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

Wow, you're pretty good. Too bad I'm not good enough as a programmer!

Quick, someone recruit him.

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?

Not interested personally. I model my stuff and render it to bmp. I can't draw as well as I can model. (although I'm no slouch at drawing)

My suggestion though: You should learn to program, yourself. Allegro makes it really easy once you pick up the programming basics, and there are plenty of tutorials all over the web, plus you have a huge community here willing and able to help, and most of us are coherent half the time.

I, of course, frame this suggestion of the following assumption: You are looking to make games for fun. I doubt you expected to find a serious commercial title here. If you're looking for a portfolio piece, then that's another thing.

EDIT:
Wow, didn't notice your shooter on your dA. By the way, nice stuff. If I were shooting for a spot doing game art, I'd ditch the cartoony stuff just because I've never seen any cartoony concept art -- The machine is a cruel mistress. So yeah, you can apparently code, yourself. Then what do you want one of us for? I'd still recommend learning C/C++ and Allegro.

Side note: Perspective for Legacy Page .05 is a tad wonky...

Side note 2: Is it just me or is everyone's first game a space shooter? It was for me and I know someone else whose first game was a space shooter, and someone else whose first was a remake of BeetleMania. (also a shooter)

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.

Too bad we aren't yet ready for a graphics artist to join our team - your stuff looks very, very good, and also your style would probably be what we're looking for.

I guess you're on the right board - usually, it's the other way round (a coder looking for an artist).

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

Well, after looking at all the art you've made up to that point, I must say I'm pretty impressed. You must understand that it is very rare to see an artist looking for coders and not the other way around.

After saying all that, I must say that I'm a little interested, but you provided very little information about what you would actually like to do. Do you have a specific project that you need help in, or are you looking for a project. What sort of work except the graphics would you like to do.

Well, just a word of advice - pick the person that is very much interested in your project, and a person known for finishing their work.

If you want, you can contact me at krajzega-at-kalamburos-dot-net. I'm an experienced C++ programmer with several games more or less finished (you can check them out here). I do most of the job using OpenGL, but can use DirectX, Allegro or SDL if need be.

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

Most Impressive.

I think KingLith is going to be getting quite a few AR's comming his way...;D

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.

Nice stuff.

I don't know if you Oekaki at all, but if you get a chance, you should check out 2draw (shameless plug)

I think high resolution platform games are pretty cool (just did an opengl 800x600 megaman one a few months back), but I am unsure if C++ is the language of choice in this day an age. At least, you probably want some core engine+mostly scripting rather than writing the game entirely in C++.

Those are my thoughts anyway...

Good luck with it.

Marcello

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.

Er, read the rest of the post?

It would end up being a large download, certainly, but hand-drawn maps are not unfeasible. Baldur's Gate did it, and I think computers have improved since then.

[edit removed]

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

You have a great point there…

Using 32bit color:

30 maps 3200 x 2400 a piece would be around 6 GB!

However, using 256 colors…

30 maps 3200 x 2400 a piece would be around 210 MB. A reasonable size for a game correct?

My game idea I am sure is full of holes and it is just to get something out there. I am open to others ideas and critiques. I don’t mind doing tilesets eigher.

Thanks for your comment!

Lith

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.

I'm interested in some conceptual work for my project.
I want to make a game that's truly top down, like the first GTA. Though without the 3D effect on houses.

I'd really like to see how well that'd work and I totally suck at doing graphics myself.

It would also be nice to have some good graphics while I'm in early development.

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.

You could also save the images as JPEG or JPEG2000 images and use polygons to define the edges. That would save a lot of space.

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.)

After a lot of thinking here are the new proposed specs.

-------------------
Tile based graphics

320x240 resolution. (See Bellow)

Mario style with lots of action. Think Super Turrican (Check spelling)
-------------------

The tile based is a tried and tested method and does have a lot of benefits. Using tile sets would allow for a larger game in the end.

The lower resolution because high resolution doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for retro gaming and because high resolution tile sets look like crap. (Generally speaking)

Any ideas?

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

Hey, your stuff is pretty nice looking. I've been in the market for an artist to do some 2D art for my non scrolling side-esque Ninja game. I won't bog you down with details here. Check this link for information about my game, including a playable demo. Or, if you prefer, PM me instead.

I know you've got your own ideas that you want to bring to life, as we all pretty much do. That said, if you're even remotely interested in doing some art for Ninkatsu, let's talk and see where things go from there. If you're interested in a past completed project I've done (in collaboration with an artist), see: ZD.

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

Nice drawings
Muke Domination V is just "bad"

Good luck with you searching

onewing: but the game looks crappy. it's one thing to be 29MB and look awesome, and another to be 29MB and look no better than most couple mb games?

I don't mind up to 100MB if the game looks good, and people say so.

Marcello

That's a rather extreme change -- I would not jump to it so quickly. There are costs and benefits to either approach, but in my view the art is very important, and you'd be losing a lot by moving to a low res.

As far as the technical challenges go, a non-tile-based method would not be terribly hard. Given the interest in this thread alone, I assume you can recruit a reasonably skilled programmer, so this shouldn't be a huge concern.

As far as gaining some of the other advantages of a tile-based engine, without sacrificing the resolution or the unique qualities of the art, Carrus had a nice suggestion:

It is crappy. However, nobody said anything about that, they just said 29MB was too big. Of course, a finished product that does look good has more of a chance of being downloaded, but the problem with that is it has to be finished. Who is going to download a 50MB+, 50%-done product to test out?

You can know early on how good it's going to be... so I think if the 50MB demo looks like it'll be great, you'll try it.

Marcello

I am more or less a noob but I have an idea. You should handdraw all of the backgrounds and use it as a buffer and put a tile-based map on top of it to determine where the character can go or not. Of course the backgrounds would not be generic throughout the game.

With impressive art, coming from a good coder? I would. Though there are many people concerned about download size, there are also many with a nice connection and some spare time ... and for purposes of testing, you don't need such a large audience.

Well, I'm skeptical. I'll congratulate anyone who gets to 50% done with their project.

Thank you all so far you have all been really great help...

Zaphos - You are incredibly helpful. Thank you. It is hard to be surrounded by so many people you admire and not know who to listen to. Here is all I know...

+ I want to make a game (Not necessarily my own)
+ I want it to be bad ass
+ ...and I need help doing it.
+ I would like to invest a lot of time into the project art wise.
+ I need to know the team that is working on it is serious about it. Not intensely serious but serious.
+ I have had a few bad experiences in the past where coders lose interest or just can't do it. Not to say there is a contract written in blood but...

Q: Other questions I haven't answered. Would I want the game to be for fun or for commercial use?

A: I am solely in it for fun but who knows... at the very least I think we could have a cult following.

My thoughts so far...

• I think Indeterminatus and his team have good follow through. That is a definite plus.

• Jakub Wasilewski looks like a good pick

• Simon Parzer looks like a good pick

• Mokkan looks like a good pick

I want to ride this one out a bit and give some more people time to see my post.

Lith

If we could get a proper team, I wouldn't mind going along for the ride either (if you need another programmer)...

While you're waiting for the prefect match, could you just make me one animated character in this perspective?

I just want walk, run and punch. That's all I ask.
Maybe die too.

While speaking of a team, I would "hire" two coders at most, if I were you. If you have too many people working simultaneously at the same code (especially when they don't know each other personally), they only get in their way.

About your concept (hand-drawn pictures, no tiles): It sounds like a great idea, but there are a few major disadvantages:
* very much work for the artist (don't underestimate it!)
* big filesize (could be reduced by JPEG2000 and vector walkmasks, maybe using arbitrary tiles as Carrus said... but it is hard to make a usable level editor with arbitrary tiles ...)
* uncommon concept (this is maybe also a plus)
Nevertheless, don't rejoice yourself so fast!

That makes no good impression. A person that claims to work years on one project just cannot throw away a concept after one day, because some people are nagging.

Simon good point, but I only stated my original idea as a building block. I am still unsure of what game to make. If someone thinks they can do my idea that would be great, but I am keeping all possibilities open at this point. I take what each coder says very literally, so I guess I can be persuaded easily.

I'll check back later.

Lith

He beat me to it.

To me, the best approach of going forward is letting each programmer work on his own game. Just supply him with simple placeholder graphics (which would be far better than he can do) and serve as a beta tester / motivator. When a project starts to look promising, then you can start to seriously work on the graphics. (And maybe then tasks could be given out to other programmers.)

Of course, these programmers could work together by sharing some modules (input handling, etc) and by helping each other with bug fixes and ideas. But generally speaking, if you get two random programmers on the internet working together on a game, nothing good will happen.

Your art is great!
Please finish your "DarkGems" RPG project, those images looks like screenshots of an old school RPG by Square.
If you are looking for coders, you're in the right place.;)

That's a good idea about the placeholder gfx Matthew.

I must side with Simon and Matthew on the issue of having multiple coders. Generally the thing with internet projects is that they tend to fail when one of the links in your development chain fails. So, try to make your team as small as it can possibly be. If the game is a task that can be handled by only one programmer, by all means, have only one. Two programmers are not likely to do the work twice as fast, but it is likely that one will leave the team, and the other will be left with gobs of code that he isn't familar with. Only if the task is too big for one person, consider getting two persons working on it. Even then, preferably get two persons with different fields of expertise and different views on what they like coding.

Ideally, you would like one/two coders and someone taking care of the audio side of things (while you're here, I think that Mark Oates could help you, if you ask him nicely).

However, I must say that you didn't make an overly good impression with your description of the project. The thing you posted first was a good sketch, but you backed out of it way too fast when you got opposition. And the critique wasn't all that well-founded - a 3200x2400 bitmap can be packed with JPEG2000 33% down to about 2MB and still not look half-bad. Of course, loading time could be a small issue on slower computers, but it could be helped (for instance, by loading the level by chunks in a separate thread). Never mind the technicals, just don't get too easily convinced that your project isn't feasible.

If you want to really get one of us on board, you have to provide way more details about the game. Your graphics are awesome, I must say that, but you must understand that most coders are pretty creative people and very much like working on their own (brilliant, in their/our heads) ideas. So, in order to get somebody to help you, you have to convince him that the project of yours is right up his alley. The thing has some promise for originality - there are not many games that use non-tiled hand-drawn levels. But it is not really interesting if you don't fill in the details (story, background, mood, type of gameplay (fast, reckless running with jumping on enemies, or a slower paced game with ranged weapons, or one where you stealthily sneak at the monsters from the back and stab them?)). Throwing Mario or Sonic as an example won't give us much of a picture of what you have in mind - especially when you give us both of them as the example .

APPEND:
One more thing about recruiting. Be careful with people that jump on board without hesitation, without asking for details of the game design. They tend to leave the project with similar ease, and quite fast too.

I think this is very doable. I did something very similar years ago with Age of Invasion, except that my maps were 7200x1200. And each pixel on the image included 3 extra bytes for terrain property information - no separate mask for collision detection. Of course, my maps were very simple things with large solid areas of the same color, and so compressed very nicely.

However, I wouldn't do things that way again - pathfinding was almost impossible. At the very least I'd split it up into very small tiles, say 2x2 or 3x3, where each collection of pixels has the same property. Saves on RAM and makes collision detection/pathfinding much easier. If you use a similar scheme, you can have hand-drawn terrain that the player can alter.

Say if you shoot a gun and it leaves a crater, or if you have a sonic-like character you could spin and dig through dirt. That sort of thing.

Of course, Age of Invasion is a piece of junk for a variety of good reasons; it was developed under DOS using no drawing program whatsoever, I had no idea how to program whatsoever, I had no idea how to design a GUI whatsoever, etc.

In my experience, it goes like this:

1) Coder has lots of interest, lots of motivation, big plans are made and agreed upon.

2) Some small amount of work is done.

3) Coder stops sending email/making new forum posts. Replies to your emails only after a considerable delay.

4) No work is done, the coder gives very reasonable excuses. Still promises to have it done though.

5) Weeks pass. No work is done, more promises.

6) Coder admits that he isn't interested, or has other obligations that prevent him from working on this. It's often apparent that he knew this weeks ago, but said nothing.

Anyways, I'm interested in throwing my name in, but after I know more details. Whoever you select for lead programmer should have some existing projects. I'd like to look at the source code and talk to them for a while via instant messenger to see if I would enjoy working with them, and get the details of the game.

Er. What? If you really want the map in a tile-based form for your pathfinding algorithm, you can do a post-process step to generate it. There's no need to let this kind of technical detail affect the way art is done on a high level.

Yes ... but I think it is reasonable to assume that essentially anyone downloading a 50-100 MB game of this variety has sufficient ram for it, even given a relatively inefficient implementation. After all, older games have used similarly large bitmaps for backgrounds, before. Baldur's Gate and its follow-ups come to mind.

You can do this given any system for annotating the terrain. Again, this should not affect art direction.

Or you could use somthing that's used in HL2 for glass breaking etc. (IIRC). Leave terrain for collisions at the biggest chuncks as you can. For example some big squares, and if you want to destroy some part split it - some kind of Tunneler.

Btw: really cool graphics, I like your style.

Here is my game idea in greater detail since I finally have some time to sit down and explain myself.

GAME NAME

Luna : Assent from Evian

BACKSTORY

In the world I am envisioning there are different types of elves.

Dark Elves – Live underground - White Hair
Rivirin Elves – Live Deep Underground – Jet Black Hair
Fire Elves – Live in the Desert – Red Hair
Night Elves – Live in the Forest – Purple, Green, or Blue Hair
Sky Elves – Live on the towering cliffs of Urdenfell – Yellow Hair

There was an Ice Age know as the Rizdenfall Epoch and all of the surface dwelling elves that were on the surface joined together in the Lark Grotto. A beautiful grotto with access to the surface, roughly half a mile bellow ground.

Fire Elves, Night Elves, and Sky elves dwelt here together out of necessity. It was there only option. They were all waiting for the Ice age to pass. One simple rule was made and obeyed by all. None of the elven races were to interbreed.

The great separation happened 40,000 years ago when the elves separated to follow different beliefs. Most to follow different elemental spirits. The Night Moon separated to follow the God of man and is highly disregarded among other elfin tribes.

STORY / PLOT:

The story evolves around two elves (Lithien, and Luna)

Luna is a Fire Elf. She inherently has red hair, grey glowing eyes, and is obviously very beautiful.

Lithien is a young Night Elf Ranger with purple hair and he is our hero

The two fall in love. Luna even gets pregnant

The elders find out and a trial is held. They give him a fate worse than death. Banishment to Evian. (see bellow)

They Put Luna in prison and vow to burn the baby once it is born and make her watch.

In the Lark Grotto there is a slab of rock with chiseled runes called the Hearth Stone. When anyone stands inside the runes the are teleported to Evian.

The History of Evian. Evian is a pit deeper than hell. It is rumored to be deeper than the pits of hell and tunnels around hell. That is where out hero starts out. There of course are others already down there and a small civilization has been built there. Before an elf is banished he is fed some special bread that gives him a state of deep amnesia. As the game progresses the hero remembers key elements of the story I have described and fuels him even more the find a way back to the Lark Grotto. So. Basically it is a love story. The hero has to get topside before his “wife's” unborn child is born, only to be killed.

Throughout the game there will be beautiful backgrounds and different environments underground. There will be enemies, puzzles, and bosses to defeat.

I also know how to make music too and have already made some amazing music for the game.

Enemies –

Rivirin Elves – A ruthless and brutal band of elves will stand in our hero’s way
Trolls – These brutal creatures hide in shadows and thirst for blood
Bats – Blood sucking bats
Etc…. Many others to fight on the way out

EVENT SYSTEM: The event system wouldn’t need to be too advanced. We would need the ability to show cut scenes, change conditions, and use switches to trigger changes in the environment. That’s really it for the event system. I want to keep it pretty simple.

GAME WORLD: I want the game to be epic in scale and this is why in the end we might have to go for tile sets. This is going to come down to time. How long the coder can put into the project. If the coder can put years into the project then I would probably hand draw all of the environments.

INVENTORY: We would defiantly need and inventory system to manage item and heal etc. Not too advanced but still functional.

MOOD: The game is going to be dark, gothic, bloody, and have a lot of Elf Ranger action. I can’t think of an example because it has never really been done before. The characters will be slightly cartoony and cutesy but have some bad-A$$ qualities to them.

I want to constantly remind the player of the gloom he is experiencing to get back to the one he loves.

COMBAT SYSTEM: Live hack and slash. The hero would use are Scimitars and bows. That’s it.

PUZZLE SOLVING: The game would need puzzles and the fact that the game is moving upwards for the most part helps this.

PERSPECTIVE: Side-view Plat former. Think Mario or a better example would be XEXYZ for NES or Ys Wanders for SNES.

IMAGE TYPE: This is still up for debate. Either Hand Drawn or Tile set based. Both have plusses and both have minuses.

CODERS: Bases on popular demand I would at least start with only one coder.

FINAL THOUGHTS: The game sounds complicated but in truth I think it’s doable. IF it was completed to this point then we could decide whether to add co-opp elements MMO elements etc. But in the short term I envision it only as a single player game.

Thanks for reading and for all you support/intrest on this project:

Sincerely,

Kinglith
-----------------------------------------------------------
>>Follow your Heart<<

Banishment to Evian, eh?

http://www.larrysmarkets.com/catering/ProdImages/bev_evian3.jpg

Heh, sounds far more deeper than Mario/Sonic games. I like the idea, and I'd definately play the game (at least for the graphics). Unfortunately I always get lack of motivation after some time of working on a project -> I don't have any projects completed, it's sad, because I have so many ideas. Well to speak frankly, I have one. The game I've made for Christmashack in 8 days. In my opinion it's a crap, but at least I was happy to finish something.

Edit: hazul, I was thinking the same

I think I would have to disagree with you. Not to discourage you, but from what you've written there, the game will be extremely complex. A decent cut-scene engine alone is a lengthy project in of itself, especially if you're sticking with C++. Then add on an inventory system and puzzles and you're in for a treat.

My recommendation would be to take your design spec to the next step. Do an outline of the number and specifics of actual areas in the game, the types of puzzles, instead of 'etc' write an actual list of enemies (after all, you'll have to draw all of them), specify the type and number of bosses, look at the inventory system and perhaps the actual items that you'll be able to hold and what they'll do.

Your description actually makes me think of cave story, as it sounds like the magnitude of the game will be similar. To the best of my knowledge, cave story wasn't a particularly quickly made game, though there was only one person who did everything.

The only point other I think should be clear is that the larger scale the game is, the longer it will take, and the more difficult it is to stay motivated the whole way through, especially for a freeware game. You might consider scaling down the idea a bit, or even figuring out an episodic way of developing the game, so you can release it in pieces rather than one "epic" game.

Marcello

Yes. I'm very interested.

I've read all your ideas and it is doable.

Zaphos: I'm rather certain that I've failed to correctly explain my way of doing things, because we seem to be in agreement and yet we are arguing.

Let me try again: when I say a 2x2 group of pixels with the same properties, I mean they can have different colors but the share the same physical property. As long as one pixel is solid, the whole thing is solid. Almost like... an annotation?

High level art: Regardless of the method you use, you'll need some way to specify the physical properties of regions when drawing the map. No different here, and no impact on the artist.

Post-processing and RAM: I can't think of how to explain what I mean. Let me ask you this: why is it important to match the resolution of the physical properties to the screen resolution? If an area of map has 800x600 discrete physical areas per level, why add 4x more if the game has a display resolution of 1600x1200? Just have mini-tiles of 2x2 instead... no one will notice any difference, except that pathfinding becomes computationally feasible. It doesn't add that much more complexity to the program.

Of course, if you don't need pathfinding, it doesn't matter much either way. Age of Invasion didn't have any pathfinding, the creatures would just bump against obstacles like flies against a window.

Reminds me of Xenno the Rogue - except it's more on the "rogue" side than "ranger". I only played the shareware episode, but it's a good recipe.
Screenshots don't make the game justice, the heavy music and sounds play a strong part in the mood.

True, it took me a lot of time to code something like that, and I didn't finish it yet.

That's a lot of work, motivation decreases when you see a lot of work to do.
Two coders seems to be a better idea IMHO.

Just remember to pick them in power-of-two (2 coders, 4 coders, 8 coders, and so forth): you'll get the best results.

Looks great! I think its a great idea. Simple rectangle or polygon collisions would be pretty simple. And scrolling memory bitmaps shouldn't be that hard as long as you have hardware acceleration. I don't think I would have enough time to help out but if you need some sound effects or mp3/ogg/wav music I might be able to help.

And as for the download size you could always offer the main binary and then each level as a separate download. You could also offer different qualities like one thats jpg compressed and one that is compressed in a nice .dat or png. That way everybody could play.

[edit]
As for tiles and such... Use both. Have areas that are tiles or simply use variable sized tiles.

hehe. Coders squared or square coders?

Ah, yeah. My bad -- completely misundertood you. So, yeah, you can use a tile-map in the way you say. I've actually done that before; it worked great

I like the episode idea.

As far as number of coders, I think once my final desision is made I will ask my primary pick if he would like to work with anyone else and go from there.

Bernardo - I saw some of your other posts and it looks like you have done things like this before with your adventure game. Thanks for your support

Yes KingLith, I've done an adventure game in 800x600 resolution, in which the collision, hotspots, walkable paths, etc. are all in several bitmaps. That means that the characters of the game have a more "natural" path to walk. Of course... it is a little taxative on the memory side. But it runs fine on all machines I've tested.

I didn't post it yet because I'm doing (and my girlfriend ) all the voices in English... since I'm Brazilian and the game was all in Portuguese. When I'm done writing the "language pack" I'll post it in the depot. Make sure you'll see it.

Anyway... I intend to do another game right away. And while I can draw little bit, it takes a lot of time. Since your art is very nice I'll fell most inclined to work with you.

But it's your call.

Bernardo, you are my final pick if you want to do it! Thank you all for participating. Bernardo, I still have some work to do on the first map. I should have it done this weekend along with some character animations. I will send you a Personal Message with my email address right after I am done posting this. I will leave it to your digression if you would like to add another coder to the group.

Sincerely,

Kinglith

KingLith your art looks nice.

A member of this board and I have been working on a project for about 6 months now, and are basically finished. I've been doing solely programming while Inphernic has been doing the art and sound. Unfortunately the publishers we've been talking to want some artistic changes before they're willing to accept it (namely they're keen on a 'theme').

This is all well and fine, except in the last 4 weeks Inphernic has fallen off the face of the planet.

If you're interested, I would love to have you finish up some of the final ideas Inphernic was implementing for our publishers. I can't afford to pay you amazingly, but it would definitely be worth something to me financially.

I hope you're interested and await your response.

Dustin,

I am flattered that you ask but Bernardo and I are going to be very busy working on Luna for quite some time. Thanks for considering me for the task however.

Again thank you all for partisipating. I will be sure to spread the word arround deviant art that this is a great place to meet coders. Take care you guys! cya

KingLith: Could you go back here to post when there is a homepage/prototype for your Project ("Luna") ready? I'm very curious about it.
And, congrats that you have finally found someone who is willing to work with you on such a big project.

DD: Maybe he's gone to the world cup?

Sure. I am sure that we will post up a demo on the depot when the time comes.

I'm surely looking forward to it.

I am interested, I been looking for an artist for years.. 2d is diffinity what I would like to do if I had an artist. I code in DirectX. I can give you a demonstration. If you want, send me some sprites of your art, I'll incorpate it into a game and you tell me what you think. My Email is murrowboy1@yahoo.com if it is not on my profile already. I like your art, you can draw anime style very good. Write me up. I hope we can work together.

I am flattered that you ask but Bernardo and I are going to be very busy working on Luna for quite some time. We are already making great progress >.<