With IceWolf, I learned that I shouldn't ever begin a game with other people involved right off the bat.
It can only work correctly when you bring them on later in production, when the feeling of the game is already well defined and the whole design less likely to change drastically.

Really important lesson, that. People tend to want to scale up a project early, so they can go at full speed, but in practice it's hard to hold a team together if you haven't figured out what your game 'is' before you bring them on board. Vision!

meh, i think it's one way to do it. Certainly has its disadvantages though.

If you bring in people after all the big decisions are made then ownership of the ideas fall more on your shoulders and people you bring in later don't have as much of an emotional/intellectual investment. Sometimes that investment is the only currency we can offer to collaborators... Instead of it being "my" game, it is "our" game. I think that's an important distinction. If you work with people that want to scale up a project early, well.... maybe those are simply the wrong people to work with...

So I just saw Up- that new Pixar movie? Yeah, I think I like it more than Wall-E. Okay, okay, I almost like it more than Wall-E, but that's still saying something. Just the first fifteen minutes made me cry manly tears- it's that good. Just another reason why Pixar are my heroes.

jesus for real?! honestly my expectations for Up are really low. After Wall-e I figured it'd be all downhill from there. Plus the premise just seems a bit boring/uninspired...

I think i'll go see it this weekend.

i have an urge to throw these in illustrator and vectorize them for you...

Why? Not trying to sound rude, I'm just curious.

I just think the style of the drawings (not the sprites so much) lends itself to clean, smooth bezier curvey-ness. Lots of flat, solid shapes for shading and the silhouettes are curvy like that too. It'd be fairly easy to vector them and it'd clean up the strokes to a beautiful shine. Plus, sometimes it's satisfying to zombie out with the pen tool...

i have an urge to throw these in illustrator and vectorize them for you...

[invented]

maybe this will help, kobel:


this is from michelangelo's sistine chapel, he actually invented some badass color techniques that blend hues, not just their shade/saturation. See the drapery there? How it goes from yellow to green, but the cloth still appears like it's almost golden. This is a bit drastic, and sure there seems to be some white in there, but I can pretty much guarantee that's not pure white, it's tinted yellow to some small degree. For more on this, and a bunch of other tips you should dig into Arne's art tutorial: http://itchstudios.com/psg/art_tut.htm#hues

ps. I think each of your drawings show an immense amount of time and dedication. Personally, my advice to you would be to work much more on your sketches/gestures during the beginning of a drawing, like spend 75% of your time laying it out. you'll learn a lot more and not get caught up too much in the rendering details which aren't nearly as important as structure (at least at this stage).

made a new enemy. Most of the enemies in the game will be big and more "minibossish" like this one.

That's awesome. Keep up those exaggerated proportions.

  dinowaurs

Honestly though, I wouldn't trade that experience for anything else. Had it been an "easy" project to complete, we would have learned very little. Now our skin is stone.

I see games like these (successful or not) are kind of like purple hearts in the indie world. Kind of how you earn your wings or cut your teeth; it's where you truly learn about the importance of stamina and attitude. Coming out of the haze, you're a battle-hardened soldier. I like to think (and probably wrongfully so) that that's how us indies learn, through the birthing pains, while AAA devs are more like the impotent parents who find a bunch of surrogates to birth their game for them.

Is that Harrison Ford at 4:30?

Regardless, I still think statements can hurt more than help - one of the amazing things about any artwork (not just formal art, or Art-art, but general creative products) is how it can be interpreted in such a personal manner. Creates a real connection. When one figures out what it is they see, it can feel as if though the piece was made for them. Or they for it, I suppose!

Feels like there's a lot of truth in this...

I still value it when creators explain their work from their perspective, as long as they're not trying to force me to agree with it.

Yea, i'm still on the fence. I explained Gray in detail on a post on Newgrounds and i'm not sure it was the right move. I posted my intentions on there because I sort of feel the whole "no, i'm not telling!" is kind of hiding/a cop-out, especially after a bunch of people have already made up their own mind on the matter... In that regard I felt pretentious, like I was too good to join in on the discussion everyone was having or something. But, like I said, I'm on the fence and I'm not sure that was really the case. Jumping into it may have been more to serve my own worry of not wanting to come off pretentious than to actually bring something new to the ongoing discussion.

here it is: http://aeiowu.newgrounds.com/news/post/316496

I dunno, it's tough. Just do what feels right.

Saw this on slashdot and thought i'd throw it in: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/26/2325208&from=rss

thanks everyone!

----------------

I messed around a lot with the colors, there were some color profile issues in previous builds which were making everything look a little off. Also this "level" is a bit mixed up now with no zooming and 2x all the way through. I went 4x with the big "ships" (black bg on some of the longer platforms, to attempt to make them feel more massive. Let me know what you guys think of the scale now, I think it _looks_ better but I'm not completely convinced it _feels_ better...



Also, we took the last week or so to take a look at Unity. We were considering moving liferaft over to unity, but for a bunch of different reasons were not going to go that route with this game. Though we'll probably be moving over to unity for some future games...

If you don't want to put it together yourself, you could probably find a small shop local to you that is in the business of putting together PCs. That's what I did with my last PC, there was little-to-no markup (compared to Newegg) and the labor was reasonable. Plus they added a decent warranty and they don't stock it full of retail version OS crap and etc. so no formatting was needed. This way you'll get exactly what you want, down to the bus speed, case, number of fans and etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta0DlcxyY5M&feature=related

Idea: Publish it through http://www.lulu.com/ it is free to publish and it means people can order it online, lulu just take a cut of the profits. You could share any money you make between the contributors to the book.

Lulu can have some pretty weak printing quality for images though, from what I've seen of their books. Just a warning.

that may be more of the author's fault than the printer though... There are some hoops to jump through when setting up images for print.

I say the lulu idea is a sound one since it gives this project the best chance of actually seeing the light of day.

Aeiowu : Wings3D might interest you as well (and it's free).

ah yea, i tried that out, it looked promising but I wasn't too keen on the context-menu heavy stuff.


BTW, I tried out Silo per Chman's recommendation and I have to say I'm very happy with it so far. I'm pretty sure i've found what I'm looking for in that program.

But yea, keep the recommendations coming, this thread could serve as a jumping off point for neat 3D apps for others to try/stumble on.

[point-to-point modeling]

Alright. I'm so sick of "shopping around" for the "solution" to all the headaches I get when I work with 3D. I know it's my problem but I'd prefer something that was simpler and just worked more intuitively. I've used Maya and cinema4d primarily but am just getting back into it and find this to be an opportunity to possibly make a switch for the better.

I'm looking for an app that would be like Adobe Illustrator but with an added Z axis. Is there anything out there like that? It just models stuff, it doesn't have hair, live painting, dynamics, a timeline or materials shaders or any of the other BS i don't need. It's just really good at one thing: point-to-point modeling and doing it easily and as simply as possible.

For instance, splines in c4d are total shit, snapping is bonkers and doesn't make any sense because it's tool specific, not global and everything else under the sun i can't stand about it. I don't care about industry standards, as long as it can export an .fbx i can manage the rest.

Which one do you recommend? Any help would be appreciated.

incredible. 

http://www.offworld.com/2009/05/leaked-first-videoscreenshots.html