Thanks for the writeup, Guillaume. Most of the issues you mention are my fault (the programmer) rather than the artist. She's mostly been focused on churning out assets rather than designing UI. Things like fonts will certainly be overhauled.

I love the weird creepiness of the toothy white pet.  I actually prefer it to the blue one, but it is a bit odd contrasted with the rest of the game.  There's nothing else in your graphics that feel as dark or alien.  Honestly, if some the rest of your graphics leaned more toward that, it would be great.

That's a good point. We might consider having a different background for the more evil pets.

I don't know how, or in what circumstances, but I feel like this could lead to people eventually doing lawsuits for that gps feature... somehow!

There are plenty of other games with GPS functionality who manage to get by, but we would certainly tie this all up before release.

My advice is to get some decent graphics if you want this to become really popular...and careful with the GPS thing - I agree with dogzer if you don't have a good privacy policy and clear terms of service that users have to agree with it might lead to some lawsuits.

I'd love to know how the graphics could be improved, and I'm not being facetious. The UI is going to change for the better certainly, but are the pets unappealing to you? Is it too saturated?

Very interesting. So when you see the locations on the map, do you have to be in physical proximity to one to actually use it? Or do you just tap on the map and it becomes accessible?

In the prototype, you have to be in physical proximity to a location to use it. We feel like part of the game's appeal is in how strongly it's tied to the GPS. If you could visit any location no matter where you were, the GPS doesn't really matter at that point. There are several in-game items that allow you to bypass this restriction, however, and we're trying our best to make the game fun for people who don't necessarily run around a lot.

I like the idea, and it has potential- but the graphics are pretty bad and the art direction non-existent. You might want considering teaming up with an artist.

I'm kind of surprised to hear this. We have an artist, and although she's a student, I think the art looks much more polished than what you'd find in most other iOS games. The footage in the Kickstarter video and in these screenshots are of the prototype, and we plan to improve the look of the game (especially the UI). Is there an aspect of the art you find particularly bad? We'd appreciate all the feedback we can get here.

First impression: that pet thing is super creepy looking.  Is that a vampiric vagina dentata?

Hahaha... strangely, that's not the first time we've gotten that.

It looks like that pet might need some revision. Good to know!

Hey guys! Not sure if this is the right place to put this, but I just launched a Kickstarter and was hoping for some feedback. My project is a virtual pet for the iPhone with GPS support and elements of Pokemon and Tamagotchi.





Essentially, the game generates in-game locations wherever you want. They're all a little bit different: the stores will have different food, toys and equipment to buy, the arcades have all kinds of minigames, the arenas have unique opponents... and so on.





Please let me know what you guys think, and make sure to watch a video to see the prototype in action.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wanderteam/wanderpets-a-gps-enabled-iphone-game

Thanks!

Thanks for the responses guys!

[Questionnaire]

I'm in a Software Development class here at UMass, and some friends and I are working on a library that facilitates microtransactions for indie games using PayPal. Sounds pretty corporate, I know, but we had to use a publicly available web service, and we wanted to tie it into games somehow.

We have to interview our "stakeholders," which I guess would be you guys. Please help us out and answer our 7 quick questions. Everything's hypothetical, of course. THANKS SO MUCH!

Questionnaire

Right for You

   1. On a scale from one to ten, how interested would you be in being able to integrate PayPal powered microtransactions into your video games?
   2. Would you use PayPal for in-game content, or for users to purchase the games themselves?

Features

   1. Would you rather use money or our proprietary currency?
   2. Would you rather users purchase currency in fixed denominations ($5, $10, $25, and $50?), or to specify their own amounts?
   3. Would you like users to be able to exchange in-game currency back out for real money, or return unused in-game currency?

Scalability

   1. Approximately how many users will be using the product?
   2. Approximately how much money would you estimate be transacted per user?

This is a remake of Fallen Angel's Siege, which is kind of like a puzzle-RTS game. Play it here if you've never had the pleasure. As you can see, we've got a sprite artist working with us, and we've also got a musician composing for us as well:

Day Battle
Night Battle

Our soldiers are doing battle on a barren green rectangle right now, though, and we'd really like to correct that. We'd need a few pieces of art, in a style that would fit in with what we already have:

- A background: grassy floor for the units, maybe some mountains in the distance.
- Clouds and stars for the sky, birds a plus.
- (optional) New castles. There will be several playable characters, each with their own castle. Besides, isometric castles don't really fit in with the flat 2D unit sprites.
- (optional) Character portraits, one for each playable character.
- Menu art.

I realize I'm asking for a lot, but this game is already pretty far along and is coming along great. We'll be releasing it for free to anyone who'll download it. If you've got questions or would like to help, feel free to post in this topic or PM me.

Thanks!
Tom

Ho- ho- hooooooooly crap, these are delicious. Please make more, ASAP.

Not bad, it's mostly stuff I saw when browsing through your older posts. I'll give you a shout early May if nobody else volunteers.

A mini-portfolio sounds about right. Ideally, we'd like to get the game done before May 8, but it's looking like finding an artist is going to take a lot longer than we thought. If you could take a look at the original Siege and start brainstorming ways to revamp the art style, that would be ideal. We're moving from a 320x200 window (in Faind's Siege) to a 640x480 window, so there's some stylistic choices to be made.

Well, the creek's run dry as far as TIGSource goes for finding an artist. Can anyone suggest a more pixel art-centric forum where I might have better luck?

Not that I'm leaving TIGS, of course. The announcement thread'll be up as soon as we secure some art!

To clarify: if you're going for the lo-fi sound, it's best not to use MIDI. Instead of sounding lo-fi or NESsy, it sounds more like a butt, farting. People around here like PXTone, because it's pretty easy to use and it nails the old Nintendo sound.

As far as your music goes, it sounds pretty good. You might want to add more to it, it's a little plain. For song 1, if you have percussion at the beginning, it sounds weird for it to just cut out randomly throughout the song. The percussion in the second song is pretty bland too. That's my 2 cents, anyways.

I don't know if it's really at the level you're looking for, but I've got a game in progress that needs music:

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=5792.0

A 3-4 minute song that includes some hooks and melodies from the song "Creature of the Woods" in that thread is really what we're looking for. We've got an orchestral version lined up, a guitar version might be interesting... 

In any case, your samples sound great. Good luck!

[achievements]

You are forgiven.  We're excited about Siege too, which is why we're also excited about finding an artist. Right now, we should be adding units into the game and balancing it, but it's hard to justify creating placeholder art that you're just going to ditch as soon as you find an artist. Instead, we're building the menus and putting achievements in place.

Unfortunately, we can't release it until all the art is done. Anyone?

Reminds me a little of Dan Paladin's style. Really cool!

Hello my funky musicians,

Some friends and I have spent the last couple weeks working on a reimagining of one of my favorite indie games of all time: Siege. We've added a lot to the gameplay, like combos and units that break your opponent's tiles. It's not really playable yet, especially after reworking the input code, but it's come a long way.





For music, we were thinking about remaining true to the original. Siege used a song from modarchive.org called "Creature of the Woods" for gameplay; it's a really awesome piece of music. Since this is a remake, though, it'd be great to have a remake of Creature of the Woods. Here's a link to an mp3 I crappily converted the s3m from.

Ideally, it would be about 4 minutes long and loop somewhat seamlessly. Obviously, the original is only a bit more than 2 minutes long, so you'd have to extrapolate extra melody bits to hit the 4 minute mark. Also (and this is a dream scenario), we would have more than one track to cycle through, to keep things interesting. There could be a chiptune mix, a disco mix, whatever. Let me know if you're inspired or interested, or if you have any questions about the game.

Tom

P.S: In terms of release, we're looking at anywhere from 2 weeks from now to 1 month. Every week we work for dozens of hours on the game, and we're definitely not stopping.

P.P.S: Beau, if you're reading, we love you! We owe everything to you!

P.P.P.S: I copied heavily from the thread I made in the Art section. It's because I'm lazy. We're also looking for a pixel artist, which explains the placeholder art.

Great, we're looking forward to hearing back from you. Not to make it sound like a contest or a race, but if anyone else is interested we'd love to see your stuff.

Looking at your posts on TIGSource, we'd love to have you! I think it would be best for the game to have a consistent style, which probably means that one person would do all the art. It's a pretty big commitment and I don't know if that's what you meant. If you're still interested, let me know!

Thanks for the well-wishes! Unfortunately this isn't a paid position; we're just a few CS majors making an indie game. We're doing it in C#, using .NET and AgateLib. When we're a little bit farther along, I'll make a thread in the Feedback or Announcements forum to show it off.