Nethack tileset
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: Pixel Art
Forum Name: WIP (Work In Progress)
Forum Discription: Get crits and comments on your pixel WIPs and other art too!
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=26618
Printed Date: 11 September 2025 at 6:16pm
Topic: Nethack tileset
Posted By: SDC78
Subject: Nethack tileset
Date Posted: 17 May 2019 at 8:12am
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Hi everyone!
I have been a big fan of the rogue-like game Nethack since I was a kid. But I always felt that the tileset that accompanied it was a bit amateurish and the art itself generally a bit inconsistent from tile to tile for such a great game. As a passion project (and a way of de-stressing after work) I decided to make my own replacement tiles. There's a lot of other great tilesets out there and I'm pretty new to this so I don't think mine will compare, but I'd love feedback from the group. Basically my goal was to make the tiles more consistent, and make the monsters more clearly identifiable from the image by giving them more distinctive characteristics -- the old tileset makes it pretty hard for instance to identify a Giant ant vs. a Soldier Ant or a Coyote from a Dog. I also decided to stick to the original 16 x 16 tiles to preserve the old school nature of the game. Here's the first few I did -- the top row of the attached image is my tiles. Bottom is the original. From left to right the tiles are Giant Ant, Killer Bee, Soldier Ant, Fire Ant, Giant Beetle, Queen Bee, Acid Blob, Quivering Blob, Gelatinous Cube, Chickatrice, Cockatrice, Pyrolisk, Jackal, Fox. I blew it up to 200% for easier viewing since 16 x 16 is pretty small on most resolutions nowadays. 
Let me know what you think (especially if you've played nethack but all feedback is welcome!) |
Replies:
Posted By: NancyGold
Date Posted: 18 May 2019 at 3:53pm
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Nice tileset, has a character of its own, but I would have differentiated ants a bit more. The cube is hard to read as cube, without the third side. Gelatin is tricky: the material has very strong subsurface scattering and and indeed pronounced highlights, but in your case highlights are very strange for the left-placed light source you use with other sprites. The cube also has different light source (from the top). When all these sprites get placed together in game, they will confuse human player and will look noisy and inconsistent, due to light-source mismatch.
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Posted By: SDC78
Date Posted: 18 May 2019 at 10:49pm
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Thanks! Good feedback. The ants I agree could maybe be made a bit more different -- though in 16 x 16 space is of course a limitation (also trying to limit my palette to 32)! Maybe I'll try to figure out a way for the fire ant to breathe fire. At least they look like ants though -- in the original I could never tell which bug is which!
There are a lot of tiles like this in nethack -- e.g., giant ant, solider ant, fire ant; wolf, winter wolf, hell hound. I need to decide how much I can differentiate them beyond coloration as there are a lot of tiles for me to bang through! The gelatinous cube I originally tried in a more traditional cube -- was having a hard time getting the detail I wanted but I agree worth another crack. Thank you for the feedback! |
Posted By: SDC78
Date Posted: 23 May 2019 at 6:39am
Here's an alternative gelatinous cube -- lmk if which you prefer (or neither ha)!
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