How a sprite library decided who lives in Dawnsweeper

Every person, house, sheep and monster in Dawnsweeper is drawn from one artist’s work: Minifantasy, by Krishna Palacio. We have the whole bundle. Before we wrote a line of the village simulation, we went through it pack by pack and asked one question of each people we might put in the world: can these sprites walk, work, fight, get hurt and die, and do their buildings have the states we need?

The states matter because of what happens to a village. A building goes up from a foundation, stands, gets damaged when monsters reach it, burns, and leaves a ruin. A settler walks, swings an axe, digs, takes a hit and falls. If a people can only stand still in a nice premade scene, it can’t live in this game.

Humans and Orcs were ready

The RTS Humans and RTS Orcs packs were made for this kind of thing. Their workers have idle, walk, hammer, axe, hurt and die animations in seven colours, and their buildings come in seven states, from a building site to a ruin. Humans got the castle, farmhouses, blacksmith and fields. Orcs got the stronghold, tents and a pig farm.

So the plains are Human and the badlands are Orc. The world’s home square is always on the plains.

One Orc pack we left out on purpose. Dark Orc Army draws orcs as an invading army. Our Orcs are neighbours you trade with, and if the monsters coming out of the Creep looked like orc soldiers, players couldn’t tell friend from foe. The Creep’s monsters come from the monster packs instead: Creeperlings and giant rats out of young Creep, up through werewolves and gargoyles, to Giants and the Angel of Death out of Creep that has been left alone for two hours or more.

Elves had gaps we could fill

Elven Kingdom has tree houses in three sizes and five colourways, which made good growth tiers for a forest village. It has no construction, damage or ruin states for them. Our importer builds those states out of the Builders pack’s scaffolding and the Raided Village pack’s fire and smoke. The elves’ walking and working bodies come from A Myriad of NPCs and the cross-race worker packs, put together from three or four packs. They match because it is one artist’s base body throughout.

Dwarves were missing, until they weren’t

The mountains were the problem. No pack we had gave a dwarf that could walk around on land. Our open question at the time read: “Buy or commission it, or keep mountains as a biome without dwarves?”

The answer turned out to be another Minifantasy pack. Creatures has walking, idle, attacking and dying bodies for every humanoid in the series, dwarves included. We added it, and Dwarves moved into the mountains. Their houses are cave doorways from Deep Caves. Their hall is a stone front with a great door, cut from Mountain Stronghold’s tiles. Their farms grow fungus. The importer recolours the Yellow Beard dwarf’s clothes to each settler’s colour and gives beards seven natural tones, from blonde to white.

A Dwarf village on mountain ground: houses that are doorways cut into grassy rock, a stone hall with an arched wooden door, a smithy with stacked ingots and ore, fungus farms, and a flagged edge of the board at the right. — A Dwarf village in a 1.0.0 development build.

The desert people are Humans

The desert had ground, palms and buildings, but no people. The question read: “Settle the desert with robed humans, another race, or commissioned art?”

We went with Humans, as their own people. They use Creatures’ Townsfolk and Amazon bodies. To make them read as clearly different from the plains Humans, who are pale and wear helmets and tunics, the importer gives them deep brown skin, a cream or white head-cloth, and robes in desert dyes: saffron, crimson, indigo, teal, turquoise, ochre and violet. Townsfolk and Amazon alternate by settler colour, so a desert village has two silhouettes in it. Their houses and onion-domed hall come from Persian Palace, their farms from Desolate Desert.

A desert village on sand: houses with orange onion domes, a hall of grey domed towers, blue wells beside watered farms, a loom and a carpenter’s bench, and flags along the board’s edge at the right. — Desert Humans, with their wells, in a 1.0.0 development build.

They trade with the plains Humans the way any two peoples do, in goods the other doesn’t have.

Cultures on top of the art

Each people’s way of living sits on top of what it looks like. Dwarves live in doorways cut into rock, and they are the diggers: they dig up mines quicker, master digging in two digs where others take five, get more ore and hoard metal. Desert farms sit on sand and stay dry until wells water them, and desert caravans, with camels, are few, large and long-range. Elves live in trees and fell no living tree. They gather windfall, plant groves, and think less of any village that cuts trees near them. Orcs stand longer in a fight and honour the ones who kill monsters.

Each people also names its own four festivals. The same midsummer day is the Humans’ Midsummer Fair, the Elves’ Long Light, the Orcs’ Trial of Strength, the Dwarves’ Forge Feast and the desert people’s Caravan Gathering.

There are packs we haven’t used yet. Icy Wilderness, Lost Jungle, Silent Swamp, Fae Depths and Sunken City are lands without a people of their own, and Creatures has goblins and halflings who can walk. We’ll decide about them when we have a reason. For now there are five peoples. No generative AI was used anywhere in the art.