> You mentioned about not fully knowing what assets are needed when creating assets, so this sort of feedback is essential isn't it?
Not really because the kind of assets I was referring to are specific to the game. So yeah, it's essential for the dev whose trying to realize /his/ or /her/ project, but it's not necessary or even really all that useful for the artist. Experience doesn't really teach you much here except to expect something to be needed. Best example I can think of off hand are enemy creatures and boss monsters. It really depends alot on what kind of game you're making what sort of enemies you'll want and what kind of poses and animations they'll need.
> This feedback can be taking wrongly if worded wrongly, and it shouldn't be seen as a demand for something
No but it is an ask. You are asking someone who has already done something for you (for free!) to do more. All the buttery prose in the world can't change that.
As Kuranyem says, sometimes these conversations go well but more often than not they go completely sideways.
As a dev, I've been on the other side of it plenty of times. When you put something out there there's no end to the number requests and suggestions you get. You want to be accomodating and for your stuff to useful for folks, but you can't honor every request and after awhile just being asked for more can get tiring.
I actually think it's a good sign that you don't see a lot of 'could you add...' requests on OGA. Too much of that would be toxic and choke off new submissions.
Ultimately, OGA is not a place for devs to go and order up art for their games. The solution for that is called hiring an artist and paying them to make /your/ art in service of /your/ vision for /your/ game.
I think the only way it works is with a collaborative model. One persons starts something, and other people contribute the pieces they need or are interested in making. That's how all good open source projects operate and endure.
> So maybe it is an idea to have a baseline of criteria for a certain style of assets and a suggestion of a Minuim requirements to aid that asset
I could see a few docs or tutorials linked from the submision guidelines being perhaps helpful.
Just something that kind of goes over the basics of what pieces are typically needed to make a 'complete' game. I'll bet if we googled around we'd even find a few existing tutorials that covered the basics pretty well. Just having links there might help new comers.
I don't think there's much to be gained by taking it further than that and I certainly wouldn't support adding any additional 'requirements' for art submissions.
Again, just to repeat myself, I see this as a 'challenge devs face when using OGA works' not a 'problem OGA needs to solve'.
I think it would be great if the challenges and game jams could help foster some collaborative spirit around OGA works, but I don't think they have to be re-worked specifically to solve these problems. TBH, they are doing a decent enough job at it as is.
> One another thing is that modifying/completing assets is actually harder than what people might think.
I definitely understand that. I've worked myself up to being able to muddle by on simple 16x16, low color stuff, but there's alot of stuff on OGA that's just way beyond my skill level to even tinker with. And that's natural, some folks are artist and some folks are developers, and the lucky ones get it all :)
So I agree, again I don't think it's OGA's problem to solve, but it's definitely a valid point and one for people to hear and try to understand.
> First to bring some more art in OGA, because it lost a bit of steam for the past year
Is that true? From where I sit OGA seems to be doing better than ever. It definitely comes and goes in waves at times, but I am continually amazed by the amount of high quality work that shows up on the 'new submissions' page every week.
@all:
Getting back to the game jam...
Well, I kind of like the idea of requiring that everything for game jam entries either be taken from or made available on OGA, but on the other hand, we've been doing fine as is, so I don't know that there's any great urgency to change it.
Perhaps just adding a theme and requiring 2 assets from the art challenges is enough of a change for now.
Once nice part is that this takes the 'challenge' and 'theme' bits out of the subjective ranking part and moves them in the requirements part. That would certainly make the ranking part easier, as you could just play the game and focus on rating that and not worrying about tracking back what assets it used.
Another thought I had was to maybe expand the categories a bit. I guess we don't want to do it to death, but IIRC this year we had:
playability
artwork
music
sound
story/narrative
overall
I'd like to see something added for 'polish' or 'completeness'.
I could also see changing 'playability' to 'gameplay'
To my mind, 'playability' seems to straddle both 'completeness' and 'gameplay'
for example, a game that has great gameplay mechanics but crashes or has many bugs, how 'playable' is that?
I suppose we could spin forever on names for these, but that was my two cents after rating the games this year.
Welcome! Awesome that this conversation got you to sign up, thanks for joing in!
> ( lost my post after hitting reply from the preview, hopefully won't get a duplicate )
holey moley have I had that happen to me alot on OGA over the years! I recently switched (back) to firefox browser which seems to do a better job recovering your submission text if you hit back quickly enough on an error but even it's not proved full proof. Lately, I've been trying to train my fingers to hit ctrl-A, ctrl-C before hitting 'save'...
> *I* believe that it'd just be better to completely restrict the usage of assets to be from here, whether they add them before or during the jam.
I hadn't given it much thought before but I kind of like that idea. It certainly is the most obvious way to make the jam promote OGA art. There's the issue you get into about finding complete and/or compatible sets, but I do fundamentally like the idea that all the art from all the jam entries would come from OGA. This is certianly the most straight forward way to align the games with the goals of the Jam (eg. showcase OGA art).
> For example I absolutely love Sara and think she deserves her little game, but I just can't gather enough -consistent- assets to make her a proper little game.
I 100% agree with this point. Well not about Sara specifically as I haven't look into her case. But yes, 100% this is actually the biggest challenge to using OGA assets that I see as a dev. It is just very difficult to find /all/ the pieces you need to make a complete game. That's sort of what the recent 'Missing Link' challenge was all about. TBH, I don't know that it's a problem OGA needs to solve. To some degree, I think it's just the nature of the beast. The only real solution is probably more collaborative works where someone posts something and somebody else posts back filling in some 'missing links' they noticed. And to the community's credit, you do see this kind of thing happen a fair bit on OGA.
Still, I 100% agree it's an issue and it does pose a problem for trying to run a game jam with the requirement that 100% of the art be from OGA. I guess this is where the 'or added during the jam' idea comes in. The requirement could be that you must submit any changes/extensions/etc. that you made to OGA works back to OGA at the end of the Jam. This could promote a sort of 'virtuous cycle' in which art was published to OGA and then 'missing links' were filled in by folks actually trying to use the art in complete games.
> Though I suspect that artists don't get back to their work mainly because they don't particulary want to. I mean, I know for a fact that creating assets for a game is more work, and less fun, that creating assets on a whim
There's probably some of that, and to a certain extent the entire site exists on the whim of artists so it really only seems fair.
But I think there's also a lot of artists, especially folks just starting out, who simply don't know everything that's actually required to make a full game. There's just so many little bits and pieces you never notice when you're playing games. It's not something that's really obvious until you've been through the whole creation process a few times.
On top of that, there's a certain amount of stuff that you just never know you need until you need it. So much what a game needs is gameplay driven, unless you're all 'requirements document'-ed out from the get go, you're bound to run into some new sprite or animation or tile or something that you need that you never thought of at the outset. Asking artists to anticipate this kind of stuff is both futile and unfair.
Again, I see this as a 'challenge devs face when trying to use OGA assets' not 'a major problem OGA needs to solve.' However, it does point to the need to allow /some/ new art to be created for Jam entries.
@chasersgaming:
> Authors will never know to recreate/rework/add assets unless they get any feedback, they could get that feedback from the persons using those assets
that kind of feedback is /A LOT/ harder to give than it sounds.
Think about it. Someone puts who knows how much time into making a gorgeous set of sprites and tiles and then generously releases it onto OGA under an open license. Now you go back and say 'this sets great, but I really need a 'hurt' animation for this and this sprite'?
You can try to dress it up as nice as you want, but no matter how you word it, you've flipped the script, instead of doing something incredibly nice for you, now this artists is taking orders from you. Sometimes it ends well, but I've seen this kind of 'feedback' loop go awry many a time both on OGA and in the open source community more broadly. In the worst cases, people get burnt out and stop contributing altogether because they are sick of being made to feel like they're taking orders from the insatiable mob.
@all: Thinking out loud for a minute, I think the Art challenges are actually a pretty cool way to address the 'complete' works issue. We've actually had a few challenge themes in recent memory that were kind of in this vein and I think the results were positive. But to make it more general across all the challenges, maybe a standard '+5 favorites' if your submission is a derivative, expansion or compliment of an existing OGA asset.
> I was thinking that aswell, 6 assets, 2 (mandatory)being from the art challenges from previous years
that sounds about right to me. Plus some kind of text saying you've got to mention which assets from which challenges.
> and having a theme, voted for by the community, themes from the art challenges from previous years.
So theme is voted on from list of previous year's art challenge themes?
Maybe better from a short list of themes from previous challenges?
I actually don't mind saying 'choose a theme', leaves it more open, just require people to say which theme it was they were going for.
I like the wording:
'use of artwork'
'use of music'
I almost wonder if those should replace the existing 'artwork', 'music', etc. categories.
Friday, August 17, 2018 - 08:28
Yeah the ultimate aim of the game jam is to promote OGA and OGA art.
Obviously, though for the contestants the goal is to make the best game possible.
Adding Challenge/Theme to the voting criteria does seem to work at cross purpose with that. Should you try to make the best game or use the most art from the challenges? I think the general idea is to shoot for the former, but the voting criteria actually tilts a bit toward the later (two categories for 'theme' and 'challenge' vs one for 'playability').
Two ideas for solutions:
1) Split the two up. Add a separate award for the 'theme' and 'challenge' stuff and make it completely indepedent from the overal 'best game' award.
This could replace the OGA favorite award, if we're worried about there being too many awards.
2) Make use of the challenge art mandatory.
So something like: submissions must use at least 6 OGA assets including at least 2 from one of the previous year's art challenges. For theme, game must fit theme of at least one of the previous year's art challenges.
Of these two, I almost prefer the 2nd. It's more rigid than the current totally open contest, but on the other hand, it's still pretty flexibile. The themes themselves are fairly broad and IIRC some folks were requesting a theme because it gave them some where to start instead of a totally blank canvas.
I guess for theme the idea would be state which theme (or themes) you were going for and then voters can rate you according to how well they think you hit it.
yeah I am a big fan of the art jams. They are actually a better fit OGA than the game jams.
I just had a little trouble connecting the two this year.
One solution that occurs to me, is to put the onus for getting 'theme' and 'challenge' stars on the submitter. So if you want the points, then you've got to explicitly state which assets you used from which challenges. Ditto for themes. Makes it a little harder on the submitter, but saves everyone else the trouble of investigating this stuff themselves.
Thursday, August 16, 2018 - 17:07
@chasersgaming:
I couldn't disagree more with that idea. Other than CC0, it's in the text of all these licenses that you must provide credit including a link to the original work. I don't think we should be doing anything that signals that it's ok to not do this or be loose about how it's done.
I think Spring's hang up was making the link something you can click on. I do support dropping the text about that. It's strictly an optional 'nice to have' feature and seems to have caused some confusion.
I think there's got to be a better way to handle the 'theme' and 'challenge' bits. I love the idea of linking the game and art challenges, but I think we either need to make the connection stronger (eg. require assets from the challenges be used) or toss it altogether. As it was, I found it very hard to rate these two categories this year.
Tuesday, August 14, 2018 - 09:41
I call them 'fanfares' but I'm not sure where I got that term so it may or may not be a real one. :)
@chasersgaming:
> You mentioned about not fully knowing what assets are needed when creating assets, so this sort of feedback is essential isn't it?
Not really because the kind of assets I was referring to are specific to the game. So yeah, it's essential for the dev whose trying to realize /his/ or /her/ project, but it's not necessary or even really all that useful for the artist. Experience doesn't really teach you much here except to expect something to be needed. Best example I can think of off hand are enemy creatures and boss monsters. It really depends alot on what kind of game you're making what sort of enemies you'll want and what kind of poses and animations they'll need.
> This feedback can be taking wrongly if worded wrongly, and it shouldn't be seen as a demand for something
No but it is an ask. You are asking someone who has already done something for you (for free!) to do more. All the buttery prose in the world can't change that.
As Kuranyem says, sometimes these conversations go well but more often than not they go completely sideways.
As a dev, I've been on the other side of it plenty of times. When you put something out there there's no end to the number requests and suggestions you get. You want to be accomodating and for your stuff to useful for folks, but you can't honor every request and after awhile just being asked for more can get tiring.
I actually think it's a good sign that you don't see a lot of 'could you add...' requests on OGA. Too much of that would be toxic and choke off new submissions.
Ultimately, OGA is not a place for devs to go and order up art for their games. The solution for that is called hiring an artist and paying them to make /your/ art in service of /your/ vision for /your/ game.
I think the only way it works is with a collaborative model. One persons starts something, and other people contribute the pieces they need or are interested in making. That's how all good open source projects operate and endure.
> So maybe it is an idea to have a baseline of criteria for a certain style of assets and a suggestion of a Minuim requirements to aid that asset
I could see a few docs or tutorials linked from the submision guidelines being perhaps helpful.
Just something that kind of goes over the basics of what pieces are typically needed to make a 'complete' game. I'll bet if we googled around we'd even find a few existing tutorials that covered the basics pretty well. Just having links there might help new comers.
I don't think there's much to be gained by taking it further than that and I certainly wouldn't support adding any additional 'requirements' for art submissions.
Again, just to repeat myself, I see this as a 'challenge devs face when using OGA works' not a 'problem OGA needs to solve'.
I think it would be great if the challenges and game jams could help foster some collaborative spirit around OGA works, but I don't think they have to be re-worked specifically to solve these problems. TBH, they are doing a decent enough job at it as is.
@Kuranyem:
> One another thing is that modifying/completing assets is actually harder than what people might think.
I definitely understand that. I've worked myself up to being able to muddle by on simple 16x16, low color stuff, but there's alot of stuff on OGA that's just way beyond my skill level to even tinker with. And that's natural, some folks are artist and some folks are developers, and the lucky ones get it all :)
So I agree, again I don't think it's OGA's problem to solve, but it's definitely a valid point and one for people to hear and try to understand.
> First to bring some more art in OGA, because it lost a bit of steam for the past year
Is that true? From where I sit OGA seems to be doing better than ever. It definitely comes and goes in waves at times, but I am continually amazed by the amount of high quality work that shows up on the 'new submissions' page every week.
@all:
Getting back to the game jam...
Well, I kind of like the idea of requiring that everything for game jam entries either be taken from or made available on OGA, but on the other hand, we've been doing fine as is, so I don't know that there's any great urgency to change it.
Perhaps just adding a theme and requiring 2 assets from the art challenges is enough of a change for now.
Once nice part is that this takes the 'challenge' and 'theme' bits out of the subjective ranking part and moves them in the requirements part. That would certainly make the ranking part easier, as you could just play the game and focus on rating that and not worrying about tracking back what assets it used.
Another thought I had was to maybe expand the categories a bit. I guess we don't want to do it to death, but IIRC this year we had:
playability
artwork
music
sound
story/narrative
overall
I'd like to see something added for 'polish' or 'completeness'.
I could also see changing 'playability' to 'gameplay'
To my mind, 'playability' seems to straddle both 'completeness' and 'gameplay'
for example, a game that has great gameplay mechanics but crashes or has many bugs, how 'playable' is that?
I suppose we could spin forever on names for these, but that was my two cents after rating the games this year.
@Kuranyem:
Welcome! Awesome that this conversation got you to sign up, thanks for joing in!
> ( lost my post after hitting reply from the preview, hopefully won't get a duplicate )
holey moley have I had that happen to me alot on OGA over the years! I recently switched (back) to firefox browser which seems to do a better job recovering your submission text if you hit back quickly enough on an error but even it's not proved full proof. Lately, I've been trying to train my fingers to hit ctrl-A, ctrl-C before hitting 'save'...
> *I* believe that it'd just be better to completely restrict the usage of assets to be from here, whether they add them before or during the jam.
I hadn't given it much thought before but I kind of like that idea. It certainly is the most obvious way to make the jam promote OGA art. There's the issue you get into about finding complete and/or compatible sets, but I do fundamentally like the idea that all the art from all the jam entries would come from OGA. This is certianly the most straight forward way to align the games with the goals of the Jam (eg. showcase OGA art).
> For example I absolutely love Sara and think she deserves her little game, but I just can't gather enough -consistent- assets to make her a proper little game.
I 100% agree with this point. Well not about Sara specifically as I haven't look into her case. But yes, 100% this is actually the biggest challenge to using OGA assets that I see as a dev. It is just very difficult to find /all/ the pieces you need to make a complete game. That's sort of what the recent 'Missing Link' challenge was all about. TBH, I don't know that it's a problem OGA needs to solve. To some degree, I think it's just the nature of the beast. The only real solution is probably more collaborative works where someone posts something and somebody else posts back filling in some 'missing links' they noticed. And to the community's credit, you do see this kind of thing happen a fair bit on OGA.
Still, I 100% agree it's an issue and it does pose a problem for trying to run a game jam with the requirement that 100% of the art be from OGA. I guess this is where the 'or added during the jam' idea comes in. The requirement could be that you must submit any changes/extensions/etc. that you made to OGA works back to OGA at the end of the Jam. This could promote a sort of 'virtuous cycle' in which art was published to OGA and then 'missing links' were filled in by folks actually trying to use the art in complete games.
> Though I suspect that artists don't get back to their work mainly because they don't particulary want to. I mean, I know for a fact that creating assets for a game is more work, and less fun, that creating assets on a whim
There's probably some of that, and to a certain extent the entire site exists on the whim of artists so it really only seems fair.
But I think there's also a lot of artists, especially folks just starting out, who simply don't know everything that's actually required to make a full game. There's just so many little bits and pieces you never notice when you're playing games. It's not something that's really obvious until you've been through the whole creation process a few times.
On top of that, there's a certain amount of stuff that you just never know you need until you need it. So much what a game needs is gameplay driven, unless you're all 'requirements document'-ed out from the get go, you're bound to run into some new sprite or animation or tile or something that you need that you never thought of at the outset. Asking artists to anticipate this kind of stuff is both futile and unfair.
Again, I see this as a 'challenge devs face when trying to use OGA assets' not 'a major problem OGA needs to solve.' However, it does point to the need to allow /some/ new art to be created for Jam entries.
@chasersgaming:
> Authors will never know to recreate/rework/add assets unless they get any feedback, they could get that feedback from the persons using those assets
that kind of feedback is /A LOT/ harder to give than it sounds.
Think about it. Someone puts who knows how much time into making a gorgeous set of sprites and tiles and then generously releases it onto OGA under an open license. Now you go back and say 'this sets great, but I really need a 'hurt' animation for this and this sprite'?
You can try to dress it up as nice as you want, but no matter how you word it, you've flipped the script, instead of doing something incredibly nice for you, now this artists is taking orders from you. Sometimes it ends well, but I've seen this kind of 'feedback' loop go awry many a time both on OGA and in the open source community more broadly. In the worst cases, people get burnt out and stop contributing altogether because they are sick of being made to feel like they're taking orders from the insatiable mob.
@all: Thinking out loud for a minute, I think the Art challenges are actually a pretty cool way to address the 'complete' works issue. We've actually had a few challenge themes in recent memory that were kind of in this vein and I think the results were positive. But to make it more general across all the challenges, maybe a standard '+5 favorites' if your submission is a derivative, expansion or compliment of an existing OGA asset.
Well, yeah the ultimate goal of the jam is for everyone to have fun making and playing games.
But the goal of specifically hosting an OpenGameArt Game Jam is to promote OGA and show off some of the wonderful art available on OGA.
The point of the jam is to bring attention to OGA and show off what can be done with assets from OGA.
Tying the Game Jam to the Art Challenges can help drive interest in both.
> I was thinking that aswell, 6 assets, 2 (mandatory)being from the art challenges from previous years
that sounds about right to me. Plus some kind of text saying you've got to mention which assets from which challenges.
> and having a theme, voted for by the community, themes from the art challenges from previous years.
So theme is voted on from list of previous year's art challenge themes?
Maybe better from a short list of themes from previous challenges?
I actually don't mind saying 'choose a theme', leaves it more open, just require people to say which theme it was they were going for.
I like the wording:
'use of artwork'
'use of music'
I almost wonder if those should replace the existing 'artwork', 'music', etc. categories.
Yeah the ultimate aim of the game jam is to promote OGA and OGA art.
Obviously, though for the contestants the goal is to make the best game possible.
Adding Challenge/Theme to the voting criteria does seem to work at cross purpose with that. Should you try to make the best game or use the most art from the challenges? I think the general idea is to shoot for the former, but the voting criteria actually tilts a bit toward the later (two categories for 'theme' and 'challenge' vs one for 'playability').
Two ideas for solutions:
1) Split the two up. Add a separate award for the 'theme' and 'challenge' stuff and make it completely indepedent from the overal 'best game' award.
This could replace the OGA favorite award, if we're worried about there being too many awards.
2) Make use of the challenge art mandatory.
So something like: submissions must use at least 6 OGA assets including at least 2 from one of the previous year's art challenges. For theme, game must fit theme of at least one of the previous year's art challenges.
Of these two, I almost prefer the 2nd. It's more rigid than the current totally open contest, but on the other hand, it's still pretty flexibile. The themes themselves are fairly broad and IIRC some folks were requesting a theme because it gave them some where to start instead of a totally blank canvas.
I guess for theme the idea would be state which theme (or themes) you were going for and then voters can rate you according to how well they think you hit it.
yeah I am a big fan of the art jams. They are actually a better fit OGA than the game jams.
I just had a little trouble connecting the two this year.
One solution that occurs to me, is to put the onus for getting 'theme' and 'challenge' stars on the submitter. So if you want the points, then you've got to explicitly state which assets you used from which challenges. Ditto for themes. Makes it a little harder on the submitter, but saves everyone else the trouble of investigating this stuff themselves.
@chasersgaming:
I couldn't disagree more with that idea. Other than CC0, it's in the text of all these licenses that you must provide credit including a link to the original work. I don't think we should be doing anything that signals that it's ok to not do this or be loose about how it's done.
I think Spring's hang up was making the link something you can click on. I do support dropping the text about that. It's strictly an optional 'nice to have' feature and seems to have caused some confusion.
I think there's got to be a better way to handle the 'theme' and 'challenge' bits. I love the idea of linking the game and art challenges, but I think we either need to make the connection stronger (eg. require assets from the challenges be used) or toss it altogether. As it was, I found it very hard to rate these two categories this year.
I call them 'fanfares' but I'm not sure where I got that term so it may or may not be a real one. :)
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