ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Don't get excited yet, I've only made a meager amount of progress on this but I'd like to see if anyone else wants to help out.

I took a stab at a project recently in translating over Crawl's excellent tileset over to ToMe. I think Shockbolt is great from an illustration standpoint, but horrible for utilitarian purposes because the art is not uniform or clear enough to facilitate easy distinction and the absurd amount of detail muddies the look from a distance.

I downloaded the latest Crawl source (found here) since it contains individual sprite files for each enemy, dungeon feature, playerdoll, etc. The process was usually as simple as finding the appropriate corresponding file and renaming it. Because ToMe has a great deal more enemies (too many needless variations in my opinion) I had to mess with hue/saturation on Paint.net to get distinguishing color schemes. The playerdoll system is what I found most fun, since I got to play dress up with the individual components in order to build sprites for the unique characters in ToMe. Still, it would be preferable to have more "dynamic" sprites (see the dwarves below) but that's beyond my skillset.

That said, most of the work is quite tedious since you're just renaming files for the most part. I also couldn't really figure out how to change the terrain and gave up shortly after.

Here's a sample of what I was able to do:







Is there any interest in this? I definitely won't finish this on my own since I have life obligations and the like but was wondering if there are people willing to assist.

Looks really nice, but just to give you a friendly warning for the tremendous amount of work that you've got yourself into Not that I can help you with it - got my hands full.

Two suggestions, if I may:

• Have you tried using GIMP? I think it's far better software for things like adjustments, layers, etc. and you'll need lots of layers for the playerdolls
• Have you considered the option to start the tileset as a support for some of the t-engine modules outthere? I think they'll benefit far more from customized tiles and when you're amassed some more tiling experience, you can come back to core ToME

Best of luck and cheers!

I'm not a big fun of DC:SS tileset, but it is indeed easier to read than ToME4 one. Some of your sprites are too similar, though. Changing small details and some colors can easily fix it, though.

And what rexorcorum said about other modules.

I have to admit I like them. They look great. Hooray for pixels!