Maybe it's because he is Mexican?

Introducing Chessime, an anime chess game--don't hate me it was MdNight's idea. It's chess, but with some fun little changes. First, you drop the boring pieces and add in anime characters. Swap out the board for anime places. Then add events, abilities, rankings, medals, and piece collecting and you wind up with a silly little anime chess game called Chessime.



Piece Sets
Each piece set consists of 6 characters from a specific anime. These will be themed, we could have Androids (DBZ) or Akatsuki (Naruto) or Shinigami/Captains (Bleach) for sets. Currently, two sets exist, Naruto (Naruto, Sasuke, Kakashi, Neji, Sakura, Sarutobi) and Dragon Ball (Master Roshi, Bulma, Yamcha, Tien, Chiaotzu, and Kid Goku). Each anime could have multiple sets and characters could appear multiple times as they differ throughout the anime.

Players will start with a single set and have to collect pieces from other sets in order to play them.

Board Sets
As with pieces we'll be pulling terrains from the animes for their characters to play on. These will also be the source of events. Events would be game altering as they may destroy a piece (lightning) or put a time limit on the match (Namek likes to explode). More on these later.

Abilities
Pieces may have abilities that are also game altering. Some characters might be able to teleport (Instant Transmission - Goku, Flash Step - Yoruichi) or take an extra turn (Time Freeze - Guldo). We're thinking players will have limited usage of these and only in matches where they are allowed.

Rankings & Medals
We'll be making use of BYONDs fun features to add rankings and medals. Hopefully, I'll be able to come up with some sort of ranking system a little more complex and better than the one for Efencea. As for medals, a few would be, Unlock # of Arenas, Collect # of pieces, Win # of times, Lose # of Times, Play # of Times, Defeat MdNight, ect.

It's going to be interesting!

There is something strange here.

This is a bad omen BYONDfolk.

For those who want to try first and read later: IconUtility3.zip

I've made the first of many changes to the Icon Utility. Status of the mentioned changes are as follows:

• Redoing the interface entirely.
• Moving away from the grid control.
• I'd like to find a way to determine the dimensions of files.
• Detect what I believe to be interlacing. (Not sure what it is really, just that some sheets looked as though they were woven when output to the grid)
• I'd also implement multi-tile animations as requested.

As you can see, there aren't many of the initial changes left to be made. That, and remaking the interface is going to be a work in progress.

I've also made some neat little changes with the replacement of the grid control. Now the icon utility uses a map, which is much more powerful. I really don't know why I didn't do it this way in the first place. Users are shown the frames they are selecting, as they are selecting them, in variable colors.

The icon utility has begun making more use of menus as well. It keeps track of recently opened files, for quicker access to the spritesheets you worked on last. For now it tracks the last 5 files you've worked on--I plan on making the number of files customizable by the user. There are also options for changing the selection box color, for when you've got a spritesheet that the default color doesn't show too well on and performance settings because I thought it might come in handy to allow the user to turn up the tick_lag of the utility.

Among other changes, the utility now gives a preview of the selected transparent color and automatically updates the queued animations to display the correct transparency.

Future updates will include a tabbed work area, multi-tile animations, a test-zone for those who want to see their new animations at work, and possibly the icon editor functionality I've mentioned.

Questions, comments, ideas, and bug reports are welcomed, joyously.

I'm having some downtime with Efencea considering that Tayoko is off in making-money land, and, as such, I intend to put some time into spiffing up the Icon Utility I made awhile back. As previously stated, I originally made the Icon Utility for myself but built upon the concept to try to relieve the spritesheet-to-dmi woes of the local pixel-art teams. However, before I actually commit myself to this, I'd like to ask, is it worth my time? As in, is there any demand for a more useful and clean Icon Utility?

If I were to rework the utility I'd be:

• Redoing the interface entirely.
• Moving away from the grid control.
• I'd like to find a way to determine the dimensions of files.
• Detect what I believe to be interlacing. (Not sure what it is really, just that some sheets looked as though they were woven when output to the grid)
• I'd also implement multi-tile animations as requested.

I might go so far to turn the Icon Utility into a full on icon editor. Which, is most probably NOT worth the time, but I could see it being a fun little project. This would be complete with an editor file format, that supports layering, and any and all effects I could squeeze out of Lummox's IconProcs library.

Also, all suggestions are gladly welcomed, so, please share any comments/ideas that you have.