one of the curious things about being one of the two main content devs in the past year of an open source project is having to go clean up the half-done efforts of other devs' given projects. decoupling transformation magic from spellcasting into various talismans did make it so many more character builds can access transformations than prior, but by tossing out the prior connections to other schools of magic it also left a relatively plain set of transformations rather isolated and singular in its progression. having every troll and octopus end up aiming to become storms and statues is substantially less varied than earthshapers and weather witches of all sorts possibly dabble into the corresponding [earth | air] + transmutations form.
after a lot of brainstorming with my partner about the needs of variety and with the makeshift art compositing capacity I've picked up, actually coming up with enough forms to provide reasonable spread-out options then clashes strangely with the need to match the prior species-
-resulting in the absurdity of depicting a spine-coated cephalopod, a two-headed snake with cat ears, or vampire and werewolf armadillo-taurs. it does mean, also, in comparison to That Other Roguelike's permitting immense bodyhacking for a steadfastly genderless player-perspective, a character can actually divest experience towards transitioning into a traditionally-feminine mythological feline with a chest and an armoured skirt. who knows how popular that'll be compared to becoming a walking hive, though?
(will still need to get volunteer artists to cover a few remaining things- no compositing really will get a werewolf cat- but it's not too bad for preliminary art compared to other programmer-art.)
I don't spend a lot of time actually talking positively about my projects these days, since I've been spending the bulk of my time actually working on them. With me not doing a lot besides chores for Halloween Day this year (my gay wife and I watched Dorohedoro Season 1 in the week leading up to it instead), I feel like today's a reasonable enough time to ramble about some of the monsters I've made while trying to do enough devwork for Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup to exorcise its rougher influence on my younger years. The multi-decade project has very high standards for what stays versus what gets trimmed out, which has also included high standards for highly-distinct monsters compared to many other traditional roguelikes, but I'd like to think I've been reasonable successful at adding quite a few to the 500+ monsters while our game's length still demands yet more and more.
As per usual, all DCSS tiles are CC0.
Chonchon
Some sorcerers care little for unholy realms or undead forms, seeking power instead in the whims of cruel chaos. This ominous owl-winged head is all that remains of a former archmage: it delights in spreading misfortune and drinking blood in its new airborne form.
The penultimate dungeon branch, The Depths, was made over a decade ago to try and present a more obviously dramatic difficulty spike before the Realm of Zot, and there wasn't a lot of attempts at trying to make a lump of generic dungeon monsters half-established two decades ago have much thematic cohesion. These Chilean bloodsucking heads are naturally trying to link together some of those highly scattered denizens in our prefab level pieces:
Flightless fae Spriggans, who represent a fast-moving and very frail player species in their own underworld-forested-fortresses but don't really use much for clever fairy tricks,
More anthro takes on Tengu, another player species of sword-and-sorcery birdfolk mages who are somewhat lost from mountain homes aside from the presence of some other hyper-dangerous bird swarms,
Vampires, a former player species (and now a current player transformation state) who get the standard unholy dangers in with high-level magic and accompanying thralls,
and Ugly Things, a set of generic fleshcrafted horrors linking colour-coding elements to chaos by changing one anothers' elements with their own radioactive presence. (There's also a kobold fleshcrafting mage represented above that's quite new- it might get its own entry later.)
As such, chonchon serve as fast vampiric-but-alive human-bird hybrids who use chaotic debuffing melee and repositioning wind magic to harass their foes, which reasonably matches the mythological brief. While they don't explicitly connect these given disparate myths + OC dungeon fodder, they fit naturally alongside the each of them in the ever-cosmopolitan state fantasy game settings invoke. They're not very sturdy, but they do have vampiric bites, and provide some wonderfully awful support capacities for other dangerous monsters.
(Tiles-wise, they combine CC0 scraps of Surt- the faces of some generic modern solidiers, to be more specific- with griffon wings and raven talons by our original main artist multiple decades ago, Denzi. I would have liked to put together something clearly flying with its ears, like in SMT's sadly neglected art or A Book of Creature's, but this particular rendition ended up still standing out pretty dramatically for a higher-resolution jarringly-placid human face than nearly anything gets in our 32x32 confines, alongside the dancing sparkles.)
Bes kemwar
A minor hairy maggot spirit, phasing in and out of this plane. Each regional variant inflicts different minor ailments: the ones found in the Dungeon cause one's magic to grow weak.
On the other end of the game, multiple needs presented themselves:
In some heavy reworking of other features, we ended up adding a simple "diminished spells" status to let the above demonic-mutating Zykzyls cast the high-level hex Enfeeble. Since that spell can apply multiple other statuses simultaneously, it'd be good to have another home just for that.
Our undead crusader god (rewritten to be a fallen jailer of the heavens), Yredelemnul, provides some temporary undead allies when their worshippers Raise The Black Torch and attempt to conquer each floor in Yred's name. There's not a lot of non-derived / template undead available early on, though, so low-level worshippers most notably get a lot of power in wight bands or ever-swarming marrowcuda, alongside a generic necrophage we've been trying to phase out for lack of a good gimmick.
With the many, many different illnesses this bes can inflict, it seemed reasonable as a way to combine the two needs and thus get a weakling undead that can inflict any given debuff. They rarely show up accompanying the relatively-generic-but-mechanically-distinct phantoms, jellies, or walking sleepcaps in early D as a regular encounter, and give another potential summon for fledgling torchbearers of The Fallen. They're mostly statted as fodder in both cases, but low-level fantasy foes should be a little more iconic than just goblins and rats and bandits and skeletons forever, right?
(The tile was made by altering a highly-spectral old hungry ghost tile by ploomutoo and mixing it with old mana viper tiles by roctavian. Both of the above monsters end up using the highly-antiquated quotes system (inspired by Nethack???) to specifically describe their myths as more than just random fantasy syllable-mashing by quoting @a-book-of-creatures's site- I couldn't easily get my hands on the books they cited, but hopefully they're fine being quoted and cited in an open source project?)
There's a lot of other monsters, implemented or planned, mythology or OC, that I could write further about, but we'll see how well the next months of work work out.
it's so deeply alien to constantly hear about how so many programmers write almost nothing for patch notes or commit messages, when working on a new monster's lore for a two-decades-old open source project has literally lead to me writing more words defending it than there are individual pixels in the chimeric art I've prepped for it (which is to say over 600). not that I'm sure who creates and handles the greater burden, really.
The intermittent months and months of radio silence at a given time regarding progress on 東方虚舟 ~ Sapphic Starseas Abyss reflects one of my longest-held design theses.
Any work in most mediums takes a thousand talents smaller teams have to all brandish and large teams have to all coordinate; project and team management, audio / visual interface / effect coordination, dialoguework, motifwork, creature / costume / set design, narrative / exposition / scene / difficulty pacing and overhead, worldbuilding, copy-editing, budgeting, promotion, ad infinitum, forevermore. (Of course, mediums that don't express as many put higher burden on what remains.) Smaller groups take unconscious shortcuts and larger groups make vanilla compromises on weaker areas and budget-restrained aspects to get anything out at all under such weight, which contributes just as much as ambient pop culture does in producing generic slush. Straight-faced clichés of western fantasy settings, lacking options in character representation, cough, how many other deckbuilders on Steam use unaltered monochromatic Rexard and Poneti icons, cough cough, all the roguelikes with two or less songs while thousands of options have CC-BY licenses on Bandcamp, etcetera. The consequences of not using such have their own immense burdens; I've spent three years learning GIMP and G'MIC-Qt simply because I wanted my roguelike to not be 16-bit or otherwise be full of fuzzy abstract programmer art. My lack of restraint here thus meant working up and down the creative commons for thousands of needed assets, for UI bits and enemies and obstacles and status effects and other effects and card art and manifold collectible boosts. So it goes. The part where everything hasn't come together yet playability-wise further obscures this endless toil. It's hard for posting about games to spread without character melodrama or hot bodies or reflection and anecdotes, so all of these random contextless aesthetic + system samplings rarely stick.
...Having said all that, have some contextless vfx gifs from the hundreds I've worked away on. Gotta work with this aforementioned state of mostly being Aesthetic. Most of such are derived from the offerings of CuteStockFootage, KotatsuAkira, and pimen, if severely distorted in the fuzzy darkness that readily binds disparate sources together. (More works should really learn to do that.)
Eternal assets edit-work for 東方虚舟 during these pandemic voidyears, now finally aimed at the Eternal Space Quandries of UI. Also means actually arranging up some battlescreens to assess such in. Some day I'll actually explicitly and directly describe the overall shape of this gay myth-vs.-alien-cryptids deckbuilder roguelike (like going on dates before runs for buffs, or kissing unique-elites for their cards) but it'll probably wait as I work towards a state I'd feel ready to commission non-placeholder art for the playable characters.
Still, there's probably something to be (repeatedly) said for how my lack of prior drawing talent and budget resulted in heavily distorting the Creative Commons into some total style incidentally as far away as possible from any other Touhou fangame in existence.
walking home carrying groceries with my romantic / gamedev partner, talking about how even with social support it costs over $1000 a month in bills and food to live outside big cities. and then operating on that over years and years to sell something at best about $18.
"this game's only worth five bucks on sale!" Steam posters shout, and. if you think juggling fifteen talents for fifty months is worth about a bag of chips and a soda bottle, then I'll personally fly over to directly pour chips and soda into your eyeballs, motherfucker
More and more piecemeal looks and words for 東方虚舟 ~ Sapphic Starseas Abyss.
Settled looks for status effects,
(including organization dividers and a higher-def rather than simplifier approach)
Cursory looks for Bombs,
(exploration-based cooldowns replacing consumables here as default roguelike fallback options)
Plus some old & new encounter profiles, not yet posted here.
(...admittedly awkward to expound on mythos accuracy and then make freaky mutants, but most of these iterative deviations are very directly symbollic. Touhou fangames struggle to get opposition away from generic fantasy or memetic clone swarms; expanding the urban legend bleedthrough with non-gorey intimidation's is this work's approach.)
