WIP [LaS] Light and Shadow - Art Discussion

Cervator

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We talked some about it on IRC earlier and I realized the availability of multiplayer doesn't necessarily mean we should start with two-player / two playable faction support - I'm stuck in structural mode where the codebase just differs substantially, but that doesn't mean gameplay has to :)

It might still be worthwhile to have the "first testable" just be the player against mobs & environment. Unless we sort of just bump into full multiplayer support right away (all players could always be on the same side this early)

I need to spend some time looking at the milestones/issues/MoSCoW stuff again soon to get into the swing of content coding (and to provide more exact feedback). As soon as I've got the restructure stuff off my back I'll do what I can to help code some L&S functionality.
 

glasz

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I'll do the black queen next . SuperSnark : question regarding her feet : it seems like she doen'et have one foot but to feet, plateform shoes like. Is that correct?
 

Cervator

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On one of the early concepts it looks like the black queen has a plain base, newer concept added the split in the bottom which does kinda make it look like platform shoes.

We might have to wait a bit for an answer, it looks like SuperSnark is in Atlanta for some reason - unsure when he'll be back, but probably relatively soon :)
 

SuperSnark

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That's correct. Sexy, stripper shoes. In the concept art I sort of saw them fused together at the heels. But if you want to make them independent to give her a nice sassy walk, that'd be cool. Or you can force her to hop. I'll leave that up to you. :)
 

Cervator

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Bump - just to get it in here we now have https://github.com/Terasology/LightAndShadowResources for submitting art resources separately from the game logic & type definition in the main module. That way we can start playing with the assets again, which are being updated by glasz and put in the game module by synopia :)

As a reminder there are a couple related milestones on GitHub - a "whenever" type with extras most of which are art and a first goal to make it testable. Several items in there should be doable and viewable by using the new module now. SuperSnark there are a few in there for you too, and your third milestone still needs issues :)
 

SuperSnark

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Light and Shadow – Fortress Frenzy
(Castle Dash?, Quick Castles?, Other ideas welcome)

Last Friday in IRC we discussed a new possible game mode for Light and Shadow. This new game mode is highly influenced by the capability and potential of our minion AI. The game will be for two players or for the player vs. an enemy AI. This definitely has potential for more than two players, but for the time being, this is not under consideration.

The basic premise is this that the player will work to defeat his opponent (AI or player) by building and completing a castle for his King. This will be accomplished in three phases.
Personally, I think this idea should supplant the previous “Kill the King” game mode since it is a bit more unique and hopefully more interesting / challenging. This would still be a step toward the ultimate version of Light and Shadow.

Phase 1: Capture Territory (aka Painting the Roses Red).
In order to build the castle, the player must claim territory. Players may only build structures on territory they “own”.
To begin, the player picks a side, red or black. The player starts on a grayscale map. The player opponent or enemy AI opponent starts at a moderate distance away. Players start by “tagging” territory around them with a paintbrush. This will turn the terrain from grayscale to the color of the player’s team. Once a certain amount of terrain is obtained the player can begin to build on that territory.

Notes on Tagging:
· Tagging involves using the paint brush to “spray” an area of voxels with a particular color.
· A specified number of voxels will be required to build something.
· Each thing that is built will require its own unique amount of territory to build.
· Ideally, tagging territory will also cause flora/fauna to grow that is unique to that team’s color.

Notes on gameplay during this phase:
· Players may turn the opponent’s territory to his own, and vice versa – not just empty, unclaimed territory.
· Players may attack/kill each other. Death will result in a “time out” for the entity that dies. Respawn after X seconds. Respawn will be near, but not precisely on, the original spawn point.
· Players may attack/kill each other’s King. The King will respawn after X seconds near his original spawn point.
· Kings must remain in their own territory once territory is claimed and will NOT move to unclaimed or enemy territory. They cannot be commanded to attack, but will defend themselves if attacked.



Phase 2: Create Your Army (of workers and soldiers)
One enough territory is acquired players may then harvest material to build a Toy Box. The Toy Box is a minion spawner. Players may choose to build Knight Box or Pawn Box. Pawns can both build and defend themselves and can be commanded to attack. Knights cannot build and can actively seek out enemies or structures to destroy or guard areas.

Notes on Toy Boxes:
· Players must harvest X amount of wood and X amount of stone in order to build a Toy Box.
· Toy Boxes are specific to minion type – Knight or Pawn.
· An equal amount of resources are required to build both types – leaving the choice as a strategic one to the player, as to whether they should build worker types or fighter types first and in what quantity.
· The number of Toy Boxes created is up to the player.
- Once a structure is created, the land under it cannot be tagged by an opponent. The structure must first be destroyed.
-Toy boxes can be destroyed by opponents.

Notes on Pawns:
· Primary “builders” of the Castle and the only pieces that can build structures
· Slower movement than Knights
· Weaker attacks than Knights
· Will defend themselves if attacked
· Will not attack on their own, but can be directly commanded to attack
· Pawns cannot attack enemy structures

Notes on Knights:
· Faster movement than pawns
· Stronger attacks than pawns
· Will defend themselves if attacked
· Will attack on their own if allowed and can be commanded to attack
· Knights can attack enemy structures




Phase 3: Build the Castle
As long as the player has the required amount of territory and at least one pawn available to build, he can direct his pawn(s) to begin building the castle. The pawns will actively harvest nearby stone resources and use the blocks gathered to begin construction of a castle according to a pre-defined blueprint. Once the castle structure is completed, the King will enter the castle. The King must remain alive in the castle for X seconds and then the player wins.

Notes on gameplay during this phase:
· Players and Knights may always attack an opponent’s castle, brick by brick, slowing the building process of the enemy.
· Players and Knights may also attack Toy Boxes to slow the enemy.
· Players can create defensive structures, such as walls, to impede enemy AI.
· Pawns will always work as quickly as they can to build the castle. If a brick or bricks are damaged or destroyed, they will repair or replace the bricks in the order of creation according to the blueprint, meaning earlier destroyed bricks will have priority.
· A completed castle brick should be somewhat more durable than a standard Terasology brick, allowing the player more time to defend the castle.



Parts needed:

Character Models:
1. Red/Black Pawns
2. Red/Black Kings
3. Red/Black Knights
4. Red/Black Fool (Likely Player Character)

Animations for Pawns, Kings, Knights, Fools:
1. Take Hit
2. Swing weapon
3. Move

Additional Animations for Pawns, Fools:
1. Dig
2. Build (Hit with Hammer or Trowel)
3. Pick up/place? (Thinking of block stacking for the Castle)

Additional Animation for Fools:
1. Paint (This could be in the form of waiving the brush, using it like a mop, or "shooting" with it)

Minion AI:
1. Build a structure
2. Defend Self
3. Attack structure
4. Attack player or opponent

Player Tools:
1. A digging tool (trowel or shovel in the shape of a spade or reversed heart)
2. A paint brush tool (brush tip in the shape of a spade or diamond)
3. A building tool (hammer, in the shape of a club, or heart)
4. A killing tool (sword, an elongated spade or diamond)

Terrain / World:
1. Black/ Red checkerboard tiles for terrain
2. Black /Red flora
3. Black /Red fauna

Toy Boxes
(Alpha stage these are likely blocks)
 

glasz

Active Member
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You havent specified what happens when the king dies. My suggestion : one minute of mourning silence (and immobility) is observed while the team anthem (or some mourning anthem, like the lone sad trumpet of westerns) is played.
 

Skaldarnar

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Hey guys,

I'm just going to throw in all the thoughts and ideas that came to my mind the last days thinking about L&S. Some are targeted on balancing issues, the latter focus on (possible) enhancements of game mechanics. I know that they possibly don't fit into early alpha or even beta stage, but I wanted to share them anyways.

Impact of territories on enemy units
To prevent players to rush within the first minutes and end the game we can make use of the territorial claims. Units standing on opponent's territory will get damage constantly (quite a lot in the beginning to give defenders a real advantage, but can be reduced by some kind of research/better armor).
Furthermore, I wonder if tagging should need some kind of resource, maybe the souls of defeated enemies (kind of meta-resource).

Block Phyics
As we are talking a lot about building castles with walls and towers, the should give the player a real advantage against the opponent. Therefore, the enemies access to the fortifications must be limited/restricted. For example, it should be impossible to use just dirt blocks to build stairs up a wall or bridge over a moat (I mean these 1-blocking-diagonal-floating-stairs).

How can we achieve this? One way would be to have every block require an amount of support from surrounding blocks. The "support flow" will be high from a lower block to a block on top, slightly reduced to a block on the sides or below and really small for diagonal connections. You can calculate the support for a block by accumulating all incoming support flows (This was designed with having block networks in mind, maybe we can re-use them here...). If there is not enough support, a block cannot be placed. If a block within a structure is destroyed, the new support flow will be calculated and might effect other blocks as well so that a part of the structure might collapse.

RTS view
It may come in handy for the process of placing walls, towers and other blueprints to have more overview of your base. Therefore I'd like to introduce a RTS-like bird view. I think the view should be restricted to either
- the area around the player's current position (to stay in "command shouting range" so to say) or​
- the area claimed by the player. Every unclaimed field should be coverd by a ligth fog of war which hides enemy units, but does reveal the territory at this field, and every field claimed by the enemy should be hidden completely by the fog of war.​
Furthermore, the player is not able to control his units directly from the bird view, it should be used only for placing blueprints (... please start discussion here :p).

Optional Models & Animations
  • If we go for the bird view it would be nice to have bird models for both teams (maybe an eagle/hawk for the red team and a raven for the black team) to indicate that a player is in the RTS mode currently.
  • For the change from normal first person view to RTS mode some kind of "skin changer" animation would be nice - the player character throws his head back like when he's screaming, for example)
 

SuperSnark

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Cool ideas, and good points Skaldarnar. As you said, I'm not sure at what phase we'd implement some of it, but good to think about regardless. I have a feeling we will be doing a LOT of balancing once we have something we can play around with.

"Furthermore, I wonder if tagging should need some kind of resource, maybe the souls of defeated enemies (kind of meta-resource)."

That's an interesting idea. The "paint" could be a finite resources - however it's obtained. Maybe players start with enough to tag and build their own territory, but not enough to willy-nilly spray it on another player's land. Although this could make for fun gameplay between players in the early stages, and a way to initiate combat. I think tying it to downed opponents, while very interesting, might prove problematic.


" it should be impossible to use just dirt blocks to build stairs up a wall or bridge over a moat"

What if the material used to build itself impacts it's stability and utility. Meaning, to build a wall you MUST use stone, and stone is a finite resource. Dirt could only be stacked say, 3 blocks high, before it simply collapses into dust. Or, if you're using wood for example, you must also use nails or something to build over a certain height. Maybe moats can only be bridged with a specific resource, like wood.



"the player is not able to control his units directly from the bird view,"

I started thinking about this too. I don't want this game to become a complete bird's eye view RTS, but I agree that it could be useful to switch out of first person now and then just to get a better feel for things. In terms of commanding units, what if pressing like P for pawn or K for knight brought up a little menu where you could pick the unit, then pick an order - build, attack, guard, etc. We could simply say, "guard territory" and let the knights roam around all tagged land. Or "attack" which is a general command to seek out and attack anything. I think if we want to have them attack specific units it may be hard NOT to use a bird's eye view, but I'd like the game not to sort devolve into a simple version of that. I'd still like the focus of the game to be on the player and what his actions can accomplish, rather than let become a "typical" RTS. Good things to think about. But I agree with you that whatever we use bird's-eye for, it should be limited.


I think Bird's Eye could be accomplished just via camera angle changes. Since we are talking about 3d models and a game, if we can positionally set the camera than I think we'll be OK. Still cool to have bird models in any event though. =) I'm all about ambient critters.
 

glasz

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Art
I made some new anims for the red pawn, with its different tools :

hit :

take hit :

hammering :

troweling :

I git added the md5 to https://github.com/glasz/TeraMisc/tree/master/lightandshadow/redteam/redpawn/redpawn.0.5.5 , but i couldnt export the tools models as i have an error about the model not having an action associated. I guess i might need to at least attach each tools to a single bone armature, wich is more complicated than i expected, the idea being that the tool should be attached to the tool bone of the main armature (btool.r and btool.l in the current skeleton setup) at runtime. I joined the .blend file on git, in case somebody want to give a try at tool export and have better luck than me.
 

Cervator

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Nice troweling! Great tools :D

Lovely anims - although the "take hit" looks a little odd to me, almost more like a stabbing than getting hit. Do you think it would work if the pawn looked more like it was throwing its hands in the air, so to say? Spear pulling backwards and upwards some? Although maybe pulling inwards is more realistic. Maybe any sort of curved swing direction would make it clearer it isn't an attack?

I'm going to throw the troweling vid on the social networks tomorrow if you don't mind :)
 

Skaldarnar

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Update Time!

I've worked on some new assets for Light and Shadow recently. First, have some banners for both sides. They are climbable (like ladders or vines).


Additionally, there are new tree assets. I am going for a mix of the billboard look and some (semi-)realistic assets for the environment. As with grass, dirt, snow, etc. the normal trees still look like "normal trees". On the other hand, birch and pine trees are associated with one of two sides, resulting in a somewhat exaggerated look tending to either light or shadow.
Terasology-150126112215-1152x720.jpeg
Terasology-150126111940-1152x720.jpeg


In general, I really like the ideas about making the whole world special with poker chip tress and so on, but for the first version I want to stick with what we already have. That said, I'm going to look into tree generators producing symmetric trees out of the trunks and leaves you can see above. Similarly, I'd limit the ambient flora to simple grass (added in this update as well). We still have the crops for both sides (resource for food), and we already have red and black bricks. From the art asset perspective, the first playable version can come :)
 

Skaldarnar

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Ah, nearly forgot to ask @SuperSnark for the art resources :geek:

I tried to work out a logo/banner for LaS, but I'm not really satisfied with it. I'd really appreciate if you could publish (some) of the artwork files as SVG (or whatever they're originally), or at least point me to the used fonts. I think a logo/banner and icons for LaS and LaSR would be nice (I thought either the rook, fool, or adventurer might fit well as small icon...).

Light and Shadow Logo.png
 

SuperSnark

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I'll take a stab at a logo. :)

I lost a lot of my fonts when my computer crapped out, but I do have all the art concepts. I think the font I used had "queen" in the title. Like Black Queen or Gothic Queen ... I can't quite remember.
 

Skaldarnar

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Great work @SuperSnark!
Nice, clean, simple one:
View attachment 1596
This one is definitive my favorite :) It's really clean and simple, yet catches the essence of LaS. For my taste the complex one is a bit to cluttered/full. Can you try to increase the letter spacing a bit in order to make the logo a bit wider?
I see this one as a good candidate for a module icon :) Can you probably save some space when just using LaS instead of the full title? Maybe the figure needs to be simplified a bit as well if we want to bake it into a - let's say - 32x32 pixel icon.
 
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