$12256 / $11500
UPDATE: Apologies -- looks like I accidentally turned off commenting for this post. This has been fixed.
Greetings!
Now that things are starting to come together, I need to get a feel from the site's users about the direction you'd like to see things go. Specifically, I'd like to hear about:
* Improvements that I can make to the site's interface (search, etc) that would make things easier to use or allow you to do more.
* Directions you'd like the site to take as far as acquiring new art (genres, art types, etc).
* Any other ideas you might have.
Just drop a comment in reply to this post -- no need to register if you don't want to. Brief is fine, but please be specific. :)
- Bart
P.S. A search by license feature has been requested more than once, and it's taking more time than I'd expected due to some technical issues. I'm hoping to have it working within a week.
This website's content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Comments
The site is looking good :). Obviously it will need work continously as it grows, and perhaps the search & browse interface will need to improve later. But it's hard to tell in what way until the site have been used a while and have a lot of content. For now it works as-is to me.
The most important point right now - as I'm sure you're already aware - is content. My suggestion here is to try to maintain certain "art styles". IMHO, you want more or less complete and coherrent sections with content that fit well together. Combining awesome art doesn't neccessarily mean the results are great if they are too different. I think it's better to have one full featured "style" than to have bits and pieces from several. Hopefully you can commision some great artists to make this easier. Having "style guidelines" and similiar might help but would probably require some momentum for the project before it would work.
Some possible ways to make opengameart gain momentum (brainstorming; some hard, some easy, some with a lot of benefit, some with less):
In short, I guess what I'm trying to say is try to keep the site alive. The thing about a site like this is that it can be really hard to gain initial momentum, but if you manage to cultivate a thriving game developer/artist community it could potentially more or less run itself. Good luck!
Thanks a lot for the excellent reply.
I agree with you that momentum is the biggest hurdle at the moment, which as you said means that I'm going to have to keep things going almost entirely on my own until I start showing up on the radar, which I imagine will take a while.
As for art resources, I do have kind of a cool idea, but it'll depend on someone else being okay with it. There's a site with some excellent pixel tutorials in a foreign language. If I could translate them, I'd have something that's essentially exclusive content, at least for people who don't speak that language. I'm trying to get ahold of the guy so I can get his permission to do it. :)
I also like the idea of some pet projects, or, say, adopting or sponsoring an open source game -- I'll see if I can find someone to volunteer their project in exchange for a prominent plug on their site. It'd be good for them (access to my admittedly limited but non-zero funds for art commissions) and good for OpenGameArt (free publicity in the form of an attractive success story).
As far as attracting talent goes, I'm assuming that'll happen as the site grows. I'd like to eventually be at the point where it will be cool to contribute to this site. Wesnoth has pulled this off, but it's taken a lot of time.
Finally, with respect to game resources, I may expand in that direction, but I'm not 100% sure just yet. There are already a number of popular open source game development sites out there, so I'm not sure I'll be able to add something unique. This will be something for the future, because for now I'd just be spreading myself too thin.
Thanks again for the insight!
Bart
Well, it sounds like you have a plan. Keep up the good work. :)
Game resources
I agree with the risk of spreading too thin. Game resources should probably come at a later date, if at all. However, it's what this site is for - helping people make games. Developers could potentially be an important part of the community. Like you said information on the technical aspects of game making already exists elsewhere and is hard to beat until the community has grown a LOT. This aspect IMO is best left to grow naturally at it's own pace. That said, there are other ways to attract developers. Game ideas, non-technical feedback, recruiting, meeting point between artist/writers/developers etc. Ideally you want the game makers to have this as their "home", the main place where they develop (gameplay, story and art) and showcase their project. I know this is hardly easy either, but it might be slighty more doable. But again, this is for the future when the site has grown some.
Art resources
Sounds great :).
Attracting talent
Agreed about Wesnoth. Essentially you want to steal their art boards ;).
"Conclusion"
It sounds like you already have good ideas. Sponsoring a game and at the same time commissioning art for it sounds great actually. The problem would of course be finding a talented developer with a good idea who can actually be expected to get somewhere. It would be cool if you could find a simple game that wouldn't be hard to make yet would require art resources valuable in other games.
As for what art would be most useful to have, I believe it's probably RPG-style tiles and side-scrolling platformer/shooter art. Which "look n feel" would be most useful I'm not so sure about.
If I had the skills, I would love to contribute to a project like this. One difficulty would be to know what is needed. I think that clear inspiration for potential contributing artist would be great. A good game project could do this.
And sorry for scaring away other commentators with my lengthy posts :p.
One thing about licenses: the names are kind of long, instead you could just name them "CC-BY(-SA) 3.0", "GPLv3" and "PD" etc.
Also I recommend to instead of just "public domain" to have the choice also include the CC0 license http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ so it will be "PD/CC0" - this will make it easier for distributors for non-US legal reasons.
I believe I'll take that suggestion. Can I have your permission to change the work you submitted as "public domain" to CC0? (Not sure I legally need to ask that, but it's best to be safe and courteous.) :)
sure, go ahead :)
I would like to have a view (page) in which I would see, sorted by date, the latest added 10-20 submissions. (Of *all* categories.) It would be good, if this view/page could then also be red as rss/atom feed.
Perhaps this already exists and I'm just too confused to find it ^^