One of the typical sizes for tiles is 16x16 pixels. This is a good size for someone starting out because it doesn't require too much detail but gives you enough room to be creative without using a lot of tricks. Here are some tilesets by one of my favorite graphic artists:
The idea behind a tileset is you make every tile the same size. We have a style guide from a contest we ran called the Liberated Pixel Cup that might offer you some guidance:
The guide uses 32x32 pixel tiles and in a different style from the assets above but the ideas are the same. Generally speaking, smaller tilemaps are easier to make than bigger ones because they require less detail work.
I'm not a graphic artist by the way, I'm a programmer. If you have any other questions everyone on this site is usually pretty willing to help out. Good luck and please share what you make!
That's an excellent idea in theory but it doesn't work on a predictable schedule. Google search bot randomly goes through a site and indexes content on its own schedule that could be anywhere from 5 minutes to 2 months between sweeps. The other problem with that is it encourages spam bots if they see site search is provided by a search engine (more links to a site from external sources will bump a site up on search results).
It also searchs things like blog entries, static content, forums, and user pages even if you don't really care about any of those things (when you want game content you likely don't want a blog post). Using an external search function is only a good idea if most of your content is the same type (forum posts, art submissions, user pages, etc.). On a site the size and age of OGA that would make search results less significant and less useful than they are now (which people complain about).
Also, controlling how search results are displayed would be next to impossible since searching would be handled outside of OGA. You couldn't have a music preview button next to an image like it is now (rather nice if you ask me). Having a good internal search function is important for finding useful and relevant content.
Definitely agree with you on all those points, especially with respect to tracking tags from potentially malicious users. Keeping track of things with a changelog similar to how it's handled now would probably sufice for that purpose. I think pennomi had a much better description of what I was fumbling though explaining when he suggested adding a curator role that's more than a standard user but less than an admin for those community members who want to help with tagging and metadata.
I made the suggestion that admins/trusted users be able to modify tags on anyone's concent to help with that problem but don't know how hard it would be to implement.
This might be more work than it's worth but allowing people that aren't the content owners to add tags might be useful. If someone uploads something and it's missing an obvious tag an admin or even long-term user might be allowed to add tags so content can be made more search-friendly.
I've become a huge fan of Haxe, HaxeFlixel, OpenFL, and Nape since I started this thread. I'm still working out the kinks and hopefully my week off (starting tomorrow) will give me the time needed to finish the infinite runner I teased in the Haxe game dev blog I started.
I don't look forward to tinkering with Objective C again but I know it's coming if I want to make phone apps that see a wide audience. I'll cross that bridge when I get there.
Thanks for the link, I checked out your site. Looks pretty awesome. I love SNES style games and graphics, that's what drew me to LPC.
The fact you have to embed a flash runtime environment in a mobile app to make it work is exactly why I looked for something like Haxe in the first place. As soon as I realized mobile was not a real option with flash I gave it up for dead.
@LaughingLeader
Thanks for the link and the info. I've seen the conditional macro tags, those are pretty great for targetting particular platforms and only compiling what's needed for any given release. I'll probably work with them more later but haven't had much reason to mess with them much yet,
One of the typical sizes for tiles is 16x16 pixels. This is a good size for someone starting out because it doesn't require too much detail but gives you enough room to be creative without using a lot of tricks. Here are some tilesets by one of my favorite graphic artists:
The idea behind a tileset is you make every tile the same size. We have a style guide from a contest we ran called the Liberated Pixel Cup that might offer you some guidance:
http://lpc.opengameart.org/static/lpc-style-guide/styleguide.html
The guide uses 32x32 pixel tiles and in a different style from the assets above but the ideas are the same. Generally speaking, smaller tilemaps are easier to make than bigger ones because they require less detail work.
I'm not a graphic artist by the way, I'm a programmer. If you have any other questions everyone on this site is usually pretty willing to help out. Good luck and please share what you make!
@congusbongus
That's an excellent idea in theory but it doesn't work on a predictable schedule. Google search bot randomly goes through a site and indexes content on its own schedule that could be anywhere from 5 minutes to 2 months between sweeps. The other problem with that is it encourages spam bots if they see site search is provided by a search engine (more links to a site from external sources will bump a site up on search results).
It also searchs things like blog entries, static content, forums, and user pages even if you don't really care about any of those things (when you want game content you likely don't want a blog post). Using an external search function is only a good idea if most of your content is the same type (forum posts, art submissions, user pages, etc.). On a site the size and age of OGA that would make search results less significant and less useful than they are now (which people complain about).
Also, controlling how search results are displayed would be next to impossible since searching would be handled outside of OGA. You couldn't have a music preview button next to an image like it is now (rather nice if you ask me). Having a good internal search function is important for finding useful and relevant content.
@surt
Definitely agree with you on all those points, especially with respect to tracking tags from potentially malicious users. Keeping track of things with a changelog similar to how it's handled now would probably sufice for that purpose. I think pennomi had a much better description of what I was fumbling though explaining when he suggested adding a curator role that's more than a standard user but less than an admin for those community members who want to help with tagging and metadata.
+1 on pennomi's suggestion. I could do that too pretty easily.
This is related to the discussion about content curation going on in this thread:
http://opengameart.org/content/improvements-to-content-curation
I made the suggestion that admins/trusted users be able to modify tags on anyone's concent to help with that problem but don't know how hard it would be to implement.
Performance is great so far. Works like a charm for me.
This might be more work than it's worth but allowing people that aren't the content owners to add tags might be useful. If someone uploads something and it's missing an obvious tag an admin or even long-term user might be allowed to add tags so content can be made more search-friendly.
@cdoty
I've become a huge fan of Haxe, HaxeFlixel, OpenFL, and Nape since I started this thread. I'm still working out the kinks and hopefully my week off (starting tomorrow) will give me the time needed to finish the infinite runner I teased in the Haxe game dev blog I started.
http://williamthompsonj.blogspot.de/
I don't look forward to tinkering with Objective C again but I know it's coming if I want to make phone apps that see a wide audience. I'll cross that bridge when I get there.
Thanks for the link, I checked out your site. Looks pretty awesome. I love SNES style games and graphics, that's what drew me to LPC.
Welcome back indeed, you have quite the selection of sounds!
@mdwh
The fact you have to embed a flash runtime environment in a mobile app to make it work is exactly why I looked for something like Haxe in the first place. As soon as I realized mobile was not a real option with flash I gave it up for dead.
@LaughingLeader
Thanks for the link and the info. I've seen the conditional macro tags, those are pretty great for targetting particular platforms and only compiling what's needed for any given release. I'll probably work with them more later but haven't had much reason to mess with them much yet,
Pages