Sep
09

Bandit Racer, Graphics and awesomeness

Yeah bom­bastic! I’ve been help­ing Ban­dit Racer with art dir­ec­tion lately, doing racing tile tracks 1, 2 & 3 UI and icons. So while I’m all hyped by that I figured I should make some noise about it, as it is such a nice little game.

Being a web-browser game no install needed, just a recent web-browser and you are ready to go, play­ing against bots and shoot­ing while you are at it. Check it out www.banditracer.eu. It even got a track editor so you can build tracks with the tiles I did and tex­tured by Dovilė Lap­in­skaitė, the cars is also done by her, look­ing great!

All stuff made by me are under the CC-BY 3.0 license so feel free to use them in your pro­ject if you like.

Also check­out mine and CruzeR’s side scrolling vec­tor art assets for mak­ing fantasy side scrolling games. I would like some developer feed­back on that, what should be included in such an asset pack and more..

 

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Nov
19

Comeback, again

I’ve been absent or inact­ive for an age it seems, no excuses needed and none sup­plied. Well I’m back and I will con­tinue the con­tent man­age­ment research I star­ted; Con­tent Man­age­ment and all things about that.
In fact I have already head star­ted with a new pro­ject that I hope will gen­er­ate some­thing use­ful, at least we will get a series of art­icles about it.

For those who want a pre­view you can head over to the SVN and look at some odds and oddit­ies pas­ted there. In short I’m going for a “full” media pack, doing all con­tent that would be needed for a game

More to come soon.

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Feb
03

Actually creating a 'Shared World'

Once again my post will be influ­enced by m64’s blo­g­post, this time around it’s more about what was said on #free­gamer at freen­ode (IRC) about the named post.

‘Shared Worlds’ might be a dif­fer­ent thing to dif­fer­ent people, but here it’s all about shar­ing assets, his­tory (I won’t say story) and contributors.

There are some obvi­ous prob­lem with making/creating this ‘shared world’ without think­ing; here I list the things that pops out of my mind:

  • A lot of effort before any­one use it, if any will — wasted time for all
  • Hard for people to con­trib­ute to a world that is “non-existent”  no bound­ar­ies will lead to an unat­tract­ive bloated world
  • Will­ing con­trib­ut­ors without a com­mon goal, leads to end­less discussion

How can we rem­edy these prob­lems before they occur?

There are some as easy solu­tions as there are prob­lems; One is to use a pre-existent world, from let’s say a game that is FOSS and don’t have any con­nec­tion to a closed/owned world, the big­ger the game is the bet­ter. A prob­lem here could be cur­rent lead man­ager not agree­ing with this idea, to me that hangs on com­mu­nic­a­tion. So go out and find one for us!

Another way would be to set out from the real world, and adding some spice to it. Ima­gine tech­no­logy advances stooped in the early 1920, Titanic (still a boat) got to its des­tin­a­tion, the Eif­fel tower got blown away by gnomes who sud­denly appeared from below.. (this could go on). But this ‘solu­tion’ only solves the num­ber two prob­lem lis­ted. On the other hand it will solve any legal har­ass­ment, depend­ing in what we spice it up with. Any thoughts on this is greatly appreciated!

A way to simply solve the last of my lis­ted prob­lems is to get hold of a strong-willed lead, someone or someones who can hold fast to a vis­ion, pure blood into that, and make other people interested/fascinated. Is there a bet­ter way to make all who want to con­trib­ute, work toward a sim­ilar of not same goal?

Sim­ilar pro­ject that already are out in the wild got mentioned

They don’t really cut the cake but they are worth research: Biggest and best of the men­tions comes first Angels Fall First (AFF) — To me it is Star Wars and Star Trek sans ali­ens and Hol­ly­wood cliché, to bad this is not truly open for us. Second is the Tux world — to me this hardly even makes it to this list as it is some­what lack­ing in ingredi­ents, even white the aid of freedroid.

I almost for­got, go post your thoughts on the fgd forum too!

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Feb
01

Making use of the Community

TheAn­icent­Goat, have been tinker­ing with a dis­tri­bu­tion sys­tem that would make it easier to:

  • Get games
  • Con­trib­ute
  • Develop games

A Kit­chen and Sink sys­tem to most of us, but that depends on how it is made.

Per­son­ally I want to make it easier for non-devs to con­trib­ute stuff like: sounds, 3D mod­els and other non code stuff. Some­thing else then SVN, git, bazaar and other sim­ilar sys­tem, which is both hard to use for most people not doing code, and a bit too offi­cial. And let’s face it, they were not meant to man­age the assets of games.

I would like to see a sys­tem that could handle feed­back and gal­lery like fea­tures, and do this in a simple way. This is not what theAn­icent­Goat aims for at the moment, but I think it could be integ­rated in his Steam like idea.

The idea out­lined by TheAin­cent­Goat is more about mak­ing use of the com­munity.

Build­ing a com­munity that is not for one spe­cific game, that could make con­tri­bu­tion more com­mon. If we find the way to make it easy. There are a couple of things beside regis­ter­ing to a forum, learn­ing how to use a Revi­sion Con­trol sys­tem and becom­ing best friends with the pro­ject lead/developer, that hinders con­tri­bu­tion as it is now. Min­im­ising the fear of rejec­tion and mak­ing it easy to test ones con­tri­bu­tion is also of importance.

All these things is already pos­sible, but it is far from work­ing in a good way. How to solve this is what the cur­rent dis­cus­sion is about, join in at IRC freen­ode #free­gamer or in the for­ums.

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