Artwork for The Mana World

"The Mana World is an FOSS MMORPG. It uses 2D graphics and aims to create a large and diverse interactive world. The player's story is built with quests, interaction and fighting against monsters and in PvP mode against other players, too."

Having played it for a while, I wanted to add a smuggler's cove map complete with wrecked ship. This became a sidetrack into the artwork side of the project to have the graphics for my map.

It added a few new experiences of a different work environment. As I was doing graphics instead of code, I gained insight in the the work of pixel artists; and also playtesting new content and discussing the obscurity level of new puzzles with the puzzles' authors.

There are actually two projects developing different in-game worlds, with some people contributing to both projects.

Building materials

A bit different from hack and slash gaming - we'd been discussing building a new town and having the buildings go up gradually - both as an in-game event (have the adventuring characters provide the raw materials) and as a time for development to finish. The next tileset to do seemed to be some scaffolding, which can also become a bridge set.

The existing art has a woodland village surrounded by a wooden stockade (on the right of the screenshot), so it made sense to have wooden scaffolding, reusing the existing art for the vertical poles.

sources The discussion thread about this is was lost along with the rest of Aethyra's forums.

Bilevel caves

Artwork for caves with different levels of ground and water. Most of the first set already existed, and I reworked it to create the second set.

Walls with walkable areas on top are a half-tile sideways of ones without, to better fit with the collision detection. This was more effort that it looks, and took around a week for it to look right.

These are under the GPLv2+ license, with source in XCF format (the native image format of the GIMP).

This version is obsolete - the graphics engine needed a single tile to contain all the graphics for the ground layer in the game, requiring there to be a water or ground graphic at the bottom of the walls. More recent versions of the engine don't have this restriction, and the tileset has been replaced with one that can be composited with many ground or water tiles.

Map development

Very much an idea in progress, here's a map that I have in progress.

License

The tilesets on this page are distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2.

You can redistribute them and/or modify them under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.