Hello! Are you allowed to use the existing engines, like Löve (uses the Lua language) or Godot (uses its own language, inspired by Python)? If yes, you may find them useful. They have a lot of boiler-plate code, so you don't have to focus on getting a window on the screen, and can instead work on the game logics. If you like Python, you may try Pygame. It's only for Python 2, though, but it's pretty well-documented.
If you need ideas for your games, why not try one of the random idea generators (one, two, three, four, five, six)? I know, they're stupid, but they can be a fuel for your creativity. Just use them as a starting point. Or, if you are interested in a video game that tells us about something in an interactive way, you can start with what you want to tell instead, as suggested in this article, and build a game around the ideas you want to share.
@eugeneloza, I believe Russian and Ukrainian are more complex than this. There's a more-or-less straightforward relationship between a letter and phoneme, a meaningful sound. But we don't pronounce phonemes, we pronounce their positional variants, allophones. Sounds interact with each other in quite complex way. For example, phoneme /o/ can be pronounced roughly as [ɔ] in слон /slon/ and as [œ] in лёд /lʲot/ to accomodate for the previous soft consonant. /g/ will be pronouned as [gʷ] in год /god/, because /o/ is rounded and we round lips before we even start pronouncing /o/. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
So, if we only take phonemes into account, we’ll get a very unnatural result. And taking all the allophones into account is a lot of work.
Also, I'm not sure even letter→phoneme is that straightforward. I seriously doubt anyone ever says /'zdrafstvujtʲɪ/.
You definitely can use them. Most LPC assets come under CC-BY-SA license. It means, you can use them if you credit the authors and if you publish all the graphics based on these assets under the same license (for example, if you redraw a part of some graphics, you'll need to allow other to use your redrawn version under the same license, CC-BY-SA).
Who are you trying to fool? The only change is the shadow in the lowest line (yours has lighter-darkest-darker, the original has lighter-darker-darkest, and this one looks like a mistake).
Although your attempt to provide free graphics is honourable, please state your sources correctly. The original sprite is under a free license, and you can re-use it freely if you use the CC-BY license and say who is the original author. By not saying the name of the original author, you put yourself and the people re-using your graphic in jeopardy, and ruin the reputation of OpenGameArt. So please don’t do it.
Also, while we’re on this, I would appreciate it if you put all your graphics into a single pack, like many other artists do (for example, http://opengameart.org/content/24x32-characters-with-faces-big-pack has a lot of graphics in just one big file; please do it this way). Because by creating a lot of submissions with just one image, you’re creating a lot of visual noise, and it makes it hard to track new submissions. Thanks.
While increasing the resolution may be a good advice for the end user to like your game (I mean, it won't be blocky; only pixel-art enthusiasts like blocky games, most users don't), it won't help you if you want to learn how to draw.
Also, quite a lot can be accomplished with a small limited resoultion and a limited colour palette. See Heroine Dusk as a nice example.
> and color depth
As for color depth, it's already RGB in that picture. :P The problem is not technical (are there enough colours in the picture?), the problem how the available colours are used.
There're indeed some problems with the colours used, e.g. the coin actually has 3 shades, but they're so close to each other that it looks like a solid colour (although this might depend on the contrast setting on your monitor).
I’m pretty bad at pixel art, so please take my words with a grain of salt. But I'll still try to describe things that I find stange in the screenshot.
1. First of all, shadows. Why trees have a shadow to the bottom, while some rocks have shadow to the right? Shadows should fall uniformly. (The leftmost topmost rock even has a negative shadow: shadow which is lighter than the surroundings. Negative shadow might be an interesting idea to exploit in some game, but if your game is not about it, you probably don't want it.)
Also, shadows of the trees. Shadow should basically be same as image of your tree, but reversed and shrunk (or made longer, depends on the light source). Yours is not reversed, which is wrong.
Also, houses probably should have a shadow too?
Here’s what it could look if you fixed the shadows:
2. Second, trees. I have never seen trees with such a foliage. I'm not a botanist, but I think only palms have leaves on top and a large leafless trunk. And since this is not a palm, this looks wrong. I would add more foliage:
Note: my trees are not ideal, they look tilted to the right. But you get the idea.
3. Why is grass arranged in geometric patterns? If these patterns have some in-game significance (i.e. they are the grid showing how heroes can move), then make them more prominent. Why doesn’t road have the same patterns? Add them to the road too. (Yes, it has some, but they seem different and don’t feel they belong to the same system.)
If they don’t have any significance, then just eliminate the pattern. It may be difficult, I know. Just keep removing the patterns than reinforce the grid, and checking again...
4. Also, houses are not very detailed compared to other things on the scene. Probably they need some love.
> Not every person is ethical - some > are lawful. You remind me of Russia > and Russians, who believe that > feels and morals are above laws.
Ethics are not above laws on OGA. OGA doesn’t break any laws by not accepting some of the submissions. Admins of OGA have full right to choose what they would accept. OGA is under no legal obligation to run this site in any particular way; they are absolutely free to sell this site to Microsoft tomorrow, no law prevents them from doing so.
So, no one broke any laws by not accepting your submission, and your comparison with vorovskoj zakon is not really useful. No laws are broken.
> Your "ethics" are for some reason > directed against me. You don't force > other submitters to re-ask original authors.
Because you’re probably the first person to start searching for freely-licensed assets on such a large scale. Which, in itself, is a noble endeavour, but it would be nicer to make sure authors don’t mind.
> The whole reason for Creative > Commons is to avoid wasting > time asking and increase availability.
The purpose of OGA is not the same as the purpose of Creative Commons. OGA uses some CC licenses as a tool, but it doesn’t determine the purpose of OGA.
I think it’d be more productive to initiate discussion about the dubious content, than to use it as an excuse for adding more dubious content. (I don’t want to imply Broforce sprites are dubious from licensing point of view. I just find the argumentation flawed.)
Hello! Are you allowed to use the existing engines, like Löve (uses the Lua language) or Godot (uses its own language, inspired by Python)? If yes, you may find them useful. They have a lot of boiler-plate code, so you don't have to focus on getting a window on the screen, and can instead work on the game logics. If you like Python, you may try Pygame. It's only for Python 2, though, but it's pretty well-documented.
If you need ideas for your games, why not try one of the random idea generators (one, two, three, four, five, six)? I know, they're stupid, but they can be a fuel for your creativity. Just use them as a starting point. Or, if you are interested in a video game that tells us about something in an interactive way, you can start with what you want to tell instead, as suggested in this article, and build a game around the ideas you want to share.
Wow, that’s cool! The number of variants available reminds me of Borges' library of babel. :D
@eugeneloza, I believe Russian and Ukrainian are more complex than this. There's a more-or-less straightforward relationship between a letter and phoneme, a meaningful sound. But we don't pronounce phonemes, we pronounce their positional variants, allophones. Sounds interact with each other in quite complex way. For example, phoneme /o/ can be pronounced roughly as [ɔ] in слон /slon/ and as [œ] in лёд /lʲot/ to accomodate for the previous soft consonant. /g/ will be pronouned as [gʷ] in год /god/, because /o/ is rounded and we round lips before we even start pronouncing /o/. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
So, if we only take phonemes into account, we’ll get a very unnatural result. And taking all the allophones into account is a lot of work.
Also, I'm not sure even letter→phoneme is that straightforward. I seriously doubt anyone ever says /'zdrafstvujtʲɪ/.
You definitely can use them. Most LPC assets come under CC-BY-SA license. It means, you can use them if you credit the authors and if you publish all the graphics based on these assets under the same license (for example, if you redraw a part of some graphics, you'll need to allow other to use your redrawn version under the same license, CC-BY-SA).
Who are you trying to fool? The only change is the shadow in the lowest line (yours has lighter-darkest-darker, the original has lighter-darker-darkest, and this one looks like a mistake).
Although your attempt to provide free graphics is honourable, please state your sources correctly. The original sprite is under a free license, and you can re-use it freely if you use the CC-BY license and say who is the original author. By not saying the name of the original author, you put yourself and the people re-using your graphic in jeopardy, and ruin the reputation of OpenGameArt. So please don’t do it.
Also, while we’re on this, I would appreciate it if you put all your graphics into a single pack, like many other artists do (for example, http://opengameart.org/content/24x32-characters-with-faces-big-pack has a lot of graphics in just one big file; please do it this way). Because by creating a lot of submissions with just one image, you’re creating a lot of visual noise, and it makes it hard to track new submissions. Thanks.
> In my opinion, authors' intention were clear when
> they released the screenshots under creative commons.
Yes, they were clear: get some publicity by making their game more prominent by Wikipedia. It's what my common sense tells me.
If your common sense tells something different, it's just a demonstration of how unreliable common sense is.
> increasing resolution
While increasing the resolution may be a good advice for the end user to like your game (I mean, it won't be blocky; only pixel-art enthusiasts like blocky games, most users don't), it won't help you if you want to learn how to draw.
Drawing in larger resolution may be much more difficult that in lower. Compare http://opengameart.org/content/classical-ruin-tiles and http://opengameart.org/comment/33760 — higher-resolution version actually looks much worse than the original.
Also, quite a lot can be accomplished with a small limited resoultion and a limited colour palette. See Heroine Dusk as a nice example.
> and color depth
As for color depth, it's already RGB in that picture. :P The problem is not technical (are there enough colours in the picture?), the problem how the available colours are used.
There're indeed some problems with the colours used, e.g. the coin actually has 3 shades, but they're so close to each other that it looks like a solid colour (although this might depend on the contrast setting on your monitor).
I’m pretty bad at pixel art, so please take my words with a grain of salt. But I'll still try to describe things that I find stange in the screenshot.
1. First of all, shadows. Why trees have a shadow to the bottom, while some rocks have shadow to the right? Shadows should fall uniformly. (The leftmost topmost rock even has a negative shadow: shadow which is lighter than the surroundings. Negative shadow might be an interesting idea to exploit in some game, but if your game is not about it, you probably don't want it.)
Also, shadows of the trees. Shadow should basically be same as image of your tree, but reversed and shrunk (or made longer, depends on the light source). Yours is not reversed, which is wrong.
Also, houses probably should have a shadow too?
Here’s what it could look if you fixed the shadows:
2. Second, trees. I have never seen trees with such a foliage. I'm not a botanist, but I think only palms have leaves on top and a large leafless trunk. And since this is not a palm, this looks wrong. I would add more foliage:
Note: my trees are not ideal, they look tilted to the right. But you get the idea.
3. Why is grass arranged in geometric patterns? If these patterns have some in-game significance (i.e. they are the grid showing how heroes can move), then make them more prominent. Why doesn’t road have the same patterns? Add them to the road too. (Yes, it has some, but they seem different and don’t feel they belong to the same system.)
If they don’t have any significance, then just eliminate the pattern. It may be difficult, I know. Just keep removing the patterns than reinforce the grid, and checking again...
4. Also, houses are not very detailed compared to other things on the scene. Probably they need some love.
> Not every person is ethical - some
> are lawful. You remind me of Russia
> and Russians, who believe that
> feels and morals are above laws.
Ethics are not above laws on OGA. OGA doesn’t break any laws by not accepting some of the submissions. Admins of OGA have full right to choose what they would accept. OGA is under no legal obligation to run this site in any particular way; they are absolutely free to sell this site to Microsoft tomorrow, no law prevents them from doing so.
So, no one broke any laws by not accepting your submission, and your comparison with vorovskoj zakon is not really useful. No laws are broken.
> Your "ethics" are for some reason
> directed against me. You don't force
> other submitters to re-ask original authors.
Because you’re probably the first person to start searching for freely-licensed assets on such a large scale. Which, in itself, is a noble endeavour, but it would be nicer to make sure authors don’t mind.
> The whole reason for Creative
> Commons is to avoid wasting
> time asking and increase availability.
The purpose of OGA is not the same as the purpose of Creative Commons. OGA uses some CC licenses as a tool, but it doesn’t determine the purpose of OGA.
> Broforce sprites were in such format
Indeed, I’ve overlooked that some sprites are quite usable.
> because, lets face it, OGA hosts a lot of far
> more dubious material, like
> http://opengameart.org/content/fbi-chic
I think it’d be more productive to initiate discussion about the dubious content, than to use it as an excuse for adding more dubious content. (I don’t want to imply Broforce sprites are dubious from licensing point of view. I just find the argumentation flawed.)
Pages