I'm excited to announce that the first piece of exclusive OpenGameArt.org art has been completed! You can find it here. My eventual goal is to commission various sets of armor, hair, faces, etc, (as well as a female base sprite with similar options) that will allow developers to build sprites to their specifications. For the time being, customizing this sprite will be up to you, the community. Please remember that, since this art is licened under the GPL and CC-BY-SA, you are required to redistribute the source of any modifications you make to it (in this case, any Gimp, Photoshop, or similar files that contain image layers), as well as crediting the original author.

It's been suggested to me that I consider taking donations for the website. I think this might be a good idea, as it would allow me to commission art more quickly, but I really want to avoid it being at all off-putting. If I did accept donations, I would do so under the following standards:

* Every cent donated would go toward commissioning art and/or music (as opposed to server costs, which I cover myself, and in addition to the art commissions I'm already covering myself). This may change if my bandwidth needs skyrocket, but at the moment I've got way more than enough.
* I'll never have any sort of "premium membership" or incentive for someone to donate, except perhaps recognition of doners who would like to be recognized. Since the point of OpenGameArt is to provide art to developers at no cost, any sort of for-pay premium benefit would be counter to what this site is about.

For the record, I have the budget and desire to run this site myself pretty much indefinitely without any kind of assistance. It's just that a bigger budget will bring in more art for the community, so it's worth looking into.

Thoughts, anyone?

I mentioned earlier that I've commissioned some exclusive art for this site, which will be released under the OpenGameArt.org's standard 3 licenses (namely CC-BY-SA, GPL2, and GPL3). My budget is somewhat limited, so for the time being, things will be released bit by bit, starting in a week or two. Here's what you can expect:

* A fantasy RPG tileset -- at the moment, we're starting with a basic overland set, but the plan is to move into doing towns, scenery, caves, etc.
* A fantasy RPG sprite building set -- essentially a "paper doll" web application that will allow you to pick a base and customize it with hair, armor, etc. Initial work is occurring on the male sprite base, which should be ready fairly shortly. Once the bases are completed for both genders, we'll start working on accessories.

In both cases, I encourage everyone to create and submit expansions for these art packs, as I continue to commission the artists to work on them as well.

Check back soon!

I'm not a superb artist, but I've learned a little bit about color and light theory in my attempts to improve my artistic skills. What I'm seeing in a lot of games is a tendency to use pure green for grass, pure blue for water, etc. It's a natural assumption to make, but it's not quite the right one.

The picture on the right is a screenshot of Chrono Trigger. The odd-looking green square toward the center of the image is a region where I filtered out all of the red and blue components of the color. Notice how the rest of grass in the image looks a lot more natural than the bright green patch.

I encourage you to grab a screenshot from your favorite game (2D or 3D -- this applies to both), load it up in your pixel editor of choice (I'm using Gimp at the moment), and poke around with the eyedropper tool. If you examine the grass colors, you'll notice that they all have a red and a blue component, as opposed to just green.

Furthermore, you'll discover that brighter colors are more yellow and darker colors are more blue. This is because of the way that natural sunlight works. Sunlight is yellowish, and as such, anything in direct sunlight will pick up a bit of that yellow. On the other hand, the rest of the sky is blue. Anything in a shadow will be lit mostly by the sky, and will pick up a bluish tint.

When using this, remember that subtlety is the key. Don't make your brights too yellow or your darks too blue. Adjust them carefully until they look natural.