In my effort to add portraits to my kobold mod, I realized the way I had my kobolds set up would make for an annoying amount of work on the portrait sprites, if I wanted to the portraits to match the kobold's tile sprites. So I decided to revamp the kobold's tile sprites! They're not going to change much in the end, but it's going to be a lot better.
For example, the kobolds currently are composed from 3 sprite sheets: a normal body sheet, an undead body sheet, and an extra sheet that contains all the tail colors and the horns. With this update, I'm compressing those into one single sprite sheet! Since with the addition of portraits came a new system of palette swapping that, after some experimentation, I found out worked with tile sprites!
While I was in there, too, it finally clicked for me how the appearance condition modifiers worked, so I'm going to try and make the kobolds look a little closer to what it says on their description page, starting with tile sprites.
Last thing that I was just experimenting with was making the tile sprites reflect the state of the kobold's body. So if a kobold is missing an arm, their tile sprite won't have an arm. I also want to add a couple bonus scars that are present in the portraits for dwarves too (such as a missing eye scar, that I implemented but doesn't seem to work right now...)
Anyway the picture above is what I managed to do today. I redid all the raws for the new system for every part of the kobold body except for the head. The heads are composed of a few different sprites now (head, ears, eyes), which are going to depend on some appearance modifiers so I'm pushing that to later.
Ran out of time for tonight, I was hoping to get heads all done but it turns out it's a long and tedious process... but I got head shapes done for everyone (which are based on nose length and broadness) and ear shapes for zombies ONLY (which are based on ear length and broadness)
I had a hard time deciding if head shape should be based on the nose or the skull... Since there's four head sprites - full face, narrow face, full short face, and narrow short face - so it was either gonna be based on nose length and broadness or nose length and chin broadness... I ended up just going full nose for it.
You can also see on some of the zombies here the missing eye sprites I made and thought didn't work. But it turns out the eye has to be completely gone for them to show up lol
