I have 180000000 game desgines floating around in my head, 4 of them roughly scetched on paper, and I am a pretty good programmer. Back in the 80 doyou know what I would have? 4 games that were sellable. Do you know what I haev now? 4 games that are unsellable beacuse they have no graphics!! Just getting that thought into my head, that well I can do this but it wont go anywhee because Im not an artist gets me depressed and not want to do any work on any of my ideas anymore. I dont even know any artists. Anyone else have this trouble? What do you do about it?

Have you considered:

1) An iconic game that isn't graphically lush but still very playable? You focus on novel gameplay and good, easy to use UI, and you make trivial requests for art (meanwhile lifting mock up material from the web). Look at the old Civ games, or what Age of Empires did. The more stuff that moves on the screen, the more trouble you have on your hands.

2) Aiming for the retro audience? I, for one, will kill for an update to many old school arcade games. And the first person that produces a Starflight gets a serious, heavy duty soul pound! (Many of these games could do with a UI update, btw.)

3) Focusing on a forgotten niche? An old proverb says that "when elephants fight it's best to stay out from underfoot!" So you don't have voice acting by James Earl Jones, full skeletal animation, and 10 to the 35th polygons per nose hair for each character... So what? What needs can you meet that the game industry professionals are ignoring?

I fall into the "discouragement trap," too, btw as I see the barrier to entry rise and rise and rise and rise. But I take heart in the fact that most of the innovation is in graphics, and very little (IMnsHO) is in terms of gameplay. In fact, I have a reminder permanently posted above my machine while I'm working, that says: "Forget the Technology Gamers!!!" (actually, it's a bit more strong than that, but that's the PG version).

Anyways, it reminds me that there are gamers out there who are sick of "pretty but empty" games, and that inspires me to work harder when I get depressed.





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Just waiting for the mothership...

Edited by - Wavinator on February 26, 2002 9:25:15 PM

quote: Original post by DrMol
I have 180000000 game desgines floating around in my head, 4 of them roughly scetched on paper, and I am a pretty good programmer. Back in the 80 doyou know what I would have? 4 games that were sellable.

Do you know what I haev now? 4 games that are unsellable beacuse they have no graphics!!

Just getting that thought into my head, that well I can do this but it wont go anywhee because Im not an artist gets me depressed and not want to do any work on any of my ideas anymore. I dont even know any artists. Anyone else have this trouble? What do you do about it?

You have access to a network with more than a million people on it and you''re telling me that you can''t find an artist to do the gfx for your game ideas.... Come on dude, I''m about pretty sure that if you look on the net, you will eventually find someone to help with gfx.

As for 4 sellable games, I''m not so sure about that, even in those days, getting something published was hard. Ok, maybe not as hard as today but still pretty hard. A friend of my had made a game which was published, if my memory serves me right in 1985 but don''t quote me on that and it took him 4 years for the game to get noticed and 4 more to get it up to par. That game was Freaking Funky Fuzzball, a sort of pac-man clone with a twist. But still, all this to say that it did even in those days take some time to find a publisher.



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I have to agree. I am tired of people moaning. A close friend of mine used to all the time. Now-a-days, you can create any game, setup a web server, and sell it from your house. Make the price a little cheaper, get more profit than distributed goods, with the added bonus of the audience having lesser expectations. Sure, other products out there are incredible. People still buy home brewed cheap games.

If you write a complete game with ''placeholder'' graphics such that it is ready for release, I can assure you that there will be an artist out there who would love to see their work used in your game in exchange for their name mentioned in your credits. I guarantee it.

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Thanks a lot for the encouragment. I should really worry about all that stuff later and have some artist do that carp for me. Thanks a lot.
I think ill put up one of those signs.

What kind of games are you talking about? Some types of games are easy to create art for. Whenever I need art, I make it myself, now mind you I don't have ANY drawing skills but that doesn't matter when you're just screwing with pixels. Trust me, pixel art takes more time to do, but it is a lot easier (at least for me) than freehand art.

Just get a copy of Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop (even the limited edition is great) and start fooling around. There are plenty of tutorials out there to help you along and so long as you can clearly visualize what you want in your head, you can make it happen. Don't believe me? I'll show you an example...
(*EDIT* Sorry, forgot that most free hosts don't like external links to images. Have to redirect you to an HTML page instead, sorry, I know it's a pain)
Click Here

Now that's somewhat of an enlargement of the original, but that's my first and so far only attempt at creating character graphics for my own use. As you can tell it's incomplete, but that only took half an hour to do in MSPAINT! I'm still learning Photoshop, but once I have it down, you can bet I'll be moving to using it instead of Paint! Just give it a shot on your own, chances are you can get your game operational with your own work. Just worry about beautifying it once you're about ready to release it to the world. There's my 2 cents.

Edited by - Silent Error on February 27, 2002 3:22:15 AM

Edited by - Silent Error on February 27, 2002 4:17:45 AM

I''ve found Bryce is great for game art, where you want to use static images (great for adventure games, web games, etc). Here are some shots of the browser-based game I''m working on:

Screenshots
Some Images

I''m no artist -- and even WITH Bryce, I can''t do the kind of breathtaking, amazingly detailed scenes that the professional artists can, but you can see it''s at least passable (and should work well for what''s essentially an illustrated MUD).



Mike Snyder
Prowler Productions

Actually probably the best free software out there is Truespace 1.0 It allows you to make 3d models which you can either use with directx (after conversion) or save as a series of bitmaps
or *.tga files that can be used as sprites. There are hundreds of tutorials on the net, its easy to use and its free. I''m not artistic at all, but it allows me to make realistic models very quickly. I''m still not very good at making organic figures but
then again I spend most of my time making spaceships.

http://www.pcplus.co.uk/article.asp?id=8556

Do you know of any links showing some scenes rendered with TruSpace? How does it compare with Bryce (which, IMO, is very easy to use)?

Mike Snyder
Prowler Productions