The Mana World Forums

I started on my first monster here. Since there is no name for it on Wiki, I tough about naming it "Lurker".
Why Lurker? Well...places, where it lives are "Between wet places and desertic lands, savannah and/or forest" like it's written on Wiki. Maybe it's very depended of water, so it's lurking all around that places looking for wet places.

Wiki => http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/ ... l#Number_1

I made shape for it and put it trough some rough colors. For start, I need your opinion. Too small, big, difrent legs, "chest"? Is it too much like a spaceship?

CONCEPT:


PIXEL ART:

Nice to see that you decided to pick up this quite interesting concept.

I like the lineart and perspective so far. The legs already look fine, but the upper part could need a bit more contrast between the different colors to accentuates the details. When I first saw it I thought it was cell-shaded until I zoomed in.

It also needs shading. In The Mana World we have a light direction from the southwest. That means that surfaces facing left, front and/or up have to be brighter than those facing right, down and/or back.

The biggest challenge will of course be animating this beast. But I believe that you will be up to this task.

Happy Anniversary Bump

http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/ ... sal#Lurker

Sigh... there was an animated version of this (and not just the concept art animation)...
Hopes for Matt to magically swoop in and find what post it was in...

Still an interesting monster that someone will hopefully take back up again
Says the guy who needs to finish some of his own outstanding projects...

was bored at work, so i tried to find your animated monster, didn't find it. (yet)

i found this interesting monster though: http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5076

Fother J wrote:Sigh... there was an animated version of this (and not just the concept art animation)...
Hopes for Matt to magically swoop in and find what post it was in...

I seriously doubt that since I can't remember that there was an animated version.

Seems like you just want to get me on fire and let me search for something that doesnt exist

Hi Everyone

I started to design 'lurker' again. Here are some examples of my work. I reckon lurcher could suck players brains as an attack method and I could animate blood spluttering out of lurker's mouth.

Some things for consideration:

1. I need to redirect the light source for lurker's left legs.
2. I could tone down the middle part of lurker's legs, or I could leave them bright blue as this could indicate that lurker is poisonous?
3. I still need to smooth out the graphics.

Please feel free to leave a comment

evilmonkey wrote:Hi Everyone

I started to design 'lurker' again. Here are some examples of my work. I reckon lurcher could suck players brains as an attack method and I could animate blood spluttering out of lurker's mouth.

Some things for consideration:

1. I need to redirect the light source for lurker's left legs.
2. I could tone down the middle part of lurker's legs, or I could leave them bright blue as this could indicate that lurker is poisonous?
3. I still need to smooth out the graphics.

Please feel free to leave a comment

lol, cool. I can see the brains being eaten out. Now that they've got the realistic brain as a drop, maybe that could be incorporated in when it's slain.

evilmonkey this looks a lot different from the original concept, it is a lot easier to make a sprite if you stick to the concept.
The attack frame was originally planned out as this: so the brain wouldnt be sucked right away .
(please also check for the other concept frames here: https://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php ... sal#Lurker)

On the technical side, I like how you restricted yourself to a very small number of colors.
Perspective looks off, tmw has a 45° orthogonal perspective.
The concept you are following at the moment is difficult, make it more comic style, like other in game sprites, i.e. larger Head, thicker extremities, rounder "feet" and "knees" (a good start for this is OP's pixeled version).
Your sprite at the moment completely lacks texture, you could try to give it a hairy or scaly texture.

Keep up the good work, Mister

Here are some links to tutorials that you could look at:
to get a feeling for the different steps that are helpful to be done to sprite a mob: http://the-godlings-rapture.deviantart. ... -280927794
we also have a collection of howtos in our forums: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17239&hilit=tutorial.

Hi Speiros and Chay

Speiros: I like your idea of lurker dropping brains.

Chay: Thanks for your feedback. I was having difficulty with creating perspective that is similar to other monsters on TMW. I'll have to work on that some more. I was actually thinking of increasing the length of Lurker's legs so that the monster is able to look menacing and can bend it's legs to suck player's brains (like in the concept art).

I'll try to add some texture too. I haven't got much room on the legs but I could tweak things a bit to add some hair. I would like to keep the legs lanky as this resembles the artists concept and will look good when I animate it because it will allow the monster to lurk around with high footsteps.

I was also thinking of making the back legs similar to the front legs as this would allow me to add more texture and will look more balanced. But more than anything, I'd like to make Lurker 2 times the size of a player. This will make Lurker look more intimidating and allow Lurker to act out the attacking action envisioned by the artist (i.e. bending legs to suck brains).

If anyone wants to help out, I could post my sketch of Lurker (where I tried to realign the perspective as the artists drawing does not fit in with mana perspective), Inkscape template of a vector image of Lurker (which could be used to animate Lurker and change the size of Lurker easily), and Gimp template (where I pixelized Lurker).

Thanks for your feedback

If this gets implemented...
Anyway nice graphical skills
Too bloody

bugs wrote:Anyway nice graphical skills

Thanks Bugs

evilmonkey wrote:

bugs wrote:Anyway nice graphical skills

Thanks Bugs

Heheh