I think CC-By does indeed have some sorts of limits on DRM. But I don't know how extensive they are, or whether there are easy ways around them, which there may be. Generally, if you're having trouble with that you can just contact the artist who can give you individual permissions to override issues on that front.
"You can pull it apart and use the clothes in your universal sprite sheet...but ehhh...the colours don't quite work."
Remember, the base is meant to be recolored (or at the very least open to it) as part of character design, as ofc are all assets. So I would think that shouldn't be much of an issue.
""To me, it makes no difference if we fail. I'd rather fail, and find out what we did wrong so that we won't make that mistake next time. As my business profs say, 'failing forward'."
...You gotta start somewhere, right?"
You do need to start somewhere. A big, ambitious 3D project is, however, probably not the best place to start. Starting small is important for a number of reasons, including those he mentioned. You will inevitably be making mistakes, probably major ones since it's an unfamiliar field. If you start small, those mistakes won't end up costing you huge amounts of time and work, not to mention stress and drama.
Regardless, this probably isn't the stage to be looking for outside artists. If you really want to go forward with a big project, you really should start out using placeholders until you have a serious (if potentially unshiny) demo to show that you are legit developers and your project has a good chance of success. There are few things more frustrating than putting a lot of love and care into a project and watching it go to waste. As it is, your chances of getting external help at this point are probably pretty low.
You're not crazy for requesting help on an indie here, but it might be a good idea to give some more information about your openness to FOSS licensing of contributed assets. I think people here will be more interested if you are fine with at least some assets made for you being released under a FOSS license.
Another thing you might want to elaborate on is the level of experience of your team. You said you arent formally trained, but lots of devs arent. Do you guys have game-making experience? If so, linking to a past project would be a good idea. If not, this project is likely to be seen as too ambitious and likely to fail (which ofc makes it less appealing to artists).
It's fun to see someone building off of Sinbad. He was on the list of characters I'd like to expand (especially in honor of his open-source pedigree) but yeah.
Here's a quick touchup of the shirtless version if you're interested:
Re female head: Huh. I spent quite a bit of time fixing animation formatting bugs like that one; a number of them were introduced somewhere along the line. I'm surprised one got through, especially without being brought up. I'll have to look into it and get a fixed version out, at least for the sake of future development.
Edit: from taking a quick look at the current LPC style guide, the head appears to bob properly on the back view. Perhaps the sprites in question were working from an older version with the earlier bugs?
Re skin tone, etc.: Generally, when people start pixel art, the very first thing they do is recolor a preexisting sprite (at least in some circles). It's the first thing because it is basically the easiest thing you can do once you get a hang of the tools. I would say that it's definitely something worth looking into as a programmer, if only because it lets you add variation to assets quickly. Because it's pretty easy to do (and I figured people might want to make it truly individual when designing a character, rather than just choosing from a few examples) it wasn't high enough priority to add at the last minute. There were plenty of other things that got cut as well.
I'll agree about female outfits generally being lacking. I was hoping to fully animate Sara, but I got caught up in other work. It's still on my list of things to eventually do, though.
I would advise never using his assets in an open source game (or at all, honestly). The vague self-written license could be a real issue for your project, and are decidedly FOSS incompatible.
For the record, the skin/eye tone in the base assets is meant as a placeholder to be customized with the rest of the character, not as some stereotypical ideal. I had assumed that most programmers even with no art background could probably do a color swap easily enough, though ofc not being from that side of the game dev world I'm not always sure.
I would be interested in your elaborating on what you mean by a motor piston head, though. That metaphor doesnt say too much to me.
I think CC-By does indeed have some sorts of limits on DRM. But I don't know how extensive they are, or whether there are easy ways around them, which there may be. Generally, if you're having trouble with that you can just contact the artist who can give you individual permissions to override issues on that front.
@Hapiel: Thanks for posting your work! It looks very nice, and it's always good to see some quality pixels.
"You can pull it apart and use the clothes in your universal sprite sheet...but ehhh...the colours don't quite work."
Remember, the base is meant to be recolored (or at the very least open to it) as part of character design, as ofc are all assets. So I would think that shouldn't be much of an issue.
"... and after I make some headway into the project myself I want to invite a pixel artist to join me in creating some custom art into the game."
Thank you for going about it in that order.
Welcome to the site!
""To me, it makes no difference if we fail. I'd rather fail, and find out what we did wrong so that we won't make that mistake next time. As my business profs say, 'failing forward'."
...You gotta start somewhere, right?"
You do need to start somewhere. A big, ambitious 3D project is, however, probably not the best place to start. Starting small is important for a number of reasons, including those he mentioned. You will inevitably be making mistakes, probably major ones since it's an unfamiliar field. If you start small, those mistakes won't end up costing you huge amounts of time and work, not to mention stress and drama.
Regardless, this probably isn't the stage to be looking for outside artists. If you really want to go forward with a big project, you really should start out using placeholders until you have a serious (if potentially unshiny) demo to show that you are legit developers and your project has a good chance of success. There are few things more frustrating than putting a lot of love and care into a project and watching it go to waste. As it is, your chances of getting external help at this point are probably pretty low.
You're not crazy for requesting help on an indie here, but it might be a good idea to give some more information about your openness to FOSS licensing of contributed assets. I think people here will be more interested if you are fine with at least some assets made for you being released under a FOSS license.
Another thing you might want to elaborate on is the level of experience of your team. You said you arent formally trained, but lots of devs arent. Do you guys have game-making experience? If so, linking to a past project would be a good idea. If not, this project is likely to be seen as too ambitious and likely to fail (which ofc makes it less appealing to artists).
Anyway, good luck.
It's fun to see someone building off of Sinbad. He was on the list of characters I'd like to expand (especially in honor of his open-source pedigree) but yeah.
Here's a quick touchup of the shirtless version if you're interested:
@MadMarcel:
Re female head: Huh. I spent quite a bit of time fixing animation formatting bugs like that one; a number of them were introduced somewhere along the line. I'm surprised one got through, especially without being brought up. I'll have to look into it and get a fixed version out, at least for the sake of future development.
Edit: from taking a quick look at the current LPC style guide, the head appears to bob properly on the back view. Perhaps the sprites in question were working from an older version with the earlier bugs?
Re skin tone, etc.: Generally, when people start pixel art, the very first thing they do is recolor a preexisting sprite (at least in some circles). It's the first thing because it is basically the easiest thing you can do once you get a hang of the tools. I would say that it's definitely something worth looking into as a programmer, if only because it lets you add variation to assets quickly. Because it's pretty easy to do (and I figured people might want to make it truly individual when designing a character, rather than just choosing from a few examples) it wasn't high enough priority to add at the last minute. There were plenty of other things that got cut as well.
I'll agree about female outfits generally being lacking. I was hoping to fully animate Sara, but I got caught up in other work. It's still on my list of things to eventually do, though.
I would advise never using his assets in an open source game (or at all, honestly). The vague self-written license could be a real issue for your project, and are decidedly FOSS incompatible.
For the record, the skin/eye tone in the base assets is meant as a placeholder to be customized with the rest of the character, not as some stereotypical ideal. I had assumed that most programmers even with no art background could probably do a color swap easily enough, though ofc not being from that side of the game dev world I'm not always sure.
I would be interested in your elaborating on what you mean by a motor piston head, though. That metaphor doesnt say too much to me.
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