Older creatures mod stuff 3: Potted plants and more!
Was watching my wife @cosmicsynthetics playing Creatures Docking Station and spotted some of my own art in there that I’d though hadn’t been used, which was pretty cool!
Like this lil guy! A small bonsai planter that was intended as a stationary toy for in-game creatures! I think the player can move it, but they cannot- It might seem like a funny choice for a toy, but I wanted to try and think of something larger that classifies as enrichment to interact with... An hey, keeping plants is supposed to be good for your wellbeing right? c:
Normally it’s stationary, but when interacted with it wiggles as shown above.
Note: The little dandelion also in the pot is a seedling of an ‘elevator plant’ I was tasked with making! It was designed as an object for creatures to move from one area to another while blending in as a functional decorative plant..
More art and writing (including the actual ‘eleplant’) under the read more!
And tada! The eleplant! The plant’s leaves are buttons that teleport creatures to another of the same kind of plant (I believe they exist in a numbered list, and the up and down buttons take you to the next or previous plant in the list). The buttons on the pot/base allow for the ‘elevator’ functionality to be turned on or off, rendering it just a decorative plant.
Various animations and growth stages for an Inkcap mushroom! This was intended to be paired with the hanging planters from a previous post, in that pretty hanging planters would occasionally drop seeds, spores, fruits and even things that classified as toys for living things to interract with! In the right environments/biomes, some of the fallen objects could sprout and grow a full sized version of something growing in their planter. In this case, an ink cap mushroom! I’m including this because I THINK that maybe this might have been repurposed as a non animating food item, somewhere..
There was also sprite work done for this absolutely minuscule button mushroom as well! One sprite of this growth sequence IS definitely in a mod as a food item, but alas, no growing ones as of now</3
Here’s a strange little gif sequence- The growth of a water hydra by budding! These little critters are classified as toys in-game, and will bop and jiggle when held or prodded by curious creatures. c: It’d be nice to make some sort of actual living water hydra at some point though right? I think they’re sort of cute.
Some flowers that bloom, go to fruit, and then fall and decay. These are in use -somewhere- I think, as an attachment to a bg image of some kind of large shrub or bush, allowing it to flower and provide nutrition. The two colours were requested to represent the plant growing in two different biomes and adjusting accordingly! On that note, these gifs are labelled ‘geranium’ but I do have an unfinished planter also labelled ‘hydrangea’ and since hydrangea DO change flower colour based on environment, and have clustered flowers, I think that’s what these actually were intended for.
This is something different that requires a couple of layers of explanation!
I actually have no idea if this is implemented anywhere, but I do remember having a lot of fun with it: The prompt was to make a ‘re-skin’ of sorts, of a lil fella called Doozer from a previous game in the series... Doozer is a teaching tool that occasionally spouts words for other creatures to learn, helping to reinforce their ability to communicate with each other and survive co-operatively as a group. This would have brought Doozer’s functionality to Creatures Docking Station while also giving homage to a very popular, classic mod for the series... Gaius! Gaius are quirky metallic birdlike creatures who are super cute but require their own separate save file to really be kept safely and correctly (due to a very weird and complicated glitch they cause in game that makes keeping them with other things difficult)
This little ‘Mini Gaius’ would have given players a chance to keep a cute lil metal buddy around who would actively help their other creatures to survive instead!
(pictures for context: Doozer on left, a Gaius centre and my work in progress on the mini-gaius-doozer on the right)
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Do you guys like to listen to music while you work? If so, what does each team member like to listen to?
Oh anon, you’ve opened a can of worms with this question.
Jules - Founder & President
“You’d have to pay me to choose between Riz and Gnash, considering how I love them both equally. BUT,,, the past couple of weeks, I’ve listened to Gnash more than Riz, so you decide what you wanna do with that information. Also, can’t forget blackbear!! IMHO, Soundcloud artists are WAYYYY better than mainstream artists. There’s something about the underground, alternative/indie pop that makes the quality of the songs so much better.”
Jackie - Vice President & Programmer
“I don’t like listening to things I can understand while working which is the only time I listen to music… I’m sorry but I don’t listen to normal music. Just exclude me. Why is that not an option??? Ummm… Idk. Let’s go with Light and Daffodils since I’m playing V’s route. What??? Choose another… but this is equally weird. Fine!”
Maddy - Audio & VA Manager
“I’m an Asian nerd, so I find myself listening to a crap ton of k-pop. EXO’s “The Eve” is my jam. Other than that, I like electro-swing and K-hip hop music.”
Ashe - Writer and Concepts
“I listen to Lofi hiphop generally, there are lots of live streams for it but “Get Some Rest” is one of my favs. Something with lots of chill and not a lot of lyrics. L’Orange is also a good choice. For my little bit of Korean indie music THORNAPPLE every time.”
Aly - Designer
“I’ve been listening to this a lot while drawing recently lmao”
Polo - Translator and Meme man
“This song made translating more enjoyable”
Kira - Writer & Outliner
“I listen to a lot of stuff. Right now I've been listening to the Nier Automata soundtrack while working. lol.”
And that’s only some of them. Might have to make a playlist soon. XD
Older creatures mod stuff 2: item/animal dispensers
One of the things I did a lot of in terms of creatures docking station mod art was ‘dispensers’: Ingame items that when buttons are pressed dispense another kind of item. Sometimes that item is food, sometimes it’s a plant seed or the eggs of an animal. The latter need sprite art and animations for the living dispensed. I like to make the dispenser make sense in context, maybe including a terrarium for the animals and plants, or visibly growing food items that are available to be eaten.
This one I don’t think ever actually got used for the previously mentioned meso/desert project? But it contains little pixel darkling beetles, aka, mealworms! At a push of a button, an egg is dropped out of the funnel and after a time hatches into a mealworm. The grub would crawl around on the ground, and after a time (perhaps if they ate sufficiently?) pupate and emerge as a flying darkling beetle, who could disperse and lay eggs elsewhere.
Funfact the ‘text’ on the terrarium and other things in this set is partially based on some vague glyphs shown in the official game art, as well as some simple pictographs made to make what is inside the items clearer to the user.
More art and writing under the cut!
A lot of the item dispensers in this particular project were curious in that they were all supposed to produce two things. Previously there was the case of the dragonfruit tree whose life support system ALSO vended macarons for some quirky reason. With this one I was asked to make a machine that vended both a plant and an animal product with a seafood theme. The end result is an eco-pod that raises shrimp and ‘kelp’ (actually eelgrass most likely, I also referenced the hair algae that was made for this modpack as well). Funfact those shrimp graphics got touched up and used in an actual animal further in this post!
Now this was a funny one- Another two-food dispenser that makes a plant and a meat based food, with a theme of humidity and/or ‘water themed, but not underwater’. I went with a greenhouse/biodome that raises treefrogs and grows salad greens. The plant and animal combination inside the dome maintains the carbon-oxygen cycle and also maintains heat and humidity inside. The items vended are a small salad bowl and a frog-leg kebab. I thought for a while that maybe this vended whole frog legs, but thinking back I believe that image was for a respite of the ‘Bug’s Picnic Basket’ 3rd party add-on.
This game series has a big emphasis on biotech, and weird combinations of hard tech and animals: When asked to make an item that would release two freshwater animals into the environment, I opted to put a weird hybrid animal into the graphic for the device. Here it’s a leech-crayfish combo, curled up in their life support tank inside a faux-rock, ready to lay the eggs of either leeches or crayfish at the push of a button! Those shrimp graphics from earlier actually went into making the juvenile stage of the crayfish.
Another one of these ‘two animal’ items: This one dispenses creatures for a saltwater environment, a nudibranch and a species of filefish (oxymonacanthus longirostris, I don’t know why I decided that specific species or named the files that way it made them hard to find later). The ‘nudirostris’ creature hiding inside this tank actually got an out-of-tank graphic that was never used. I think I remember the animal just being considered cute by the coder so they wanted it?
The Nudirostris and the Crayleech actually feature in some other art I’ll post later, at least one of which WAS handed off to the rest of the devteam, but I have no idea if it was ever made into actual game content.
Older creatures mod stuff 3: unimplemented graphics
I’ve made quite a few things for creatures docking station 3rd party content that, either due to time constraints coding difficulties or project dropouts, didn’t make it into the final products. Here’s some I was able to dig up!
These stone fountains feature the ‘nudirostris’ and ‘crayleech’ hybrid animals from the aquatic animal items for the banshee meso project. I don’t recall what they were for, there are several ways they could have been used within the game engine: Perhaps as objects coded as ‘nature’ that creatures could stare at to gain contentment, perhaps as set dressing to indicate areas coded to be humid, or even as items literally coded to release humidity? I doubted they’d be items the player could pick up, but I did try to make the pixel art dither into transparency on their bases to allow them to blend in with whatever background they were placed over.
To this day, that flowing water coming from the crayleech fountain is one of my favourite things I’ve ever animated. It took a lot of research!
More art and writing under the read more!
This was intended to be an item that contained all the animals needed for a freshwater life cycle: A plant, an invertebrate and a vertebrate species! It was inspired loosely by a series of brightly coloured palette-swaps of fish by a fanbase user called savannahs11 (I think?). In this case I kept the approximate colours and made a shoal of fictional tetras. They loosely resemble skirt or glass tetras. The other graphics represent floating algae and some to-scale sea monkeys, also called artemia or brine shrimp (although they could also be interpreted as fairy shrimp or other freshwater members of the genus). There’s a distinct lack of free-floating aquatic plantlife in the creatures games, so I wanted to try out something that would allow for basically clouds of tiny plants to float around clouding bodies of water... There’s no semi-transparency in this game engine so I tried to use pixel dithering for a similar effect. This is also what is happening in the dithered sprites for fish, food and animals: It represents the item decaying and would show shortly before the item is removed from the game session.
Another ‘mobile’ plant that didn’t make the final cut is this marimo moss ball! In this case, as it has a large sprite and would have ‘rolled’ along a surface instead of simply free-floating in water with a randomised movement pattern, the issue very quickly came up that it would need a LOT of sprites to show the rolling action correctly as it rolled slowed stopped and changed direction. Rather than try to solve that issue (as well as how to keep it from rolling out of water) it was put on indefinite hold.
This next set is actually all one ‘plant’, at least by the standards of the game code! These sprites were intended to be an expansion to what I believe is an existing but far more restricted version of the in-game item. It detects what body of water the plant is placed in and grows a different set of sprites accordingly. These sprites represent various different add-on rooms and biomes that are currently available, and would have allowed the plant to detect them and grow a graphically appropriate plant to better blend in. I think that topmost plant sprite set might be based on an existing sprite set in the current version of that item.
Now here’s an interesting one, in my opinion!!!! There’s an unused official graphic in c3/docking station for an ‘aquarium’ (really a large fish bowl) that was seemingly supposed to contain a small area filled with water, allowing you to safely move fish and other aquatic life around the game. As it stands, you cannot safely move fishes around and have to grab them and hustle to your next destination while praying that the creature doesn’t suffocate before you get there.
At some point, a modder of the games made a functional version of this fish bowl, but it was lost to time and I was never able to find a copy of it. Eventually I said ‘I’ll make a graphic for an actual fish tank/aquarium and approach the coding side of the community and ask if they’re interested in making this’ but nobody ever bit. The game does have an engine that would permit a mobile box of particular biome (it’d be classified as a vehicle hah!) but part of their reluctance was that many had coded their animals to simply freeze in time when carried or inside a ‘vehicle’. An aquarium of modded animals would simply show static images of creatures inside, and in their minds it wasn’t worth it. I still think it’d be cool though, and I’m still happy with the layers of animation over a dithered bg to create some degree of in-game transparency.
This betta fish sprite isn’t exactly related to the aquarium above, but was made for a totally non-creatures project (a small fictional fish tank I was keeping as part of a thing on deviantart). People in the community requested I separate out this betta sprite so that it could potentially be used by coders in projects, so I shared it! I’d personally prefer if it was given some different sprites for movement horizontally though so that the fins weren’t permanently flared in a display posture.
Speaking of other projects, one I’m very happy to have worked on involved creating a new aquatic area for docking station. Perhaps I’ll post about that next.
creatures modding stuff part??: miscellaneous add ons
There are lots of little bits and pieces of art that I made for the modding community of creatures 3 and docking station, here’s a few that actually made it into small stand alone mod items!
This one is one of the very first thing I ever contributed from around 2012: A large tree themed around the botany works of a fictional character of mine. The original image is actually a heavily edited scan of pictures made in coloured ballpoint pen! When this was coded into the game by another individual, it ended up really showing the size limitation of the game’s areas: As it is currently, this tree is simply too big for many growing spaces in c3 or docking station, and has a bit of a habit of clipping out of bounds!
That said, since it’s been many, MANY years since I or the coder were in that community, I’m willing to say that every art piece of mine that was coded into an item by that particular person had some uh, quirks. c; They also for some reason wrote a dedication to their then-boyfriend into the file for this plant, which is definitely something considering what happened sometime later.
More art and writing under the readmore!
Another example of differences in coder and artist preferences is this sprite set: Intended to be a companion an aquatic plant is this set of goldfish. Clicking on the ceramic fish vends little eggs that can hatch into one of three varieties of goldfish, who grow by eating in-game plant seeds.
I very distinctly recall having a surprisingly heated argument with the aforementioned coder of this item, who insisted that the ceramic fish produce a very loud cartoon ‘burp’ when interacted with. It took a very long time to dissuade them from doing this, and a lot of insistence that making it jarringly comedic would clash with the related items in the set, as well as feeling rather demeaning considering that this mod required over a hundred hand-drawn sprite images I was rather proud of. Another curious thing of note is that the third growth stage of each type of fish for some reason just doesn’t work in-game, due to some kind of coding issue, so nobody ever got to see their largest most polished sprite sheets.
The companion to these goldfish is actually this little aquatic plant! One of my favorite plants is an amazonian fresh water species that goes by a lot of different names based on country and scientific debate. Sometimes it’s called elodea, or egeria, or anacharis, or densa, or combinations of the above! All you need to know is that it’s an invasive weed in some countries and that it photosynthesises so fast it can be seen visibly bubbling on a sunny day! The coding for this one ended up sadly a little strange as well, launching the seeds produced by the plant through walls, floors, ceilings and sometimes out of bounds, making it hard to keep alive. It makes me vaguely consider if I could somehow figure out how to edit it myself.
Mercifully written by someone else, this set of sprites is for an item that seeds the nearby ground with moss. It comes in four varieties, three of which require soil and nutrients to grow, and one labelled ‘aggressive moss’ that would simply grow a layer of generic moss regardless of the in-game environment. This was made as a failsafe for when 3rd part areas (or sometimes even bugged or overlooked areas of the main game) simply fail to provide data for supporting plantlife... Making sure at least something grew would provide in-game creatures with much needed food.
Also here’s a fun thing to find- a very early prototype of the above moss planting machine!
Actually, these might be the first thing I ever contributed, but I can’t say for sure. These are so old that I don’t actually have the sprites in their original non-game-engine-specific filetype. When in game, these candles have a flickering ‘lit’ state, and an unlit one. They produce in game ‘scents’ that attract different lifeforms based on their genetic coding and body chemistry, and were designed to alleviate community/gameplay issues with keeping creatures in areas they weren’t native to.
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the sprites you made are so pretty! do you remember the names of the addons they are for, by any chance?
Oh the creatures stuff! Lemme think...
some of the solo add-ons and some misc stuff I did art assets for are here.
And a couple of the items are specifically packaged with metarooms (mods that add entire game areas for those who didn't grow up with the game terminology) so sadly they can't be accessed one at a time, but some of those rooms are here (desert meso, contains content from me and my wife CS) and the banshee ark meso, which has many of the items I featured in my posts! I actually really wish there were a way to just inject the flooded/water core area I designed, because apart from the elevator graphics that's 100% art by me.
I'm also realising from other people commenting that some of these things I have copies of are actually beta copies that may or may not have been released *thunkful*...
I have a ton of other things on the burner, including a whole comic strip for Sonic The Comic Online that I'm really making the rest of the team wait for, but at some point I really need to go find the coders for some of these and see if I can get some of these things repackaged or separated into their parts for more custom game experiences.
"Dog Days:V1" Developmental Work🔫 ----------------------------- So guess what @johnelle7 , thanks to you and your continuous support, and the fact that you were convinced "Dog Days" was an already established product, as promised, the actual work on the animated shots for its promotional trailer has begun! ☺😊 keep an eye out for it because everyday I'll be trying to put in some time on it so by hopefully the end of the year I have a substantial amount of stuff to pull together for a trailer if not by end of year, by early next year for certain. Keep a look out! 👀 Also @navidlancaster something for you to keep your eyes on. -------------------------- #dogdays #devwork #development #3d #animation #CGI #private #trailer #trinicontent #modelling #render #nodes #shaderbuilding #trinicontent #triniartist #vfxartist #animator #trinidad #kylestephen