From: nhmall Date: Sun, 27 Dec 2020 23:00:48 +0000 (-0500) Subject: Art Contribution: Differentiating gendered monster tiles PR #430 X-Git-Url: https://granicus.if.org/sourcecode?a=commitdiff_plain;h=7e20be61dfb8bff7ee05799f5be16d4ad72ca3ab;p=nethack Art Contribution: Differentiating gendered monster tiles PR #430 From the pull request author NullCGT: This pull request is a response to 0c3b964, in which nhmall expressed interest in contributions that would make gendered tiles visually distinguishable from one another. Since I've spent way too many hours editing NetHack's default tileset and the thought of trying to merge this commit into my variant gives me an absurdly massive headache, I thought I would have a go at it! Making tiles of different genders distinct in NetHack presents an interesting problem. While it would be fun to create highly distinct tiles for every gender, doing so would reduce the accessibility of the game, since players would have to remember many more tiles, and might end up confusing one monster for another. Visual clarity is key. Therefore, I had the following goals when creating this pull request: 1. If there is an interesting way to differentiate tiles by gender, do so. 2. Any sort of differentiation should be minor enough that a user can still tell what a monster is at a glance. Essentially, visual clarity comes before differentiation by gender. 3. Try to use a "TDTTOE method" of differentiating tiles. For example, female cats are more colorful than males, because generally male cats have only two colors of fur. Basically, I spent a lot of time on wikipedia researching sex characteristics of different species. 4. Try not to fall into "female = longer hair / eyelashes." While this feature will unfortunately require some gender-essentialist visual shorthand, this tropes is overdone and exhausting. Please let me know what you think; I'm totally open to feedback on all of this and happy to make modifications. I've attached the resulting tiles file to this post in png form. The alterations made in this pull request are as follows: - Female ants are slightly larger than male ants, just like in real life. I could have added wings to the male ants, but I felt that doing so would lead to some confusion. - Female wolves are slightly smaller than male wolves. There wasn't a great way to show this without making winter wolves look very similar to winter wolf cubs, so I just made the female wolves tails slightly shorter. - Calico cats are almost exclusively female, so I turned the female cats into calico cats. The other piece of logic behind this choice was that players will probably really enjoy seeing different variants of their pets. - Female hobbits, minotaurs, humans, werecreatures, and aleaxes wear slightly different clothing. - Dwarfs are not differentiated in any way whatsoever. According to Terry Pratchett (in Unseen Academicals, if I remember correctly) it is almost impossible to tell what gender a dwarf is, even for fellow dwarfs. I strongly believe that NetHack should follow this tradition. - Female leprechauns, archons, frost giants, guards, and all types of gnomes are clean-shaven. Although of course not one hundred percent accurate, it's convenient visual shorthand. - Centaur tiles have no differentiation because the different types of centaurs are already extremely difficult to tell apart from one another. - Female ogre tyrants and elven monarchs have slightly different crowns. - Female quantum mechanics have a different hairstyle and no beard. Genetic engineers look the same, because the genetic engineer tile is perfect. - Female barrow wights look like old grandmothers with flyaway hair. I kept the hair color the same and used a similar quantity of pixels so that they look similar enough to the males that you can tell they are barrow wights. - Female archeologist tile is a reference to a certain archeologist known for raiding tombs. --- diff --git a/doc/fixes37.0 b/doc/fixes37.0 index 52a6f0ded..90e698172 100644 --- a/doc/fixes37.0 +++ b/doc/fixes37.0 @@ -782,6 +782,7 @@ allow rereading spellbooks to refresh memory at any time (github #261) allow themed rooms constrained by level difficulty (github #344) add a varied form of LIBNH nethack library contribution (github #385, #403) add cross-compile to WASM (github #385, #403, #412) +differentiating gendered monster tiles from NullCGT (#430) Code Cleanup and Reorganization