Tobias' Norsemen (and women) WIP

Reveling in the OP double post here I go …

a crude thing to be sure but… well, no excuses really. More work to be done on it

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I hope you are a fan of the André Øvredal movie when it comes to the size of this thing! :cherry_blossom:

Love that movie
"Troooooooollllllll!!"
:japanese_ogre:

hardly seems crude to me… this is a troll, yes? i love the look so far, including the pale green skin tone… cant wait to see what you do to improve it… :smiley:

Yes, a troll. I need to label a little better :smile:
I was going for a John Bauer style of troll
This is the smallest of the lot, about the same size as a settler.

The next will be larger (when scaled)

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Slap on a pink bra and I’d say the female version is done. :smile:

I can’t wait to use this is Stonehearth looks soooooooooooooooooooooooooo awesome great work and, keep it up!

Before I say this, I’d just like to state that this entire post was fantastic.

However, I know you got good feedback on the roundshields, but there’s a large problem with them: they’re round shields. Stonehearth does squares. Maybe try to make them less rounded? It would make them fit better with the overall aesthetics of the game.

@Smokestacks

Round shields yes, I am a heretic in this regard. Allow me to explain the reasons behind my heresy.

In Stonehearth we operate under the following quite specific restraints:

  • A very limited number of Voxels (if we follow the cannon of ‘minimum voxels needed to read’)
  • A Stylised Chibi/SD proportioned body (any design to do with legs becomes unreadable)
  • A square aesthetic (No curves or circles)
  • No Qbert voxel stacking

As a result naturalistic portrayals are out of the question.

This means that if we want our creations to be understood (“oh its a toaster!”) then we must boil them down into the minimum number of easily identifiable characteristics (An Elf is pointy ears, green clothes and a bow, a Dwarf is short big nose and a beard etc.)

The choice of these defining characteristics (DCs) and the clarity with which we render them defines how successful the model ultimately is. Please look at the live stream where @Tom shows his boar and bat both are a collection of DCs which read perfectly.

“So what has all this to do with round Shields?” I hear you cry. When thinking of the DCs for the vikings I realised that once you get them away from their long ships (no large bodies of water for a while in Stonehearth) and the horned helmets (no, yuck, nein, bleh) they have precious few DCs to separate them from any other generic fantasy warrior race.
The DCs I came up with were:

  • The big round distinctive painted shields ( Number 1 DC and without it generic fantasy was the result)
  • The Beards
  • Limited weapon choices (sword, axe, spear and bow)
  • Helmet shape

So I made a choice…
The round shields would be even more distinctive in a square world carried only by my small little band, binding them together culturally and spiritually.

Norsehearth vikings carry round shields

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Ahhh…well I have not anything else to say, you make valid points. Keep up the good work in that case :slight_smile:

Question: Where is Yggdrasil and other stuff like that?

I recently read the Edda (I might have been a little inspired by this project to read up on it) and I really like the idea of the earth spirits such as trolls and dwarfs turning to stone in sunlight, are you going to incorporate that eventually?
There’s also the fact that giants are basically nature gods that personify destructive natural forces like snowstorms or earth quakes, are you going to nerf them a bit in comparison to the source material or are they going to be really really late end game encounters?

Well in the words of Obi Wan Kenobi
“It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.”

Yggdrasil itself is probably a little vast in scope for inclusion in a mod, but I view the Stonehearth world as a cubey version of Midgard.
There will definitely be portals to other realms (@Geoffers747 will be able to correct me if I am wrong) so it makes sense that other realms are accessible from Norsehearth. It is highly unlikely that the first version of the mod will include portals but when they do my order of implimentation would be Muspelheim, Niflheim, Svartalfheim and Alfheim. The amount of work to do this makes my mind buckle a bit.

@olaf_randel5
Yes, the Jotun do seem to ebb and flow abit in power and at the high end they are elemental and godlike. I am going to include some lesser titan style Jotun as big bad monsters. However, I may wait for the portals to Jotunheim to introduce a really challenging world with huge unkillable Elemental Giants. The goal would then be to sneak in and gather riches while you can then get out, or make fortresses and safe havens within Jotunheim itself.

These are the aspirational goals of the mod and as such may take an improbable amount of time.

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Damn right I will … but you seem to be correct so I’ll let you carry on with what I assume we’re now all calling Norsehearth?

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How are alternate planes going to work? Livestream - 42:14

“We’re still brainstorming it … at the minimum we want the alternate
planes to be substantially different from the terrestrial plane … we
want them to be other-worldly, somewhere where you’re not supposed to
be.”

a fairly lengthy discussion on “how they should work”:

sadly, Norsehearth is not mentioned in the discussion, although @Stromclaw does mention The Runestone towards the end of the thread…

It is my expressed purpose to forge NorseHearth into such an unremittingly “grim and true” experience that it will never be directly mentioned in discussion but only alluded to in hushed whispers and wincing innuendo.

umm… some of what I said previously may have no basis in fact.

However, it is likely that my runestones will be gateways, portals if you will (and you will)

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Can you make different customization to show the religious aspects of your Norse village? (Shines to Hel, banners of Thor, etc.)

@TobiasSabathius are you watching the last leg? #putin#gayicon lmao

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Are you too Sochi for your shirt?

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Ooo @Geoffers747 are you from our great united kingdom too? Really want that song as the winter Olympics anthem, lol

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