Hello everybody. This has been weighing on my mind for the last few weeks now so I thought I might as well share it with others. A few weeks ago I got an idea for a mod stuck in my head. At the time I believed that if I worked at it slowly and patiently I might be able to do most of the work on my own with only a few pointers. We’ll just have to see how that goes eh? For now I thought I should probably share my idea here and see if anyone would like to discuss it or offer any advice as to how to set about getting things done.
I’m quite fond of the idea of the Twilight Knight from Kingdom Death finding her way into Darkest Dungeon. Now she’s no stranger to crossovers. She’s already visited other worlds (Hell Dorado, Wrath of Kings, Myth, Super Dungeon Explore etc). I’m pretty sure she’s probably turned up in a few other places as well by this point.
Allison the Twilight Knight ventures out into the darkness with her shabby hooded cloak, her lantern dangling from her belt & her two handed sword to fight the foes of humanity. She rarely visits human settlements, dwelling in the shadows on the edge of society. From time to time she seems to get lost in the darkness and turn up in other worlds.
At this point I gathered a few reference pictures. At no point was I interested in the pin-up version of the Twilight Knight entering the Darkest Dungeon. I was only thinking of the much more sensibly armoured version. I’ll provide some links here.
Obviously these images do not fit the Darkest Dungeon art style very well. However the Myth artwork for her is rather close to the Darkest Dungeon style already.
Looking at that picture I’m practically seeing a Leper reskin right there.
While I may be comfortable creating an artistic depiction of the Twilight Knight I have not really experimented with the Darkest Dungeon art style. My main concern would be getting her to fit in without looking too out of place. Fit in with the art style, that is. Additionally my artwork tends to be more physical and less digital. It’ll take time. I’m not expecting miracles over night.
Obviously I could have just pointed some of the community artists towards these images (and towards Moirgaine’s blonde vestal) and write a lot of exciting stuff about how this would be a really great opportunity for people to finally create that female Leper reksin that the world’s been missing but that would be fairly irresponsible of me. Additionally someone’s recently done just that (although a few leg bandages need to be added to a handful of the sprites). I should probably try to take on some of the burden myself and do the work instead of expecting other folk to do so for me.
My next step was to shamelessly transplant Moirgane’s blonde vestal heads onto each of the Leper’s sprites (very carefully making sure things fitted well with minimal) then save them as an alternate leper skin, fire up the game, select the skin for a leper and go on a dungeon run. Now I’m not going to share any images of how that looked because I have not asked the permission of various modders to include elements of their work in an upcoming mod. I wanted to feel confidant in my ability to do things before asking for people’s permission. No point wasting their time if it’s all going to lead to naught. If it feels like I’m going to be able to persist with this then I’ll start asking people for permissions and assistance. Obviously I had the white box issue but, that aside, the heads seemed to line up. I wasn’t seeing any disjointed necks or gaps between the face and the hood etc. White boxes aside I seemed to have done an okay job of making the bits fit (in terms of contours, shapes, profiles, edges etc).
At this point I stopped. I took a step back. I applied the heads to the Crusader to see how well they lined up. The Crusader’s Sword fits the overall size and shape of the Twilight Knight’s sword much more accurately than the leper’s shorter broken sword. This experiment did not go so well. Due to the placement of the Crusader’s helmet on on his combat, idle & walk sprites, the lower edge of the hood would be projecting out of frame. I imagine there would be cut offs. I have not tested the possibility of a crusader reskin yet.
Obviously by this point I was thinking of other things beyond the artwork. Should she be limited to a reskin? Perhaps she could be created as a separate class. If she was going to become a separate class then I should give a lot of thought to what her seven skills would be as that would influence my choice of Crusader or Leper. The Leper’s cloak suits her need for a cloak quite well ‘though. I considered that if she did become a new class instead of a reskin then she would not need to be bound by the existing class skeletons. At that point ‘though I’d be needing to rely on the kindness of one of the few modders who has the spine program to skeleton her up and so I’d be better off sticking to reskinning an existing class if I chose to create her as a new class on her own. Probably better to have somewhat more realistic expectations. Stick to what I’m more likely to be able to achieve on my own. Reskinning an existing class made much more sense.
Additionally it was obvious that creating her as a simple reskin would make a lot more sense than trying to create her as a custom class. I did wonder if it would be easy to develop a custom class from an existing class reskin. That is to say, if she was to become a new class then I could look at the existing class (Crusader or Leper) and ask myself “which of these sprites do I need to reskin? Can I get away with not using some of them?” For example, if she had some kind of skill to rekindle the embers of her smouldering lantern (raising the light level and perhaps reducing a little stress from one target) then some of the Crusader sprites would make sense (the scroll, the banners etc).
At this point I think that even if she’s going to become a separate class, creating a simple reskin first (then limiting the new class to using the same reskinned sprites the base class used) would make sense.
More recently I’ve ported the crusader’s sword pommel onto a complete set of leper sprites & recoloured it to match the dull silvery grey of the leper’s sword. I’m not entirely happy with the results as it looks a bit pale and faded. Not quite the end result I was aiming for. After that I replaced portions of a leper’s base sprite with elements of Moirgane’s blonde vestal hair & head, the base vestal’s breastplate, the recent explicit female leper reskin (to get the basic shape of legs without the massive spiky thigh plates), elements of the crusader’s sword and the arbalest’s boots. This was mostly done as a preliminary aspirational sketch – a skeleton to work on top of. I believe I also managed to get the loincloth/front mini tabard from the actual Myth concept art in there as well. It’s pretty much a weird Frankenstein’s monster of a sprite but the underlying anatomy is reasonably believable.
I’ve considered approaching other modders and asking them to help out with the artwork and the coding and stuff but if everyone does all the work for me then what have I really put into the project beyond the idea? An idea which isn’t even my idea to begin with. I probably should put some effort in here. If people want to help out then that’s great. I won’t turn down offers of assistance but I don’t won’t go out of my way to make them come happen.