failed drafts of trying to fit wings into the current Ice Fiend tile. One of my original goals when I started making tiles for crawl, many years ago, was to replace all straight-on-view tiles with three-quarters-view (with just a few deliberate exceptions). This process is still not done, but I'm edging closer.

The wight tile will have significant revisions at some point, but it won't look more like the old tile -- it was too powerful-looking (the pose, the brightness of the clothes) especially alongside other undead. Certainly part of solving that is updating other undead tiles, but those are on the way. I work slowly but my commitment to making tiles for crawl is strong, so it might be a couple years before you see any of the changes I've mentioned here.

Coincidentally, I teach a unit on pre-European Mesoamerican history, and I don't think Tzitzimitl is difficult to spell at all.

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Post Monday, 12th February 2018, 10:27

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

roctavian wrote:Coincidentally, I teach a unit on pre-European Mesoamerican history, and I don't think Tzitzimitl is difficult to spell at all.


The 2 might be correlated, I guess ~99.9% of crawl players aren't up-to-date in their "random cultural group" studies :)
I had no clue what a bultungin/tzitzimitl is, don't have a strong preference but if I had to choose I'd go for simple, descriptive names.
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Slime Squisher

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Post Monday, 12th February 2018, 13:51

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

Tziwhatever is okay name because it teaches us being attentive to details. Crawl is mostly about tabbing with axe/fireball and we don't pay attention to what we tab. When long and weird name introduced, it makes me feel "Woohoo, look whoom I tabbed tonight!" instead of grinding 10 kinds of X-demons. Sometimes I go to the wiki to see what it was.
Time goes and I learned that this nekololwhat and loroomg are neqoxec and lorocyproca. I'm still not that good in spelling tzitzimitzil, but I'm getting close.

What about problems with chat bot: you can spend 30 seconds by simply going to crawl.chaosforge.org and typing "tz" in the search field to get correct name. Since there are at most 10 monsters with hard names in crawl, total time spent is negligible.

Spider Stomper

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Post Monday, 12th February 2018, 18:07

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

I was just about to make a post on my thoughs on the new tiles as well. There is something to be said for distinguishability. At the moment it feels a bit samey to have a lot of the new tiles having that same arms splayed dancey crouchy legs. Everybody looks like they are doing the haka. if they aren't a high evasion humanoid monster there really isn't a need to make them look like they are dancing. For instance the ice fiend looks rather similar to the ice fiend devil. The new wraith and entropy weaver looks less distinctive, less powerful, looking too normal somehow. I don't see a problem with face forward monsters if they have special abilities or otherwise have interesting properties or are particularily powerful. I particularily like the new boggart and the new elves, though there is something odd about their faces I don't like. I'm not sure what it is since I rather like the merfolk and they are visually quite similar. Perhaps it the elven faces or hair. Too smooth, too pretty. Can't please everyone. It's a personal preference. Though the cacodemon looks totally different, I rather like the new tile as well; the old one looked like it had awful armpit hair. I also rather like that the priests all have stone tablets; an aid towards distinctiveness yet provides a visual theme, signalling to the player that the monster can use smite. So excellent job there.
Last edited by Plantissue on Thursday, 15th February 2018, 17:06, edited 2 times in total.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Monday, 12th February 2018, 18:14

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

Plantissue wrote:For instance the ice fiend looks rather similar to the ice fiend.
I think that's okay

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Post Tuesday, 13th February 2018, 01:26

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

Note that priests have a ^ symbol on their tablets, in case they forget who they worship.

Ice fiend and ice devil DO look quite similar. TBH I think someone like CanOfWorms should make an ice fiend, because I keep reinventing the same wheel with icy monsters.

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Post Tuesday, 13th February 2018, 01:34

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

Re wights, the new tile looks like it's wearing a buckler against a dark background.
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Post Tuesday, 13th February 2018, 01:36

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

roctavian wrote:Note that priests have a ^ symbol on their tablets, in case they forget who they worship.


I was about to start looking for whatever rune that could be :lol:
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Post Wednesday, 21st February 2018, 05:44

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

duvessa wrote:In particular, cacodemons are only 2s, they don't need to look super big and nasty.


But I still miss fat cacodemons. "Super big and nasty" isn't a requirement, but I want them to be corpulent!
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Post Saturday, 10th March 2018, 15:19

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

Death yak simulacra look like bipedal humanoids.

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Post Friday, 16th March 2018, 23:26

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

Shtopit wrote:Death yak simulacra look like bipedal humanoids.

Thanks, fixed that along with a bunch of others I found.

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Post Sunday, 18th March 2018, 15:13

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

Deep elf annihilator sprite looks weird, kind of like it's squatting (this is also noticeable to a lesser degree with the other new elf tiles)
annihilator2.png
annihilator2.png (968 Bytes) Viewed 6131 times

This is what it looks like if the legs are moved one pixel in, a lot better imo
annihilator3.png
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Tuesday, 20th March 2018, 22:41

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

Maybe it's already been handled, but I met what I think was a graphic glitch while playing in Abyss

Image

Another thing I found: many Draconians show wings, but only a few actually fly. Maybe the tiles could make this clearer, since it's relevant for shatter/tornado/airstrike. I also believe that certain Tiamat colours don't have wings and don't showcase weapons, but I would have to check that one.
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Post Thursday, 29th March 2018, 23:56

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

Concerning tiles: lignification removes sharp claws, but the tile for lignified creatures that have claws:3 explicitly shows claws. It would be better if lignification tiles never showed claws. Because of the tile, I thought that claws remained sharp with treeform, until someone explained it to me in Tavern.
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Post Tuesday, 3rd April 2018, 21:34

Re: Some thoughts about new tiles.

About wights: someone on Reddit wrote that the blue colour distracts from their weapons. Since wights tend to be the first enemy you meet brandishing blue two-handers, I think that the concern makes sense: the tile should draw more attention to the weapons. Making the robe yellow, light brown, red, or orange might help.
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