DreamStones is TileBased.
That's about all that's definitive as far as artwork is concerned :)
The first version used an isometric tileset, that I drew myself. But, I don't plan to do everything myself, and I don't think I'll go hunting for pixel artists to do the art (at least, not yet).
Two possibilities :
- Reuse existing artwork. There are many FreeGames? out there on the net that have tile-based Pixel Art. The problem is, it's not that easy to find art that can be freely reused, since often only the game engine is under a free license. I have got permission to use these angband tiles.
- Allow dynamic in-game tile editing (as suggested by LionKimbro?). That would make things pretty interesting (and even more wiki-like). It'd need some good mechanics to manage it (We don't want someone changing one pixel of a grass tile and then having the server send the new version of the tile to everyone connected - that would terribly would bog things down). It can be a good way to keep control of the art license - as with a wiki, you'd tell players that their modifications are PrimarilyPublicDomain?, and that they shouldn't submit copyrighted art, etc. (see MeatBall:WikiCopyright) This can allow to start the game with a much more restricted set of tiles and sprites.
So there are mainly two issues :
- Licensing : things should be as free as possible (creative commons would be nice, or public domain), but that can prevent importing other artwork. There's also the possibility of having different pieces under different licenses, which doesn't make things easy either :-P
- Tile format - are tiles isometric, are they square ? What size ? What colour depht ? This should probably depend on other choices (which tiles can be reused and have the largest variety ?).
Something like Final Fantasy (the old ones) artwork would be nice :) Unfortunately, there's not much reuseable artwork that looks like that. It could be considered if all the artwork is built in-game from scratch, though. (In which case relatively small tiles (16 ? 24 ? 36 ? 24 has the advantage of not being used that often, which limits the possibility of users copying artwork from other games, something that can raise all kind of problems) and a limited colour palette (32 ? 256 ? using palettes ?) are probably better to keep the data traffic low).
Newer versions use a 32x32 tileset from angband (with permission), which is pretty neat but not CC or anything. I'll probably keep on with that one for still some time now.
See also : ScavengingArtwork