Ok, so I'm making some style reasearch for such isometric look project. Probably it's not going to be fully flaged game, but just to have some fun for me with ascii.
So my new attempt is to give it a look of oldschool ascii (as with previous mockup) but with some pixelart-like sprites. Those sprites would have only look of pixelart, technicaly they are just regular pure ascii using block characters.
My first sprite sketch:
Yeah, using RP as pixelart editor is also nice choice at least for me
But the main issue with it is the size, it is enormous as compared with initial street size
So one solution to it was writing small tool which tryies to compress full-block characters to 2x smaller graphics with half-block characters. Of course, as I'm self-constrained to standard CP-437, there are many strituations where such mapping is simply not possible (more than 2 colors in scaled-down character or 1 quarter fg + 3 quarter bg and a 'checker board'). But with some manual post-retouching (in RP) results are pretty acceptable to me
As it is in isometric view, animation of such sprite along diagonals would need to skip every odd horizontal cel or it could use half-block haracters to allow sprite to advance by half-cel vertically while full cel horizontaly. Of course I'm gonna go with half-cells
Sprite-sheet 2 x Comression to half-blocks after bit of manual retouch & thresholding to ansi vga palette:
Yes, sprite is still way bigger than planned on initial mockup, so I'm going to upscale streets a bit
So finaly let's see how does it look when animated:
Brown full-blocks background is left just to better show half-blocks in action.
And new upscaled street mockup:
