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
20

Content Creation and Management

Or how to manage content contributors, the experiment.

tmp_helmchange

I’ve been curi­ous for a long time on what makes FLOSS games fail in the areas of User Exper­i­ence/Inter­face (UX, UI) and graph­ics, visual coherency, why they push second-hand gfx next to ace grade gfx. In my search for an answer I decided to start a pro­ject of my own to gather some first hand experience.

The aim for this pro­ject will be to col­lect as much con­tent as pos­sible for a small and simple game, at the same time; avoid neg­lect­ing any UI or UX related issue. No need for ace grade gfx just visual coher­ency. To be able to fin­ish this pro­ject in a reas­on­able time frame, I first decided on what type of game and which kind of theme it would have. My decision are based on per­sonal pref­er­ences what kind of “simple” game would I enjoy? It fell down to a Tac­tical Role-Playing Game in a fantasy set­ting, like Tac­tics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis, Final Fantasy Tac­tics and Final Fantasy Tac­tics Advanced. Mind you, I’m only gath­er­ing con­tent for it no code what so ever, that is for a will­ing developer to do if he or she find the time and will to do so.

Here I’ll give to you the mockup game;

Realp - Book of Tiny Bits

logo: Realp - Book of Tiny Bits

In my estim­a­tion I already got enough game con­tent to be able to make a game mech­an­ics test. And this in a very short time span. The ques­tion now is what do lead developers and pro­ject lead­ers miss when they do the same job. My answers at this moment would be; Time to com­mu­nic­ate (beside the obvi­ous; con­nec­tions)  here are some ques­tions I find important:

  • How does your con­trib­utor work?
  • What does he or she need, to do the things you want done?
  • Are the con­trib­utor able to work inde­pend­ently or does he/she need continuous guidance?
    • If so how could you rem­edy that?

cha_theif2

Don’t mind the 2D, it will be in 3D as might be seen in the SVN. The 2D images every­where, is my way of com­mu­nic­a­tion with con­trib­ut­ors, in this case tid­bit the 3D modeller.

How did/do I go about this project?

Well to know what con­tent you need you must decide on a couple of things, some of them I already told you about (What kind of game). To list some of these decisions, here are some of the fea­tures I have in mind;

  • Pro­ced­ural map generation
  • Move­ment by points of interest
  • In-game script­ing of unit behaviours

These help me under­stand what is needed; Without them I would miss much of the small things. So I actu­ally think of this ‘media pack’ as a full game, that way I hope it will be easier to adapt the media to other pro­jects too.cha_brute

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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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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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