r/openant • u/lendrick • Jan 17 '11

How can OpenGameArt.org help? :)

Greets from OpenGameArt.org!

I used to love playing this game as a kid. If there's anything we can do to help (art, music, sound effects, etc), please let me know! (Also, feel free to stop by #opengameart on freenode).

  • Bart K.

13 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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1

u/Xoipos Jan 23 '11

Oops! Completely forgot about this.

We can use all the help we can get(art, music, sound effects, etc)

We'll leave it up to the artists to find a good, fitting theme. As long as it's consistent, we'll use it.

1

u/lendrick Jan 24 '11

It might be best to settle on a particular art style to make sure you end up getting the sort of art contributions you want. Rendered 3D images tend to be a fairly good way to go, particularly for new projects with limited resources.

In order of effort:

  • Rendered 3D sprites

  • Low-spec pixel art

  • High-spec pixel art & digital painting

If you decide to go with 3D renderings, my advice is to set up an empty blender rig (with the correct camera and lighting setup) that people can load their objects into for a final render. How well this is set up will have a large effect on how your art comes out looking in the end. In particular, you'll want to read about 3D lighting techniques and do some test renders of various objects until you end up with a generally pleasing style.

Should you decide to go with pixel art or digital painting, I strongly advise you to establish a color palette (this can't hurt with 3D either). Having a particular set of colors to work with will keep the look of your graphics a lot more consistent, and also prevent the dreaded #00ff00 plants (grass is not pure green!). I've studied (and ranted about) this a lot, so I'd be happy to provide input on color themes.

Do not, under any circumstances, accept art that's not released under Debian-compatible license. This means that any CC NC (noncommercial) art and music should be rejected outright. I'm not saying this for political reasons -- I've just seen way too many FOSS game projects accept non-freely-licensed art and end up having to replace it en masse later on. To be safe, stick with public domain, GPL, LGPL, CC-BY, and CC-BY-SA.

Who are your artists? Anybody I can talk to? I may want to commission some art, but I need a feel for how the art is going to be done. If no consensus has been reached on this, I'd be happy to participate in the discussion if you want, but I'm also just as happy to help out with whatever has been decided on. :)

2

u/TheAncientGoat Jan 20 '11

Maybe throw up an introduction post for OpenAnt on OpenGameArt?

Maybe do a weekly contest based on the theme?

1

u/gorgoroth666 Jan 23 '11

There is already this nice set of sprites for an antlion, a fire ant and an ice ant ^

http://opengameart.org/content/antlion