MShockXotto+ style guide

MShockXotto+ was originally the mashup of the MShock and the Xotto tileset, both of which were already build on a few other tilesets. This means that MSX never had a strong style guide. And it still has not, the present style guide will list a few rules to follow but since MSX is a patchwork of different styles there's a lot of wriggle around the guide. The main thing that we want to keep from the previous tilesets is the anime/cartoon style of the monsters and characters, and the main thing we're moving away from is the random noise over sprites.

  • Cartoon style, make your sprite recognisable.
  • Clean texture without random noise
  • Keep the colour count per material (bone, meat, cotton, wood, metal etc...) low, around 3-4 per material.

Monsters

monsters

  • Black outline RGBA(0,0,0,255)
  • Round shadow directly below the monster RGBA(0,0,0,115)

Items

items

  • Black outline RGBA(0,0,0,255)
  • Items should be roughly scaled to the character, meaning that small object like pens and box cutter should be 20x20 and big items like disconnected oven should be 32x32.
  • However, magnified items, like this 32x32 cooked meat sprite, are still okay for the sake of being easy to recognise and looking nice.

Grades of Steel

Grades of Steel

Use those palettes to differentiate the various grade of steel in items

Furnitures

furnitures

  • Outline using a less-saturated, darker color taken from the sprite's palette.

Terrain

terrain

  • No outline required
  • Terrain should fill their canvas as the game doesn't display anything behind them. Transparency will appear black in game.