It's been a little bit of an art push lately. First of all, I started work on a dungeon tile set. Up there is my first stab at it. I created a couple different wall variations, a door and a hex-pattern tile ground texture (used in conjunction with existing sand and gravel textures). Don't have anything in the way of doodads or decorations yet. Doors are still kinda tricky. I had a conversation with riuthamus about it. The gist of doors in this game is that a door needs to work with any configuration of walls around it, so trying to do artwork for a traditional-looking door and choosing alternates to match up with the surrounding walls was getting to be too difficult. I had already implemented doors some time ago that utilize portcullis-like behavior: when you open the door, it slides into the ground. Closing it brings it back up again. The door in the above shot works the same. The issue lies in creating a graphic that looks door-like, even though it doesn't look like a traditional door. I'm not sure there's a perfect solution for it. But at least when you hover over a door, a popup appears with the label 'Door'. Hopefully that's enough of a clue for people to figure it out.
I've also started experimenting with MakeHuman. The ogre in this shot is a result of that experiment:
It was a quick effort. I just used some of the clothes provided with MakeHuman (hence the jeans and button-up shirt, articles of clothing that would be quite difficult to obtain in the Goblinson Crusoe universe) and ran some of the various sliders for the mesh deformation all the way to 11 to try to get an ogre-ish form. The experiment worked pretty well, I think, certainly well enough to warrant further experimentation. As a bonus, MH will export a skeleton rig to fit the mesh, though I still have to rig it with IK and animate. As it turns out, I'm still terrible at animating. Who knew?
I spent some more time doing miscellaneous cleanup. Fixed a bug that caused creatures to die multiple times if they died in a round with multiple dots on them. (They would die once for each dot because I wasn't checking for isdead in between dot applications.) Formalized the construction of summoning spells, so that a flashy spell effect is played when things are summoned. Added some flashy effects for things dying. Moved and rearranged some data tables again. You know, crazy shit like that.
This is looking better, and better. I really like the warm color pallet.