Project Solestium

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Marximilian
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Project Solestium

Post by Marximilian »

This topic is dedicated to the concept art, unit sprites and portraits for add-ons focused on the universe of Solestium.

Solestium is a worldbuilding project I have been working on for years. Its been mostly inspired by other universes and games throughout the last couple of years which includes Heroes might & magic, Elder scrolls, Sacred, Warcraft, Warhammer Fantasy and ofcourse Wesnoth.

I won't be that active in this two weeks since I have personal matters to sort out and I will definitely be more active around the end of November.

The first campaign is in progress and has 3 playable scenarios thus far but it is lacking units and factions I want far. This first campaign is focused on the Reunification of the Eldaria Imperia to face two ancient threats, the demons of Hellarond under the Demonicus Hierarchy that wants to cause chaos throughout the world of Endaroth and the Undead a threat though to be totally destroyed 2000 years ago but has returned to make another move on corrupting the world.

I have also some art requests which would help me greatly in my endeavor to bring Solestium to life, my own spriting skills aren't that good but I atleast drawing art pieces and concepts for what I want in this project.

Art Requests:
1) Dark Elves
2)Sun Elves - a nation of elves that dedicated themselves to the Angelicus. These elves has gold like skin and silver hair, they are very ornate and are masters of healing and can unleash the divine powers of the Angelicus onto their foes. ( White, Gold, Gray, Black and Silver are the main colours for these elves)
3)Wood Elves - very similar to the elves in Wesnoth, altho I would like if someone can provide more sprites of them with more different variations of weapons like spears, javelins and rideable creatures.
4)Fire Elves - An nation of Elves had inhabit the Crimson Isles where Volcanos are plentiful and rich veins of minerals to be optioned. Fire Elves are renowned for their strong bond to the Ethereal ( god of an element) of Fire and are also known for the weapons crafting. Don't underestimate them on the battlefield unless you wanted to be incinerated to death and have your entire force be wiped out swiftly by their blades. (Red and Earthly colours are the main colours for their armour and clothes)
5)Sea Elves - These are what remains of an glorious empire, they have no place to call home other then their massive fleets of ships that travels throughout Endaroth's oceans. Trained from birth to sail and defend their fleets the Sea Elves aren't just any folk you want to mess with. (Blue, teal, silver, bronze is the main colours for the Sea Elves)
6)Snow Elves - Far north in the outskirts of the known world lays a nation of elves that has been for ages been cut off from the rest of their kind. They prefer the spears and axes over the bow and sword, they have a lot of creatures which they bring and normally ride into battle, horses, sabertooths, wolves and etc. They are good with Ice magic. ( Main colours for these elves are white, light blue and other colder colours)
7)High Elves

So there it is for now, I will later add descriptions for the High Elves and Dark Elves.

Also if simeone were to make unit sprites, please make feel fit in with the rest of Wesnoth l.
Last edited by Marximilian on November 16th, 2020, 4:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Marximilian
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Re: Project Solestium

Post by Marximilian »

Also have some concept art for Characters and races in my universe. Would really like to see how they would look as sprites.
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An undead being who seeks to bring suffering to the living, they seem ghost like and cause spine chilling fear to the living around them.
An undead being who seeks to bring suffering to the living, they seem ghost like and cause spine chilling fear to the living around them.
This dog like race in habits the great Deserts of Endaroth altho there has been little interaction between them and the other races.
This dog like race in habits the great Deserts of Endaroth altho there has been little interaction between them and the other races.
Another Ancient race from Duardoth unlike the Shaduarians these ones migrated to Endaroth and now lives near the heart of Endaroth's core.
Another Ancient race from Duardoth unlike the Shaduarians these ones migrated to Endaroth and now lives near the heart of Endaroth's core.
Shaduarians, a race of brutish 3 eyed Humaniods that lives on Duardoth or now known as Hellarond.
Shaduarians, a race of brutish 3 eyed Humaniods that lives on Duardoth or now known as Hellarond.
A Demon of Pestilence
A Demon of Pestilence
Pilauli
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Re: Project Solestium

Post by Pilauli »

Looks neat!

(I'm a bit disappointed that it's not Project Solstheim, although that would probably have copyright problems.)

---

For art: there is a chance that you can find or modify other units to suit your needs.

There have already been some attempts at factions of elves of various sorts.
https://units.wesnoth.org/1.15/Deep_Elv ... elves.html (pale, with a blood focus)
https://units.wesnoth.org/1.14/Forgotte ... otten.html (has "blood elves" with dark clothing and, in one case, a fire focus)
https://units.wesnoth.org/1.15/Era_of_M ... magic.html (the "Tharis" look like dark elves of some description)
https://units.wesnoth.org/1.12/Rashy_Er ... ended.html (more "darkelves", these ones with pale hair; also "elyser" who strongly resemble mainline wood elves)
https://units.wesnoth.org/1.12/Extended ... 0.0.0.html (features a take on dark elves, plus "sidhe" (elves, I think they live in the forest, but they aren't green) and "sylvans" (slightly expanded version of mainline elves))
https://units.wesnoth.org/1.15/Imperial ... imper.html (features similar sidhe, plus "issaelfr")
https://units.wesnoth.org/1.12/Feudal_E ... eudal.html (has high elves, although they look like a remix of other elven factions)

Ageless Era (https://units.wesnoth.org/1.15/Ageless_ ... 20Era.html) is a huge bundle which includes units from a lot of different eras and is a good era to pick through. As a matter of fact, all of the links I just gave could have gone through Ageless Era, but when I clicked a lot of links on my computer, it took a while to load (presumably because it needed to load half a dozen separate copies of Ageless Era's considerable number of units), so I decided to give links to the smaller eras instead.

If most of these factions don't match the style you're envisioning, or don't have any units you like, I will sympathize, but say I'll also say "it happens to all of us, and making art is hard."

Whether you can get someone to commit to helping you is probably going to be partly luck, and partly based on the subtleties of how you present your ideas.

It also depends on how well you want the art done. We all want original, high-quality, consistent, and beautifully-animated art. Most of us either give up, or settle for cruder and/or frankensteined art. If you set the bar low enough that you can meet it, you can at least do that yourself, and it might even inspire someone to come in and improve it for you. (Not to its ideal best form, but better than what you had. Hopefully you can yourself get it to the point where you can tell the units apart and they don't burn your eyes.)

Since elves are kind of like elves, I think frankensteining has serious possibilities. Also, anything roughly humanoid could theoretically be partly based on a human, and various creatures like gryphons, wolves, and horses could theoretically have new riders drawn onto them.

---

A couple of things to consider as far as translating your world into Wesnoth terms goes...

I notice you have a lot of groups of elves, with at least some notes on how they differ from each other. That is still a lot of elves, though, and I'd be a bit worried that they might all start to feel the same.

I would suggest reading the stickied post in the Faction and Era development subforum. https://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=34782
There's a link partway through it to another thread where someone is trying to design a faction, and you can also scroll down the stickied page to see other people's thoughts on it.

One very important question is how many different kinds of (recruitable) units do you want per group of elves? And what sort of units are you thinking of for each group?
(Relevant section: Defining and Filling out Factions)

I wouldn't necessarily suggest creating a whole faction's worth of units for each of the groups in your world. If they would sometimes ally with another group, especially to cover their own weaknesses, then a multiplayer faction could feature that alliance, even if they don't always ally with each other. An example is the mainline Knalgan Alliance, featuring both dwarves and outlaws.

For campaigns, how many units you need and what they need to be able to do depends on how often they appear. I mean, as an extreme, if you need a single fire or sun elf trader to be on a sea elf ship so that they aren't helpless against ghosts, you don't need to design four other fire or sun elf unit lines. If the single random ghost-killing elf is an enemy that only appears in one scenario, you might not even need to design any advancements for it, just make it a bit on the tough side and let the player wear down its health and kill it.

(I'm kind of paranoid about ghosts, because about half the time when I come up with a faction idea, it works fine, and then I test it against undead and get stomped. And when that happens, half the time I can't see how to fit fire or arcane damage into it at all.)

---

This got a fair amount longer than I expected.

I guess the really short form of this post is "Tell us what specific elven units you would want, and maybe I'll help you frankenstein them. Here are a bunch of suggestions."
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Marximilian
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Re: Project Solestium

Post by Marximilian »

Thx for the feedback, yes I know that these are a lot of factions and yea I forgot about the multiplayer side of things but in overall, each of these factions will come in handy in the campaigns since I am adding more resistances to the board. I am removing Arcane and replacing it with holy, dark, chaotic and nature resistances and also adding Lightning.

Each of the factions won't just be elves but other races as well such as fae, Treefolk (wose) mythical creatures, dragon-like beasts and etc.

Many of the elves won't be really the same for instance the High elves and Sea elves will have hoplite units but each of their looks and attacks and abilities would be different. In Solestium or to be more exact Endaroth elves. There are Greek & Roman inspirations for both both the Sea elves and High elves. Snow elves have a more wilder theme of how they have tamed the cold north by bringing sabertooths, wolves and frost beings into battle. Fire Elves being more industrious and looks a bit too crude in comparison to the other elves, examples of other units in this faction would be giant fire breathing insects and fire birds that they have brought from the Isle same with summoning fire and magma elementals. Dark elves being the true beast tamers will bring in giant Serpents, spiders, dinosaur like beasts, bats and as a sub race of dark elves comes the harpies and Gorgons which they will have. Sun elves would be a lot more Angelic theme, unlike Irdya's elves that are heavily related to the fae, the elves of Silvanoth originate from Angelicus/Celestials so faerie wings are out of the options but there's a certain type of sub species of elves that has wings and that's the Aelves, closest beings to angels most of them are born from the sun elves who are said to be blessed by the Angelicus. Each faction will have a variantion of the Aelves but the most variety of Aelve types will be in the Sun Elves faction and other beings Pegasus and Great Eagles will be with them. On another note Merfolk will also be around since they and elves are actually the same but the Merfolk traded their legs and devoted their lives to protect the Oceans and Rivers with the Ethereal of Water to save their people from destruction after the great collapse.

I will see what I can do with the sprites I have which I can frankstein but honestly this is gonna be a long time and I am up to that challenge besides this isn't even a tenth of what I want to do :lol:
Pilauli
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Re: Project Solestium

Post by Pilauli »

Ah, I forgot you're trying to represent a whole world, or perhaps I underestimated the amount of detail you had put into your world. That is a lot of stuff to include.

Well, good luck.
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ghype
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Re: Project Solestium

Post by ghype »

The units you draw concept for, for some of them you can find almost identical sprites and for the remaining similar ones in the unit collection of WotG _ War of the Gods add-on.

It is crazy big unit collection. To find your fitting sprites you just go to your add-on directory on your computer and check the image files for monster and undead. In one of the two you gonna find them. I know because I know most of WotG and already seen similar sprites to your concept. Just try it.

if you have a hard time finding them, I will assist you and look them up for you.

here for example a similar one to your dog race thing. He just needs a 2nd blade instead of your spear.
tomb_protector.png
tomb_protector.png (1.85 KiB) Viewed 3252 times
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Marximilian
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Re: Project Solestium

Post by Marximilian »

So been busy these last few months on building up my universe and reworked on quite a lot of backstory.

Currently now deciding how my Titans and Forgotten would actually look like, picture you see here is a Titan Embryo not yet fully developed and somewhere deep within the void.

In a few hours I will have some of the Forgotten unit designs posted.
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Not the cutest thing you would find in the void and definitely not the friendliest...
Not the cutest thing you would find in the void and definitely not the friendliest...
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Marximilian
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Re: Project Solestium

Post by Marximilian »

So Made a few sprites, not the best quality but they will serve their purpose and they are anyway just dark abyssal beings.
They will be making up for one of the main enemies in the Solestium universe, Will try and improve on them further just currently want to hear some feedback from any other spriters out there.
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Dark Seeker.png
Dark Seeker.png (9.07 KiB) Viewed 2798 times
Dark husk.png
Dark husk.png (12.17 KiB) Viewed 2798 times
Dark Gate.png
Dark Gate.png (7.17 KiB) Viewed 2798 times
Dark flier.png
Dark flier.png (9.35 KiB) Viewed 2798 times
Dark Abyssal brute.png
Dark Abyssal brute.png (12.93 KiB) Viewed 2798 times
Dark Abomination.png
Dark Abomination.png (8.19 KiB) Viewed 2798 times
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Marximilian
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Re: Project Solestium

Post by Marximilian »

I recently returned to working on my project after rewriting the overall worldbuilding and the story.
Now I will continue trying to make the sprites while I throw lore along with them into this thread, first would be the Primordials:
Obviously not finished
Obviously not finished
Primordial.png (35.44 KiB) Viewed 1750 times
The Primordials are beings form the void, a place beyond the boundaries of creation where they hide from the Creator. They are considered to be the ultimate evil by all even by the demons, as their goal is to destroy the Creator's universe and return it what it once was, a tormented realm under Darkness.
But some of the primordials did overcome the insatiable urge to consume all instead they now continue on to pursue their own goals, whatever that may be.
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Re: Project Solestium

Post by Lord-Knightmare »

I am rather interested to see when the first Solestium campaign will come out.
That Primodial multi-hex looks cool.
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hermestrismi
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Re: Project Solestium

Post by hermestrismi »

Cool
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