You can't draw? Just like me...

Nice simple article on gamedev.net. Take a look here: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/art/features/CoderGameArt/

I like the part where he's saying to avoid animations. "Use a theme that doesn't need it. Spaceships don't need much animation.". A bit late, but I understood that one by myself some weeks ago... :o

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Some more improvement to the website

With the help of Armando Elizondo, you'll see some improvement on www.golemizer.com.

The default page shows Dr. Altus working on a zombie and the login page of the game shows the zombie now alive and Dr. Altus again.

I'm very pleased by the result. It gives the game more personality and helps visitors to know what the game is about in the first seconds of visiting the website. Most people don't really care if the game they are looking at is an indie game or a big production so it's important to try to always create a good impression, even where you're on a budget.

Some will say that it's not the graphics that makes the game fun (including me) but you'd be surprised to know the number of comments I received related to the graphic quality. It's the first thing people get from your game and it seems that unless you went with a minimalistic look (here and here), there's good chances they will just walk away.

It would be easier if I had some graphic talents but eh... The free libraries really helped a lot otherwise it would have cost quite a lot to produce all the items currently found in the game.

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That performance problem

While beta haven't been very popular, it did helped me. One comment I kept receiving was the poor performance. Not the server (it's doing surprisingly well) but the client. Well I found the bottleneck...

Back when the game was still in alpha, I never had any performance problems. There was probably near a hundred cows running around in about 4-5 zones. That was before I completed the characters' creation system.

At first, when you created a character, you were selecting an avatar and that was it. The new characters' creation system added the possibility to chose a body, face, suit, hat and hairs.

All layers were dropped on top of each other as background images in 5 DIV tags. Background images are needed to switch the view of the character (walking left, right, up and down). The problem is that background images aren't very good for performance. I'm sure there's a nice explanation somewhere about this...

So I did a small test and removed everything but the body layer, leaving only one background image per avatar (players and NPCs) and the performances were back where they were in alpha. Just like PNG files were slowing down the whole thing, too many background images creates a huge bottleneck.

So to fix this problem and still allow full character's customization, I'll have to merge all layers in every possible ways so that each avatar on the screen contains only one background image. That's a lot of files but it looks like it's the only way to do it.

Ah, the joy of web development...

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New art for characters

Here's two samples. Should be added to beta tonight.





Work was done by Mick Hanrahan (www.chunkypixels.co.uk). I recommend him if you're in need of some graphic work. He's very professional and nailed exactly what I was looking for.

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Replacement for Charas graphics

As pointed in a previous comment, most of characters in Charas Project are in fact ripped from RPG Maker. Obviously, I cannot take the chance to use those for the final product.

Problem is that I'm far from being a pixel artist and that my budget is quite limited to hire an artist. I'm still waiting for quotes from an artist...

After drawing a few characters by myself (that was real ugly), Maple suggested to go with stick figures. The idea was a good one. Instead of trying to draw something that would look bad in the end, why not go all the way down with something simple.

While I think it's a good idea, I'll keep it as last resort. My concerns are first that Kingdom of Loathing already did it and that without the humor factor I think it might fails. The second one is that I already have all the arts I need for buildings, trees and such and I'm not sure that would fit unless I completely redraw the whole thing to fit stick figures. The last concern is that while this might work, I must honestly say I was hoping for something better.

So I went back to Photoshop and gave it another try with the help of a few tutorials. After spending more time that I was hoping, I think I finally come to an acceptable result.

It's surely not as good as those in Charas Project (I'm having a hard time doing hair right and the walking seems a bit odd though it doesn't look that bad when it's animating) and miles away from what an artist could do but I'm starting to feel a bit comfortable with it.

I'll probably keep the number of hairs, faces, suits, ... low for now since it's taking quite some time to do but I'm hoping that with time, I'll either come across and artist willing to help or that players will start drawing their own characters. I'm planning to add a clothes system later so players won't be stuck with what they chose at first.


So here's some samples. If anyone have some advices or can even help a bit or know someone that would, I'd greatly appreciate that. Budget is low but if an artist could make me 3 different sets of everything for under $100, that would be a start. From there I could probably even make new sets from the one made by the artist.





Here's the frame I made to start the work

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Character's creation and login screenshots

Those are actual screenshots from the test version (click to zoom). I'm in no way a graphic artist but I kinda like how this came up (credits goes to Lost Garden for the wood and Charas Project for the avatars).

So this means that I'm now starting to set what will be the final look of the game. At this stage, pretty much all systems are in and stable and now it's time for yet another testing pass, then IE compatibility checks, optimization and finally building the actual game (world, skills, lore, ...).

Still a lot of work but it's getting closer to release each day.

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Reiner's tilesets do include top-view

Well, seems like I talked too fast the first time. The bitmaps do include top-view... You can find them here: http://reinerstileset.4players.de/englisch.htm

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A taste of what I have in mind for the interface

I'm at that point where I have most of the basic systems done and I need a more robust interface to test them all (my prototype is real dirty).

I'll start work on the interface and I need to figure some basic things as what will be the dimension. I'll be using the graphics found on Lost Garden and sprites generated from the Charas Project for the characters and NPCs. It's already in my plans to allow players to build their own sprites so they don't end up looking all the same. All they'll have to do is to upload the sprite and wait for approbation before setting it up to their character.

The chat and skills zones doesn't look really good but I'm hoping to find someone later to refine those parts unless I'm able to make something good out of it.

After reading this post from Elder Game, I'm now seriously thinking of adding some kind of on-screen map.

So here it is (click to zoom)

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Inventory, NPC merchant, buildings blueprints

Those were big systems needed to easily build worlds. The blueprint system was surely the most difficult to build but it's now the one I'm the most proud of.

A building (house,tavern,...) is really just a zone that you can access by walking toward a door. The walls are just props I created with various size to be able to do collision. For the prototype interface, I used the set found on Lost Garden.

So to manually create a building, all I had to do was to use the /createprop command I already had. While it do offer the possibility to create whatever setting you have in mind, it is a lot of work to have everything at the right place. To ease the process a bit, I could just do some work on the interface to allow a drag and drop feature where I could pick walls sections and put them next to each other. However, if I'd want 50 buildings, it would still be too much work.

So instead of creating walls, I figured it would be much easier to use a blueprint that would create all zones and walls related to a type of building. The blueprint system works like the SWG system. You drag the blueprint from your inventory and drop it somewhere on the screen to create the appropriate type of building. In 10 seconds you obtain what would take about 30 minutes to build.

To create the world of my first game, I'll just set a NPC merchant that will sell blueprints. Since I'm planning to allow some part of the world to be built by beta players, everyone will become autonomous to build the world without having to deal with strange commands. This system is the first step toward players' owned buildings.

So since I needed a way to put blueprints in my inventory, I needed to create the NPC merchant. This NPC will sell both "infinite" type of props (meaning he the quantity available never goes down) and props bought from players (currently the NPC only sell stuff, buying from PC will come later). When a prop is bought from a NPC, inventory space is checked, money taken from PC and a prop is then put inside the PC inventory.

The inventory has been functional for some time already but it's just this week that I added the graphical interface that make it a bit easier to deal with it. The screenshot below show the inventory as well as the content of the chest near Dak. Props can be put inside the chest and/or inventory by drag and drop. Both windows can be dragged around and there's even transparency (and all of this is created with just 1 line of code thanks to script.aculo.us!).

Click to zoom



I haven't put a video of this since the interface is not as functional as I want it to be. I just thrown some code together to have something that works but it's not worth showing yet.

Here's how "Type 1 House" create with a blueprint looks like (I've put in the bottom left how it looks from the outside). Even if this is just a prototype, it's beginning to look a bit more like a real world.

Click to zoom

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Graphic resources for games

Here's some links of my research for game graphics.

Tool to create characters, faces and battleset
http://www.charas-project.net/index.php?lang=en

Lost Garden
http://www.lostgarden.com/2006/07/more-free-game-graphics.html
http://lostgarden.com/2007/05/dancs-miraculously-flexible-game.html

Pixel Art community
http://www.pixeljoint.com/

Lots of stuff
http://reinerstileset.4players.de/englisch.htm

Tilesets goldmine
http://www.tekepon.net/fsm/index.php

RPG Maker resources
http://www.phanxgames.com/resources/
http://rpg2000.4players.de/

Tileset development for another 2d MMORPG
http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/Tileset_development

Toolkit's stuff
http://www.toolkitzone.com/

World Creator
http://www.inet2inet.com/main/main.htm

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Can I have those old "ugly" graphics?

Since UO is "Reborn", could someone tell them to ship me for free their old graphics? :-P Yeah, I guess not...

Bah, it's isometric(?) anyway so no good for me. It seems awfully difficult to find good resources for top-down view games (free or not). So far I've only found this. I still need to dig a bit more on deviantArt.

I need to get a graphic artist as a friend... Or kidnap one! ;-)

If anyone have some links to share for graphics, I'd be interested. I'm not there yet but sooner or later, this will be needed.

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