Art Workshop • Catgirls

Hello !

My story on why I'm getting back to wesnoth after more than 10 years begins with a snarky remark from my best friend.
“ Why are you trying to use photoshop on windows when you could use an open source equivalent on linux ? ”
“ I don't know, I replied. Why are you play a proprietary final fantasy XIV instead of something open source like wesnoth ? ”
“ I can' t. There aren't any catgirls in wesnoth. ”

Well, I had no further replies, so I guess this slowly escalated in my mind until I'm here to address that injustice.

My interest is primarily making the art, although I'm coding also the minimum WML to have it running. Hopefully I'll convince my friend of find someone else to balance the units. I'm doing it primarily doing this for me and my friend (it's a surprise) but since I'm basically a beginner in pixel art, I suppose I'm also open for critique. I say "I suppose" because my focus will be more on the production than the perfection here, but hey, if the art is broken, it's broken.

As for the addon itself, well, no choices, it's going to be a single multiplayer faction with a bunch of literal cat-ladies, that's the external constraint I assumed. However on top of that I was thinking about theming them in something inspired by the Indian subcontinent. Why ? Because it's different from England, Germany, Japan and that weird blend of middle-eastern setings most fantasy universes seems to get inspired from, because I found the idea of using chakrams interesting and because why not ?

First unit is a chakram warrior, that is proficient both in melee and range. Here's three concept art I made (I made some uglier and rougher ones before that too). Maybe I'll make more concepts (andy maybe they'll look less like dancing...), maybe I'll colorize one of those to make it a unit portrait art, I don't know.
Here is a photo of my attempt to figure out how I should animate that unit for running and standing. I made the heads too large, but that's not a big issue, since it doesn't change the perpective of anything.
And here is the base sprite I came up with (so far). I stumble a bit on an issue when coloring the Shalwar kameez (the clothes) : using bright colors feels much more thematic to my indian inspiration, however the wrong bright color can be misread as another team... I went with this "indian yellow" because :

• It's bright, not muted.
• There doesn't seem to be a "yellow" color team, only an orange one.
• Using the same colors for the scarf, shirt and pants seems too uniform; it almost looks like pajamas.

Here it is in for team blue:Here is an earlier version with a more realistic pose that better match the sketched animation layout I photographed above. However it seemed really hard to read what the left arm of the unit was, so I changed it.I quickly tried today to make a standing animation as well. It's weird and janky and I'll definitively change it. The arms don't seem to have the same consistent thickness, the amplitude of motion seems too large, and the tail is maybe missing 2-4 frames to feel smooth enough ? Unless you count test-turning a cube in blender, It's my first animation ever, so i'm not sure what's wrong and what's the best fix. Let me show you what I have already.
I must admit it's a bit intimidating to post alongside quite talented pixel artists but I hope you'll take interest regardless of my level.

Thanks for reading me !

PS: Oh, and I ended up doing those pixel art on krita on linux. So much for that conversation.

Statistics: Posted by laerne — Today, 2:20 am

---