First: this looks totally awesome. I really love the retro feeling to the interface, plus the extra effort you went to on the manual's cover. I'm looking forward to giving it a shot when I get some time.
There are, however, a few people missing from the credits section on your site--from the screenshots, I noticed two people who had collaborated with me on enemy graphics weren't mentioned (Blarumyrran and LordNeo). My suggestion is that you keep careful track of that, since it's a lot more effort to go back and try to remember every listing you got things from.
Hello! I must say, this project is very interesting, and the designs you all have shown off so far look great.
As a pixel artist the designs would be the bit that I would be able to work with (though the CC-By-SA licensing means that generally I wouldn't, for reasons that have been discussed a few times around here). So when it comes to the 3D side of things I'm just a somewhat uninformed spectator, albeit one who is hopeful that they might make development easier for games I like.
So, if you'll pardon my 3D ignorance, I have a couple of questions on that front (which others in my general situation might as well).
1) What does it mean logistically for the models to be unskinned and unrigged? From my basic understanding this would seem to indicate that they still wouldn't be game-ready for most applications, but would require a fair amount of extra work to animate. But I know I could be very wrong on that.
2) What sort of polycount are the models aimed to have? I know that's not an issue for a game like FLARE which would render them as sprites, but it could of course be very important for a truly 3D game.
I only say it because it's generally very hard for devs to find good artists willing to invest a lot of time in a game that isn't far along in development. So many games fail at this stage that the artist is left with nothing after having done a huge amount of work, not to mention the time/emotional investment in the project overall. So they learn to be very selective pretty quickly, even if the idea for a game sounds like a lot of fun.
Have you taken a look around OGA for placeholders? You're much more likely to find an experienced artist if your game is at a later stage of development (aka, more likely to ultimately succeed).
Sorry for the slow response to this. I really appreciate your compliments and your offer. Unfortunately at the moment I'm too busy with school to take on another project, especially one that would be as time-intensive as this. Best of luck on your project.
Thanks! I really appreciate that. There are things I would do differently if I were drawing these today, but they still hold a special place in my memory.
The style is too different from the LPC assets for them to be dropped in as-is; the color count is too high, too much contrast, too small, too detail dense. If you're not planning on doing an LPC-styled game you wouldn't have those problems. That said, those particular features also make them somewhat annoying to animate because of all the fiddly bits, so I'd personally want to redraw it before animating anyway.
There's nothing really unfair about giving permission to one group in particular IMO. It's your art, and you have every legal and moral right to give out these permissions as you see fit--permissions which you've already been more than generous with. And it's certainly possible to restrict permission to one group of people, or to only give it out on request. That's how generally how copyright law works, after all.
Personally, I am always open to making these specific exceptions/permissions for my CC-By licensed art (which still has the potentially troublesome anti-DRM clause) on request from an interested dev. I dislike Apple very strongly, but I am always happy to see a developer getting involved in using freely-licensed assets, and hopefully looking more closely at the open source community in general. In an ideal world this wouldn't be a problem, but we're still working with imperfect licenses which don't always match the current market, and many devs who aren't always aware of what the open source community has to offer, so I'm willing to deal with it. I don't think that the community here tends to look down on this attitude at all.
On the other hand, I can also understand not wanting to support Apple's very closed system (and mindset) at all, and being unwilling to grant exceptions so people can participate in it. I don't think that the community here looks down on this attitude either. It's all about what your goals are for your art, and what you're comfortable with.
For the record, powrtoch, that is the famous Kain from FF4, not something original to MirageSource.
Is there any particular reason that the character sheets have to be that exact resolution? It's going to be somewhat limiting in a way that isn't really necessary these days. For instance, I'd normally suggest taking a look at CharlesGabriel's classic 16x18 px base (whose many accessories can be seen here: http://opengameart.org/content/oga-16x16-jrpg-sprites-tiles ) for something of a similar resolution, but at 2x it would be 4 pixels too tall for a 32x32 box.
First: this looks totally awesome. I really love the retro feeling to the interface, plus the extra effort you went to on the manual's cover. I'm looking forward to giving it a shot when I get some time.
There are, however, a few people missing from the credits section on your site--from the screenshots, I noticed two people who had collaborated with me on enemy graphics weren't mentioned (Blarumyrran and LordNeo). My suggestion is that you keep careful track of that, since it's a lot more effort to go back and try to remember every listing you got things from.
Anyway, I'll definitely be watching this project.
Hello! I must say, this project is very interesting, and the designs you all have shown off so far look great.
As a pixel artist the designs would be the bit that I would be able to work with (though the CC-By-SA licensing means that generally I wouldn't, for reasons that have been discussed a few times around here). So when it comes to the 3D side of things I'm just a somewhat uninformed spectator, albeit one who is hopeful that they might make development easier for games I like.
So, if you'll pardon my 3D ignorance, I have a couple of questions on that front (which others in my general situation might as well).
1) What does it mean logistically for the models to be unskinned and unrigged? From my basic understanding this would seem to indicate that they still wouldn't be game-ready for most applications, but would require a fair amount of extra work to animate. But I know I could be very wrong on that.
2) What sort of polycount are the models aimed to have? I know that's not an issue for a game like FLARE which would render them as sprites, but it could of course be very important for a truly 3D game.
I only say it because it's generally very hard for devs to find good artists willing to invest a lot of time in a game that isn't far along in development. So many games fail at this stage that the artist is left with nothing after having done a huge amount of work, not to mention the time/emotional investment in the project overall. So they learn to be very selective pretty quickly, even if the idea for a game sounds like a lot of fun.
Have you taken a look around OGA for placeholders? You're much more likely to find an experienced artist if your game is at a later stage of development (aka, more likely to ultimately succeed).
Hello,
Sorry for the slow response to this. I really appreciate your compliments and your offer. Unfortunately at the moment I'm too busy with school to take on another project, especially one that would be as time-intensive as this. Best of luck on your project.
Thanks! I really appreciate that. There are things I would do differently if I were drawing these today, but they still hold a special place in my memory.
The style is too different from the LPC assets for them to be dropped in as-is; the color count is too high, too much contrast, too small, too detail dense. If you're not planning on doing an LPC-styled game you wouldn't have those problems. That said, those particular features also make them somewhat annoying to animate because of all the fiddly bits, so I'd personally want to redraw it before animating anyway.
There's nothing really unfair about giving permission to one group in particular IMO. It's your art, and you have every legal and moral right to give out these permissions as you see fit--permissions which you've already been more than generous with. And it's certainly possible to restrict permission to one group of people, or to only give it out on request. That's how generally how copyright law works, after all.
Personally, I am always open to making these specific exceptions/permissions for my CC-By licensed art (which still has the potentially troublesome anti-DRM clause) on request from an interested dev. I dislike Apple very strongly, but I am always happy to see a developer getting involved in using freely-licensed assets, and hopefully looking more closely at the open source community in general. In an ideal world this wouldn't be a problem, but we're still working with imperfect licenses which don't always match the current market, and many devs who aren't always aware of what the open source community has to offer, so I'm willing to deal with it. I don't think that the community here tends to look down on this attitude at all.
On the other hand, I can also understand not wanting to support Apple's very closed system (and mindset) at all, and being unwilling to grant exceptions so people can participate in it. I don't think that the community here looks down on this attitude either. It's all about what your goals are for your art, and what you're comfortable with.
Thanks, I really appreciate you saying that and showing your project. I'll be watching your progess.
For the record, powrtoch, that is the famous Kain from FF4, not something original to MirageSource.
Is there any particular reason that the character sheets have to be that exact resolution? It's going to be somewhat limiting in a way that isn't really necessary these days. For instance, I'd normally suggest taking a look at CharlesGabriel's classic 16x18 px base (whose many accessories can be seen here: http://opengameart.org/content/oga-16x16-jrpg-sprites-tiles ) for something of a similar resolution, but at 2x it would be 4 pixels too tall for a 32x32 box.
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