Congrats to all the winners and participants! I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't push myself to enter the coding phase, despite the fact that I entered the art phase (and received a surprisingly respectable score, for that matter!).
I had some thoughts about the structure of the next one that would help motivate me and hopefully others. Regardless of the style chosen, I think we'd all benefit from having at least some part of the contests running concurrently, and in a gated manner. Something like:
Month 1: initial art phase Month 2: initial gamedev phase (must submit demo), final art phase (artists take requests/fill in gaps as appropriate) Month 3: final gamedev phase
This schedule would still allow people to take part in both. Obviously you don't want to exclude anyone who wants to enter at the last minute, but you could restrict a subset of the prizes to those who meet the first deadlines, or perhaps offer smaller, separate prizes at that level (though that increases schedule pressure on the judges, which may be an issue).
As for the style question, I think FLARE-style isometric renders of 3D models would make for some fantastic-looking contest games. Or use the same perspective and go for a particular theme (like steampunk, say, as opposed to the implied fantasy theme from last year), so that we can reuse many of the wonderful assets created for the first contest.
Monday, July 2, 2012 - 09:00
@ Anon:
I CC0-ed a couple of C# libraries I might or might not port for use during LPC:
You said "port" so it seems like you know, but you should probably remind people that XNA is not allowed for LPC. That said, you might be able to use it on something like MonoGame, though I'm not sure how using Mono will be viewed by the judges.
The full list is up now, if you haven't noticed. It looks like a good portion of the entrants participated in this thread, which is good and bad. Good because, hey, hooray for open development, and bad because there are lots of holes in necessary art for my planned game.
This is a great sampling of the fantasy music here.
Tip: click on the artist who submitted these tracks and check out their other ones. There are 13 listed here, but I had to force myself to stop after I downloaded more than 30 tracks for possible use in my LPC game, because I actually need a game for this music to go with! I'm blown away by the music available here.
There does seem to be something missing. I'm not an autotools guru by any means, but if there is a configure.in and no configure, then I would expect there to be an autogen.sh.
I can't say what's actually required, but since the library authors were awesome enough to release with such a liberal license you generally can't go wrong as long as you make an honest effort to try to credit them. Here's what I've seen:
- A copy of the GPL in its own file at the top level of the source tree.
- Copyright and GPL notices at the top of each source file that you write.
- Note in the readme what zlib libraries you used, who authored them, and provide a link to each one.
- Any libraries go in a separate directory in your source tree, and when possible leave them exactly as you obtained them (i.e. leave their readme or license files in there).
- If you make any changes to the library, be sure to make that as obvious as possible, maybe a note in the top level readme and the library readme, or maybe even a separate text file in the library folder.
Aaaaand, I'm spent. Didn't get nearly as much done as I'd hoped, but I entered my mage set! I wanted to have some awesome animation as a preview...a dozen mages blasting away at each other, something like that. Oh well. I've posted plenty previews, so you'll just have to wait and see what few items of clothing I added.
@gr3yh47: I didn't end up submitting the pixelized FLARE spells, and I'm probably not going to use them. I'm more of a programmer than an artist so July will (hopefully) be spent preparing a game entry. Who knows, maybe somebody better than me (that isn't saying much, though...) has made some for us.
A few ideas using those clip art silhouettes:
If you want to try your hand at it, I've had rather good results starting from some silhouettes at OpenClipArt.org like this wolf head:
http://openclipart.org/detail/20806/wolf-head-howl-1-by-choochus
All of their stuff is public domain, too (I'm not affiliated with them or anything, I've just found it almost as useful as this site).
Congrats to all the winners and participants! I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't push myself to enter the coding phase, despite the fact that I entered the art phase (and received a surprisingly respectable score, for that matter!).
I had some thoughts about the structure of the next one that would help motivate me and hopefully others. Regardless of the style chosen, I think we'd all benefit from having at least some part of the contests running concurrently, and in a gated manner. Something like:
Month 1: initial art phase
Month 2: initial gamedev phase (must submit demo), final art phase (artists take requests/fill in gaps as appropriate)
Month 3: final gamedev phase
This schedule would still allow people to take part in both. Obviously you don't want to exclude anyone who wants to enter at the last minute, but you could restrict a subset of the prizes to those who meet the first deadlines, or perhaps offer smaller, separate prizes at that level (though that increases schedule pressure on the judges, which may be an issue).
As for the style question, I think FLARE-style isometric renders of 3D models would make for some fantastic-looking contest games. Or use the same perspective and go for a particular theme (like steampunk, say, as opposed to the implied fantasy theme from last year), so that we can reuse many of the wonderful assets created for the first contest.
@ Anon:
You said "port" so it seems like you know, but you should probably remind people that XNA is not allowed for LPC. That said, you might be able to use it on something like MonoGame, though I'm not sure how using Mono will be viewed by the judges.
The full list is up now, if you haven't noticed. It looks like a good portion of the entrants participated in this thread, which is good and bad. Good because, hey, hooray for open development, and bad because there are lots of holes in necessary art for my planned game.
http://opengameart.org/lpc-art-entries
I'll try to get a decent preview together so I can submit my entry, and I've got a bit of hole-filler art in progress.
This is a great sampling of the fantasy music here.
Tip: click on the artist who submitted these tracks and check out their other ones. There are 13 listed here, but I had to force myself to stop after I downloaded more than 30 tracks for possible use in my LPC game, because I actually need a game for this music to go with! I'm blown away by the music available here.
Indie games can be bizarre, so it can be a competitive advantage if they surprise the judges with an innovative as well as well-executed game.
You also have to consider the fact that most of these games won't be released, so they might not want to let anybody down.
Personally, I don't want to get anybody's hopes up for my tower defense dating sim RPG.
There does seem to be something missing. I'm not an autotools guru by any means, but if there is a configure.in and no configure, then I would expect there to be an autogen.sh.
I can't say what's actually required, but since the library authors were awesome enough to release with such a liberal license you generally can't go wrong as long as you make an honest effort to try to credit them. Here's what I've seen:
- A copy of the GPL in its own file at the top level of the source tree.
- Copyright and GPL notices at the top of each source file that you write.
- Note in the readme what zlib libraries you used, who authored them, and provide a link to each one.
- Any libraries go in a separate directory in your source tree, and when possible leave them exactly as you obtained them (i.e. leave their readme or license files in there).
- If you make any changes to the library, be sure to make that as obvious as possible, maybe a note in the top level readme and the library readme, or maybe even a separate text file in the library folder.
Aaaaand, I'm spent. Didn't get nearly as much done as I'd hoped, but I entered my mage set! I wanted to have some awesome animation as a preview...a dozen mages blasting away at each other, something like that. Oh well. I've posted plenty previews, so you'll just have to wait and see what few items of clothing I added.
@gr3yh47: I didn't end up submitting the pixelized FLARE spells, and I'm probably not going to use them. I'm more of a programmer than an artist so July will (hopefully) be spent preparing a game entry. Who knows, maybe somebody better than me (that isn't saying much, though...) has made some for us.
Good luck everybody!
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