Please start by looking at my artwork to see if it's your cup-O-tea.

http://kinglith.deviantart.com/

I am a graphic designer that has done a ton of 2d art for games in the past. I am looking for a C++ programmer to work with on making high quality games. My preference is side-scrollers. Please note that I work for years on projects and very hard on my art. The only requirement in my partner/partners is that he be as dedicated to what we are doing as I am. If you are interested please let me know so I can contact you.

Sincerely,

Kinglith

I'm quite interested . I know C++, and am quite familiar with Allegro and SDL, among other things. Would this be a collaborative effort as far as designing the games goes?

I should throw him on TMS and save me some headache. >_> Slightly different art style, though.

But yeah, hope you find someone worthy of your talent.

Your art really looks promising, and I'd love to work with you. I have knowledge in C++ and especially about using it to program 2D games (OpenGL, SDL, Allegro, ...). Please don't judge me considering the projects I've registered on A.cc, they are all about 5 years old and I've learned a lot in that time.

Which type of side scrollers? Jump'n'Runs? Space Shooters? Do you have something special in mind?
I've looked at your deviantart-page, tried your shooter, examined the screenshots of your RPG. As far as I can tell, you have worked alone up to now, and creating a game requires not only coding and gfx. Which things (idea, game design, story development, documentation, project management, marketing) would you do, which things should your coding partner do?
Would you be willing to work on a existing project (maybe something you've never completed?)

I usually work on games in my free time (besides school), but I love it, and I'm willing to work hard, especially when my associate(s) are also working hard.

If you are interested, either PM me with further details or write to simon.parzer<at>gmail.com

I must first apologize for posting right before I went to bed last night. I haven't had a chance to check back until now. I am very impressed with this community. Indeterminatus was right I am on the right-board!

Kibiz0r was wondering why I needed a coder when I know how to code myself. Let me give you all a quick history of my game making background. (Please skip if it seems boring, but it should help you all see where I am coming from)

I met a friend in High school that knew how to program basic. We started making games right away. He would code and I would draw. He even designed drawing programs for me to us. During this time I developed a good understanding about the fundamentals of tile sets, animation and pixel-by-pixel drawing. I was so anxious to see my art move that I would sit and watch him code. In the process I learned how to program myself! I even made games my self such as Vetronex ( A space shooter of course). Here's the problem and this is why I don't want to learn C++ and Allegro myself. I want to focus on graphics exclusively since in some cases it can take up to a year of consistent drawing to complete all of the graphics for a game. IT would be better to let a well seasoned programmer "Flex-the-Mussel" he already has instead of me trying to play Renaissance man like I always do /cry

Indeterminatus - Don't count yourself out yet because it is best for the artist to get a huge head start on the images anyways. I am really fast at drawing and animating huge images but it still takes time.

I also want everyone to know that I have to work today and will be actively replying to as many people as I can this weekend so don't get discouraged if I don't msg you back right away.

It has also been suggested by Jakub Wasilewski that I pitch a game idea that I have been chewing on. Well here goes.

Game Pitch:

Side-Scroller similar to the old school Mario (Super-Nintendo) and Sonic, but with more perpendicular motion.

http://www.deviantart.com/view/33874986/ <- Please see this screenshot as a primer

Ok Now that you have that image in your head.

Imagine this! No tile sets. The levels will all be hand drawn. The preferred resolution would be 800x 600.

Example. So let’s say a small map would simply be a BMP that is 3200 x 2400.

Collision detection: I could either make a separate Masking image or we could make a map editor that would allow us the section of chunks of land with a line selection tool. That way we could easily designate where the character walks and areas that have an effect on you, we could easily designate areas that Monsters could not go etc. This would allow up to make a simple event system too.

We would defiantly need the following things as well

Single pixel scrolling
Monsters
Massive Bosses
Simple event system (Preferably built into the map editor)

Check this link for an early character concept. http://www.deviantart.com/view/34088946/

That's it!

I would let the coder have just as must say in how the game looks and works and be fair in implementing his/her ideas into the artwork as well.

I wouldn't get mad when he/she couldn’t accomplish a chuck of code, we would just work around it.

I defiantly think once I make my decision that a phone call would be nice or if anyone in Colorado maybe we could grab lunch sometime...

-Kinglith

Actually, this is a very intriguing idea. KingLith: would you be interested in selling graphics for many programmers for a virtual currency called Allegro Rupees? You could in turn buy a game framework from other programmers with those rupees.

I can see a hard drive filling up reeeeeal fast that way. Plus you'd have to have a separate resource defining what areas you could walk on, barriers etc, and it'd likely turn into a nightmarish resource hog. Best case scenario I suppose you could define some lines or 2D polygons to serve as boundaries, or you could go for the outline approach and treat a specific color as your boundary.

Those are lovely, if slightly overboard. If you ever fancy doing another overly retro game after this, we have a lot of games in the pending queue at our site with not enough artists to share around

That depends. Unless the game truly kicks ass I'm probably never going to bother downloading it at that size. And it's certainly not friendly for the poor people still stuck on dial-up across the world, which unfortunately is far too many. Plus, imagine the evil bandwidth issues you'd run into if your game got popular and you didn't have mirrors I suppose torrenting would be a fair option.

But with a good tile-based drawing system you can knock a huge chunk of that bloat out without having to sacrifice too much of your detail. Then it just becomes a matter of knowing when to reuse existing tiles and when to store unique ones.

Another benefit to consider is that, with tiling, you have a lot more flexibility with how the level design is done. The programmer on the team, as well as the user community, will have a much easier time designing levels for your game. And it will likely be easier to tweak a level's design after-the-fact, iterating through small changes without the need to do image editing.

Yes, you will probably want to save these as a compressed (preferably lossless) file such as PNG... storing them in raw BMP files is just wasteful.

I mean, you might even be able to use the larger resolution bitmaps at that rate as well; you should have no trouble getting 6GB of BMP files to compress down to less than 1GB of PNG files (I wouldn't be suprised if you could get substantially lower than 1GB, even toward the 300-500MB Range)...

EDIT:

Actually, if you want to go for a tile-based approach, you could probably save even more space (as Zaphos suggested). If you could get a programmer that could support arbitrary placement of arbitrarily sized tiles, you probably achieve everything you could with a huge bitmap and more (for example, you could do proper layering without having to create a completely new bitmap over the top of the map (so you character can walk behind stuff...), you could reuse elements to save disk space, etc.)

I think you should stick with your original idea. When displaying at 800x600, JPEG or even JPEG2000 compression is an excellent idea, and you should ignore the nay sayers who think lossless PNG is the best choice. That's the same boat that says 320kbps mp3 sounds better than 256.

Besides, the tradeoffs are worth it. You can always have a lower quality jpeg version of the game, then have a torrent with ub3r high quality if people are really that uptight about it.

In general, designing things with technical limitations as your lens is going to limit you in the long run. It's better to design things with artistic perspective as your lens, and then once you know what the game should be like, decide what's the most technically feasible way to do it. Obviously you won't get everything, but you'll probably get a lot more if you say "ok, I want to do this, let me figure out how" rather than "ok, I guess I'll do this way since I know it's possible."

Marcello

Just to add to the previous comments, I did a hand-drawn game* (about 10% complete) for a class project and mentioned it here, and the collective was angered at a 29MB download, so yeah, nobody would download over 100MB here for sure. However, there are ways to do un-tiled games, so don't fear exploring that area, because it'd be nice to have doable method that others can try out.

And my word of advice, don't worry about level/tile design as much as doing the object graphics (like monsters, bonuses, etc.). That's where allegrolites really need help.

• My shameless plug: hand-drawn game