Hello, are you still working on the project?
Hello killthemall. I am indeed still working on this. Work is slow (as my physical art skills far surpass my digital ones). I keep meaning to get back to it then find reasons to put it off. Accidentally saving over some master files means that, while I didn’t really lose any work I now cannot undo some of the earlier stages. It’s just a bit of bother. That’s all. I’ll get back to it eventually ‘though. Real life kept me very busy in July so I did not have much time to focus on this little side project. There was something much more important going on that had to be dealt with first and required a lot of my concentration. Now I have time to work on this again.
Anyway I really like the darkest dungeon art style and game but unfortunately my laptop is pretty old and I doubt it can handle the game and as a result I am left with Youtube playthroughs to watch.
My graphics card died back in mid February. As a placeholder I’m using a card that’s at least 10 years old (I originally bought it to be able to play Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion). It can handle the game but barely. There’s some visual corruption and artifacting on rare occassions but it’s still very playable. I should be able to afford a new card before the end of September, possibly even this month (August). While I know the graphics card isn’t everything quite a few of the other parts of my computer are almost as old. I’m going to be saving up for a new one which is one of the reasons I’ve been able to put off simply buying a replacement graphics card ’til I know how my financnes are going to pan out over the next few months.
I thought of creating my own characters but i don’t see the point since there is no way for me to implement them in a game I can not play. Going through the forum I came across this post and thought maybe I could help a bit since I like the way the twilight knight looks so I came up with a few quick concepts. I would have posted something like this a day ago but my file got corrupted and i had to start again. The first drawing is what I stated with, the second one looks better but animating it might be a bit more challenging…of course for the third one I had to draw what I kept on seeing when I Googled twilight knight :P. Fourth one is of a random twilight knight I saw, fifth one is her curious collecting pose, sixth one is her battle stance, seventh one is her block/dodge, and the last one is her camping pose. No fighting poses yet since I am still thinking about them. Anyway, my point is that if I can run it on what’s basically a dinosaur (in computer terms) then you might just be okay. I’d recommend going to one of the “can I run it?” websites on the internet (I’d recommend system requirements lab) and do a check with your laptop to see if your machine can handle it. Most of those websites should be able to check for Darkest Dungeon compatability.
When I Googled her one of the images had a larger sword so I thought of giving her a great sword since no other character in DD has that. When she walks, she drags the sword on the floor since it’s heavy.
Lovely idea in theory. Unfortunately, as I’m using the Leper skeleton, it needs to be the leper animations for walking. Also the size of the sprites limits the length of the sword for the animations. I’d love to give her a longer sword but I’m somewhat limited by the length of the leper’s blade. I might just experiment a bit ‘though to see if I can make it a bit longer as, using the Crusader’s sword blade (I’ve had to cut it down a bit to size) I could make it significantly longer. I just need to check it will fit.
With this I thought of abilities that can go with them,
1) Crescent Slam (idea I stole from one of the characters I thought of) – She slams the sword to the ground with a 30% chance to stun all enemies (or just first two if you think it’s too op).
Given the way enemy resistances work a 30% chance to stun wouldn’t work very much. The way the game handles something it’s simply maths. Resistance rolls are not separate. They’re apenalty to the roll. So if I have a 30% chance and the enemy has 20% resistance then it’s only a 10% chance. The Hellion & Plague Doctor each have a double stun ability so it might be worth looking at them to gauge the most balanced numbers to throw into the mix.
2) Luna Bash – Attack enemy with sword. Only targets first and second spot
Personally I’d be inclined to move this to the number 1 slot. Most classes have a simple basic attack that they can use from rank 1 and attack the enemy front ranks and this attack almost always goes in the number 1 slot. I suppose I’m a traditional kind of person (I always arrange my hotkeyed skills in the proper order from left to right so that I don’t get muddled up over who has what and so that it’s easier for me to quickly compare characters). A simple basic attack. I like it. Every character should have that.
3) Hurricane (another idea I stole from another character) – Spins sword to hit multiple enemies.
Hmm. Two front rank aoe attacks. Tricky. Traditionally the Twilight Knight is all about facing a big single monster (such as The Swine King) rather than swarms of smaller foes. Having too many aoe attacks wouldn’t quite feel right. I’m not sure about including two of them.
4) Lunatic – Marks enemy
Marking targets is interesting. There are already a lot of characters that can mark and that can benefit from marks. I do recall someone recently asking the devs if the antiquarian was going to do something with marks (she wasn’t quite released yet) and their response was that they felt there were enough marks & mark synergies in the game at the moment. They didn’t want it to become all about marking targets. They wanted other strategies and play styles to be effective as well. It kind of stuck in my mind as something to bear in mind for the Twilight Knight.
5) Over the Moon – She throws a sword at the enemy. This target the third and fourth spot
That’s a lot of moon themed skills and attacks so far. Is this some kind of anime reference I’m not familiar with or something? Then again it’s full moon tomorrow night. Kingdom Death is traditionally a dark subterranean environment with no sun or moon to light the caverns. Also I’m a little concerned. If she throws the sword then how does she get it back?
6) Twilight – She hold up her mini torch which reduces stress on allies adjacent to her. Also increases light of the torch.
I’m liking this one. Could probably just copy it straight across from the Crusader’s encouraging shout.
7) Full Moon – Increase accuracy of allies and self.
I believe the Man-at-arms has a similar skill so this should be quite possible. I’m not sure this mix of skills emphasises her philosophy of “dodge the big bad monster before it rips me to shreds”. It’s all worth considering.
Theses are just ideas I thought of because I choose to give her a heavy sword and is in no way meant to replace yours.
No worries :). Art can come first then abilities after (then a second pass at the art if the skills require it).
Anyway you can use my art and if you like I can provide more of it if I am not busy. Because i don’t have the game I do not know the size an image should be so I am holding back on cleaning up the image and coloring it since they loose some of their quality when resized. Are the pictures you provide altered pictures of in game art? As for animating the stances, along with the size I am not sure if the game uses gifs, sprites, or it’s own thing to animate so I am pushing that animation aside for now…plus I am not that good with animating.
Phew. That’s quite a lot so let me get through it in little bite sized chunks okay? Okay. Thanks. I’m glad to see that you’re enthusiastic about this :).
I will grab your art and take a good look at it. Thankyou for sharing it now.
The images are all different sizes (and often rotated sideways for some reason).
The images I have provided so far are all altered versions of existing game art (mostly Leper sprites but with bits of the Arbalest, vestal & assorted other stuff jammed on top, moved around, resized etc). Basically the pictures I have provided are the correct dimensions. Overall there are 12 pictures that need to be completed. 13 if we include the party roster portrait (which we can probably extract from one of the others). The attack animations are static. They’re a simple picture. That’s 4 images taken care of. Likewise the camping, investigate, defend are all static pictures. So that’s 7. Then we add the Virtue screen and the Afflicted screen. That’s 9 pictures taken care of. The last 3 are the animated ones (walking, idle and standing still in combat). Because these ones have moving parts they look more like a jigsaw puzzle where part placement is crucial. Because of the way the leper walks I’m hoping to attach the loincloth/tabbard to the left leg and hops it hides behind the right as the right comes forwards to cover it. That’s an experiment I’m not looking forwards to.
The game uses png’s as it’s file format. Unfortunately something about the way photoshop saves png’s does not agree with the game so every now and again I need to open them in gimp, tweak some settings, and resave them so they’ll show up okay in game for testing. With the 3 animated sprites testing in game is important to make sure I’ve got all the joints lined up correctly. The animation itself is done with a program called Spine which is very expensive. Because of the animation limits most custom classes use an existing classes’ body and then tweak it, change the way it looks but keep the overall shape the same.
For the forum I’ve just converted stuff to jpg’s so it’s easier to upload but the sizes are basically the same (except for probably the virtue and afflicted screens – I don’t know if I showed them off yet).
Well that’s a lot of typing. I’m going to take a look at your pictures now and get back later. I might also sneak in and add a screenshot or two to this post so people can see the current state of things.