Mar
04

FOSS games and content

Many of us “know it bet­ter than you”-people have already told the tale of why FOSS games can not com­pete with com­mer­cial grade games. Yes we are all talk­ing about con­tent, we lack the con­tent to look as dandy as the gem-sparkling com­mer­cial games.

We don’t even make it easy to cre­ate the spark of a jaded plastic toy either. No, we make bad choices over and over, cramp­ing out the life-force of con­trib­ut­ors. For­cing the entry-level of con­tri­bu­tion sky-high just due to one of the con­trib­ut­ors being very good and the rest just ‘will­ing to help’. The prob­lem here is not that the gen­eral Joe can’t carry out the level of skilled con­tri­bu­tions as that of the sole contributor-god. No the prob­lem is that we don’t har­ness the cre­ativ­ity of that sole good con­trib­utor, and help him help the oth­ers to do great contributions.

I was brows­ing a forum the other day and noticed a “graph­ics needed” thread, being me I was drawn to it like a moth to light. But read­ing the thread got me just annoyed and irritated.

example

fig­ure 1 — Example of a photo, a illus­tra­tion and a 3D render, all are objects.

In this par­tic­u­lar case they needed images for objects that was in the invent­ory of a container/vessel, call it invent­ory. Imme­di­ately I think RPG style icons, ok size, easy to eye and place for other ele­ments to use needed space. But no, here we got full 512x512 px images, all in dif­fer­ent forms; 3D renders, pho­tos, Illus­tra­tions (see fig­ure 1) — you might now be think­ing “good they accept any kind, many con­trib­ut­ors” which might be true. Now think of the ‘quant­ity or qual­ity’ ques­tion; is it bet­ter to have a ‘sea of shit’ or a ‘pond of gold’? To me the answer is easy: I want a lake of brass.

For being a graphic designer it’s not really the flashy ele­ments that makes me accept a product, I can well settle with a not so super designed thing, as long as the style is coherent.

Regulations is good for all

How would a smart graphic pro­ject man­ager go about ask­ing the com­munity for this? Well I got a couple of ideas to solve this kind of issue. First, decide on what kind of images you accept — the more who are able to con­trib­ute to this the mer­rier, but don’t go over­board. Second, decide on a size for the images — in this case i would go for a max size of 128x128 px as that is a stand­ard large icon size, could go down to 22x22px to you then just need a bit more skill to make it look good. Third, do a tem­plate, make them all fit together on some way, be it back­ground, shape or another but for the love of milk don’t let them be all and every kind.

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  • http://www.johnmunsch.com John Mun­sch

    Allow me to play devil’s advoc­ate here for a moment and come at it from the developer’s stand­point. Based only on the descrip­tion you gave, it seems to me that the developer was try­ing to not cramp the style of any artist will­ing to con­trib­ute to the pro­ject. The hope, prob­ably a vain hope, but the hope being that some artist would latch on and pro­duce a good set of images for the game and those would have a cohes­ive theme because they are all com­ing from the same artist.

    I have a pro­ject right now and I have a very clear idea of the kind of graph­ics I’d like to see for it some day. I would like them to have the simple graph­ical style remin­is­cent of the Com­munity Chest and Chance cards from Mono­poly. I think that would add even more to the humor within the game. How­ever, I fig­ure that if I were to sug­gest that then any artists would either say, “I can’t or don’t want to draw in that style, there­fore I’m not going to con­trib­ute.” By sug­gest­ing some­thing spe­cific I’m driv­ing away some­body who might have a good idea.

    If some­body did have a good altern­ate sug­ges­tion and was will­ing to do a sub­stan­tial body of work with a par­tic­u­lar style then I could and would point to that and say, “I want some­thing like this because I already have some exist­ing graph­ics in that style.” Before that point, I don’t think most would feel com­fort­able sug­gest­ing anything.

    John Munsch’s last blog post..Google Tries To Make Microsoft Com­pletely Irrelevant

  • http://tranberry.se Tran­berry

    Hi John! A valid point you got there, yes I agree being small and not hav­ing a big fol­low­ing will make it harder to get a good contributor-base, so a more slack approach is needed, but still reg­u­la­tions feeds creativity(no argu­ment can sway me on that point).

    I’m happy that you got a style already planed out for your game, that will help you, help the artist cre­ate bet­ter and fit­ting graphic to your game(s). Sadly I don’t see many devs in the small to medium game sizes that even have that. I can even say I feel that it is rare in the whole floss scene.

    My annoy­ance was bought up by a rather big FOSS-game, I won’t tell any names as I don’t want to point a fin­ger at any­one and laugh. But they have enough of a com­munity to build one of the best FOSS-games. And not using the com­munity bet­ter then what I have seen to this point, is a bit sad.

    And thanks for your reply, I’ll do a follow-up-post to this, with some ideas based on my experience.

  • http://tryglaw.eu/m64blog m64

    Hey there. Big thanks for the art­icle. I don’t have time to write lately, so it’s good to at least read some inter­est­ing thoughts.

    I agree with John that some devs may be afraid to scare away con­trib­ut­ors on the “I don’t want to do this” basis. Instead they may be scar­ing them away on the “I don’t know what he wants” basis. Another prob­lem is that some devs really simply don’t know what they want. And still another sort is that which does have some vis­ion and hopes the artists will guess what it is.

    That’s why I try to advoc­ate developers learn­ing at least a little bit about con­tent cre­ation — this would not only enable them to make some art them­selves, but also make them aware of the way the artists work and what kind of data they may need.

    Now being mainly a developer but also hav­ing some min­imal artistic know­ledge I know that both artists and developers have things that they would prefer to be set when they get to work. Per­haps FOSS game artists could com­pile some sort of a list of things they:
    1. Have to know before get­ting to work. It’s like the pro­gram­mer has to know the pro­gram­ming lan­guage he should use or what are we cod­ing.
    2. Very much prefer to know — they are not neces­sary, but greatly sim­plify cooper­a­tion. It’s like the soft­ware design doc­u­ment­a­tion.
    3. Have some per­sonal pref­er­ences, but are will­ing to adapt to pro­ject guidelines as long as they are sens­ible. It’s like the cod­ing standards.

  • http://tranberry.se Tran­berry

    A great com­ment, I agree to the fullest and will post some note on the topic of “guidelines” in the follow-up-post.

  • http://tryglaw.eu/m64blog m64

    Per­haps we could start draft­ing such doc­u­ment on the libregamewiki?

    m64’s last blog post..The only thing bet­ter than start­ing small is start­ing smaller

  • http://tranberry.se Tran­berry

    Tips on how to man­age con­trib­ut­ors?
    If that is what you mean, by all means yes, but is not the free­game­dev wiki a bet­ter place for that? As it is ori­ented to pro­ject man­age­ment and devel­op­ment, rather then a encyc­lo­pae­dia of foss games?

  • http://tryglaw.eu/m64blog m64

    Yes, cer­tainly I’ve meant free­game­dev wiki, I just mistyped.

    m64’s last blog post..The only thing bet­ter than start­ing small is start­ing smaller

  • http://iwan.tumblr.com qubodup

    I agree that instruc­tions on how to deal with con­trib­ut­ors are likely to be help­ful and sup­port the cre­ation of such instruc­tions on the FGD Wiki. :)

  • Rock

    Good points all around. Truly apperceiatd.

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