Just having the links would be huge even if there isn't room for much text around them.
I guess wether the game jam counts as an Art Challenge or not depends on wether you consider games art or not, so it's good with me, just don't ask Roger Ebert's ghost ;)
Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - 12:29
@chasersgaming: page looks great! Going white on purple was a great idea! With the checkerboard pattern back there, it kinda makes the whole page look like a jam label.
I don't know about you folks but all this purple talk has definitely got me dreaming of a Prince theme for next year's logo! :)
Gathering and working on assets beforehand seems somewhat like cheating but I'm not complaining. Getting different assets to look/work right together is definitely one of the challenges I ran into with last year's jam, so doing some of that work beforehand will definitely be a plus.
To be fair, I promise to post whatever work I do beforehand back to OGA at the start of the Jam so others can have access to them. If history holds, it'll probably be mostly be palette swapping and extra sprite poses. I'll either post the changes as comments to the original works, or if I end with a lot of stuff, I'll make a new submission out of it all.
Now that the page is up, should we get an announcement post up for the jam? Since folks can prep beforehand, it only seems fair to give them as much notice as possible.
@MedicineStorm: any chance of that super secret Jam announcement returning to the upper left of the home page (where I promise I didn't really see it before ;) Maybe I'm alone on this, but I definitely think Jam (and other) annoucements could pre-empt the 'Chat with Us' link for a while without huring anyone.
first, I notice itch asks for a 'cover image' at 315x250. By some miracle, my logo is very, very close to that (315x261), so I just lopped 10 pixels off the top of the jar. It's not quite balanced right like this but it should work just fine all the same.
Second, after a bunch of twiddling in my own test game jam in itch.io, I came up with a solution that I think works ok. Attaching a snap of the itch theme setup.
first I took the checkerboard pattern, scaled it 2x and fiddled with contrast, saturation and brightness on it until I'd gotten it good and bleached out. I used this as the 'background' for the jam page. The idea was to get it to convey the same idea/feeling but not hurt my eyes when repeated all over the background of the page. Think it came out ok, although the color seems to have shifted slightly more blue than the patented OGA purple.
Second, after a bunch of trial and error, I hit on the idea of dropping the jam jar and checkerboard treatments from the logo. This made it fit better as a title for the page. It also made it simplier to look at and eliminated any conflict between the checkerboard in the logo and the checkboard pattern in the background.
Next, I scaled this logo by 2x with no interpolation just to get it to look a little bigger on the page. Honestly, it's almost a bit too big now. A scale of 1.5x or so probably would have worked better, but being as it's pixel art, there's no good way to do that without mangling the image. So I stuck to an even scaling factor.
Finally, I padded with the top of the new logo with about 50 pixels of empty space. This was just a really brute force way to get the logo to vertically center a bit better on the itch page. For some reason, itch puts the banner at the very top of the page and then puts a bunch of dead space between the bottom of the banner and the start of the page. Maybe for some banners that works fine, but for this one it looked really off, so I basically just added some dead space to the image to force it to center better.
Oh yeah, and I also changed the background and text color of the page to match the OGA 'white on purple' theme. An idea I got from last year's jam which did the same.
Final note, the background image options are:
Repeat: Repeat
Position: Align Center
And the banner image is set to:
Size: fixed width
the results looked good on my 1080p screen, hopefully they're not too awful when viewed at other resultions.
No worries about the extra work on my end, I fully realize it's my fault for being so nit-picky about things. thank you for being patient and even asking for my input to begin with. :)
Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - 06:48
yeah, nothing quite works. Fiddling with a test jam in my own itch.io account, working up some assets to fit what itch allows. Will post them shortly. Sorry this has turned into an ordeal. :(
Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - 03:44
thanks! I just wanted to do right by chasersgaming and all the work he puts into organizing the jam.
I guess the idea is a bit literal, but what esle can you expect from a programmer brain? :)
taking a few days off from it, my only remaining gripe is Sara's pose. It was the most dynamic pose I could find, but I'm not sure it really makes any sense in the context it's given here. Thinking of going back and replacing it with a 'hands down' pose and putting a jam sandwich with a bite taken out of it in here hands.
Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - 03:39
Hi! sorry about that was out and about the last two days and only just now had a chance to sit down and login into itch.io to take a look. Unfortunately, I'm getting a 404 when folling that link. :(
Without seeing the actual page, I can tell you, last year the jam page just used the two logos as repeating wall paper in the background. I'm not sure that will working as will with this year's design. I was thinking the logo near the top (either on the top left next to the title text, or top center above the title text) and then maybe use the checkerboard pattern (perhaps desatured a bit) as the tiling wallpaper for the page.
Well that was just my first pass idea, I don't recall if itch.io even supports anything other than the tiling wallpaper approach. if not, I'm sure that'll look fine too!
and yeah, hope the name change isn't too confusing to folks, something I've been meaning to do for a while now, pretty much since I saw that it could be done. :)
Ok, here's the final draft, at least until I get some other ideas for it.
I added a cloudy sky (from Dan Ryder's awesome cloud set) and some berry bushes behind Sara. I made the berry bushes by combining shrunken version of a bush from SuperMata's LPC Modified Art set and some berries from Bart's Berry Garden set. I also added a bit of grassy ground courtesy of the LPC Terrain Repack set (various artists).
I went ahead and packed it all up and make a proper submission out of it.
is the sidebar thing too small to put two lines:
Running Now: XYZ Art Challenge (link)
Coming June 1: OGA Summer 2018 Game Jam (link)
?
Just having the links would be huge even if there isn't room for much text around them.
I guess wether the game jam counts as an Art Challenge or not depends on wether you consider games art or not, so it's good with me, just don't ask Roger Ebert's ghost ;)
@chasersgaming: page looks great! Going white on purple was a great idea! With the checkerboard pattern back there, it kinda makes the whole page look like a jam label.
I don't know about you folks but all this purple talk has definitely got me dreaming of a Prince theme for next year's logo! :)
Gathering and working on assets beforehand seems somewhat like cheating but I'm not complaining. Getting different assets to look/work right together is definitely one of the challenges I ran into with last year's jam, so doing some of that work beforehand will definitely be a plus.
To be fair, I promise to post whatever work I do beforehand back to OGA at the start of the Jam so others can have access to them. If history holds, it'll probably be mostly be palette swapping and extra sprite poses. I'll either post the changes as comments to the original works, or if I end with a lot of stuff, I'll make a new submission out of it all.
Now that the page is up, should we get an announcement post up for the jam? Since folks can prep beforehand, it only seems fair to give them as much notice as possible.
@MedicineStorm: any chance of that super secret Jam announcement returning to the upper left of the home page (where I promise I didn't really see it before ;) Maybe I'm alone on this, but I definitely think Jam (and other) annoucements could pre-empt the 'Chat with Us' link for a while without huring anyone.
ok, here's what I got after some fiddling....
first, I notice itch asks for a 'cover image' at 315x250. By some miracle, my logo is very, very close to that (315x261), so I just lopped 10 pixels off the top of the jar. It's not quite balanced right like this but it should work just fine all the same.
Second, after a bunch of twiddling in my own test game jam in itch.io, I came up with a solution that I think works ok. Attaching a snap of the itch theme setup.
first I took the checkerboard pattern, scaled it 2x and fiddled with contrast, saturation and brightness on it until I'd gotten it good and bleached out. I used this as the 'background' for the jam page. The idea was to get it to convey the same idea/feeling but not hurt my eyes when repeated all over the background of the page. Think it came out ok, although the color seems to have shifted slightly more blue than the patented OGA purple.
Second, after a bunch of trial and error, I hit on the idea of dropping the jam jar and checkerboard treatments from the logo. This made it fit better as a title for the page. It also made it simplier to look at and eliminated any conflict between the checkerboard in the logo and the checkboard pattern in the background.
Next, I scaled this logo by 2x with no interpolation just to get it to look a little bigger on the page. Honestly, it's almost a bit too big now. A scale of 1.5x or so probably would have worked better, but being as it's pixel art, there's no good way to do that without mangling the image. So I stuck to an even scaling factor.
Finally, I padded with the top of the new logo with about 50 pixels of empty space. This was just a really brute force way to get the logo to vertically center a bit better on the itch page. For some reason, itch puts the banner at the very top of the page and then puts a bunch of dead space between the bottom of the banner and the start of the page. Maybe for some banners that works fine, but for this one it looked really off, so I basically just added some dead space to the image to force it to center better.
Oh yeah, and I also changed the background and text color of the page to match the OGA 'white on purple' theme. An idea I got from last year's jam which did the same.
Final note, the background image options are:
Repeat: Repeat
Position: Align Center
And the banner image is set to:
Size: fixed width
the results looked good on my 1080p screen, hopefully they're not too awful when viewed at other resultions.
No worries about the extra work on my end, I fully realize it's my fault for being so nit-picky about things. thank you for being patient and even asking for my input to begin with. :)
yeah, nothing quite works. Fiddling with a test jam in my own itch.io account, working up some assets to fit what itch allows. Will post them shortly. Sorry this has turned into an ordeal. :(
thanks! I just wanted to do right by chasersgaming and all the work he puts into organizing the jam.
I guess the idea is a bit literal, but what esle can you expect from a programmer brain? :)
taking a few days off from it, my only remaining gripe is Sara's pose. It was the most dynamic pose I could find, but I'm not sure it really makes any sense in the context it's given here. Thinking of going back and replacing it with a 'hands down' pose and putting a jam sandwich with a bite taken out of it in here hands.
Hi! sorry about that was out and about the last two days and only just now had a chance to sit down and login into itch.io to take a look. Unfortunately, I'm getting a 404 when folling that link. :(
Without seeing the actual page, I can tell you, last year the jam page just used the two logos as repeating wall paper in the background. I'm not sure that will working as will with this year's design. I was thinking the logo near the top (either on the top left next to the title text, or top center above the title text) and then maybe use the checkerboard pattern (perhaps desatured a bit) as the tiling wallpaper for the page.
Well that was just my first pass idea, I don't recall if itch.io even supports anything other than the tiling wallpaper approach. if not, I'm sure that'll look fine too!
and yeah, hope the name change isn't too confusing to folks, something I've been meaning to do for a while now, pretty much since I saw that it could be done. :)
Ok, here's the final draft, at least until I get some other ideas for it.
I added a cloudy sky (from Dan Ryder's awesome cloud set) and some berry bushes behind Sara. I made the berry bushes by combining shrunken version of a bush from SuperMata's LPC Modified Art set and some berries from Bart's Berry Garden set. I also added a bit of grassy ground courtesy of the LPC Terrain Repack set (various artists).
I went ahead and packed it all up and make a proper submission out of it.
https://opengameart.org/content/logo-for-ogas-summer-2018-game-jam
oh and just for good measure, here it is with Sara (from https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-sara, slight smile added by me)
Thinking maybe a bit more around sara.
Ok, put some more work in. Here it is with a jar and as just a label.
Pretty happy with the text and label and all that. Shading on jar and the lid for the jar feel a touch week to me.
thanks and yup, your eye aren't fooling you, those are the exact colors grabbed off the OGA website. :)
If find them a bit dark overall. Great for grape jelly though. Still working out the coloring though. Those waves are just a first pass.
think chasersgaming said the Jam will be held in July.
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