Creating a Creature
Duplicate of https://github.com/Tuxemon/Tuxemon/wiki/creating-creatures
Making a Creature
This is a guide to creating your own creatures for the Tuxemon open source monster battling game. We are pretty tolerant of designs that vary from these specifications, and we’re always happy to help out with advice and feedback.
You don’t have to do all of these steps yourself! Just post whichever you feel like doing, and we might be able to find someone to help fill in the rest.
Design
It is difficult to provide concrete advice for the design of a tuxemon. Look at other monster battling games, especially Pokemon, and think about:
- What the creatures are based on: puns (like Farfetch’d), obscure animals, animals with an elemental twist, etc.
- How they are represented: How detailed are they? How are complex concepts communicated in simple shapes? How cute are they? Is there a difference between how basic Pokemon, first stage Pokemon and second stage Pokemon are depicted?
- What is added to the Pokemon to make it distinctive, appealing and iconic
- What is missing from Pokemon that might be added to other cartoon creatures: What is the Pokemon style?
blazeknight-94’s tutorial describes six origins:
- Logical associations
- Shape associations
- Cliches
- Behavioural associations
- Famous character tributes
- Puns
FrozenFeather’s eye chart could be useful.
Mechanical Conceit
It is also possible to start your design from the other direction: choose a mechanical role that you want the creature to play in battle, and then design it from the bottom up.
This is the approach of the Create-a-Pokemon project.
Name
There are no hard-and-fast rules for names, but consider:
- Tuxemon on the same evolutionary chain often have similar names
- Names are often based on puns or references
- Names are often compounds of two different words
blazeknight-94’s tutorial describes four naming conventions:
- Pure word associations
- Clever word associations
- Anagrams
- Saying misspellings
Type(s)
In Tuxemon, there are five types, and a tuxemon can belong to one or two of them:
- Fire: Includes creatures associated with energy, like electricity and heat, dragons and other legendary beings, and poison.
- Water: Includes creatures associated with the sea, lakes and swamps, ice and snow, the weather, and fish and amphibians.
- Wood: Includes creatures associated with plants, lichen and fungi, forests, the natural environment, the wind and flying, and the wilderness.
- Earth: Includes creatures associated with the ground and underground, dirt and soil, mountains and rocks, caves, and ancient and buried things.
- Metal: Includes creatures associated with steel, darkness, mechanical and robotic things, psychic powers and other unnatural things, humankind, and the undead.
Evolutions
A creature can have any number of evolution options. However, it will typically not evolve more than twice. For example, Botbot can evolve into Beaverbot, Fishbot, Petbot or Monkeybot. However, once it’s evolved into one of those, it cannot evolve again.
An unevolved tuxemon is in its “basic stage”. A tuxemon that has evolved once is in its “first stage”; if it has evolved twice, it is in its “second stage”.
Evolution can result from the tuxemon reaching a certain level, from it consuming a particular item, or from some other criterion being satisfied.
Illustration
There is a distinctive style, the “Sugimori style”, that Tuxemon is sometimes faithful to.
There are many tutorials for this style. My preferred one is:
Also useful are:
Software
I use Krita, but others work in GIMP, Photoshop or other drawing software.
Sprites
With enough time and practice, anyone can make sprites. There are many free and open source tools available that you can use for creating sprites. Many use [GIMP](https://www.gimp.org/) or [Aseprite](http://www.aseprite.org/), but even a basic paint program will work fine.
Your first attempts at spriting may be met with criticism, but this criticism should be viewed constructively to help make your sprites better. Ignore the people who say "it's garbage" and take the advice of the others where you can. No one can sprite perfectly at first.
Sprites should ideally be done using the Tuxemon Default Palette (download it as a GPL file).
Alternatively, artwork colors can be converted to fit the Tuxemon palette by using the PySNESify utility, which will change each pixel color to its closest color available from the SNES/GBA era platforms.
Sprites should be saved as PNG files. Do not save them as JPG files: they will lose quality. The PNG format is a lossless image format that will make sure that your images do not degrade in quality when you save them.