Yeah, this game looked really neat!

I just wish I had an IPhone to play it on

I hope the sales have been going well.  We've been watching this game for a while.

Wow that's pretty amazing!

It's a good thing I never bought it when I was thinking about it about 2 months ago or so.

Although I'm still not going to use it because I found it to be confusing and lacking in documentation (for making 2D games that is)...

I used to have the same problem with programming / designing video games.  For a while, it seemed like a chore and I doubted whether or not it was something that I was even interested in doing anymore.

If you're like me, you're going to get out into the "real" world and realize how shitty NOT doing what you love to do.  Then, while you're working doing stuff you don't enjoy, you'll be sitting back thinking "What I love to do is kind of a chore... but I like it better than what I'm doing right now."

In addition, success seems to matter a lot.  If you haven't been successful at something it seems even MORE boring and more pointless.  As you get better, however, you realize that it is fun!

If you want one last piece of advice, something that someone told me was:
"Stop doing what you love to do for 1 month.  If after that month you still go back to doing what you were doing, then keep doing it." 

You know what they say, "Abscence makes the heart grow fonder!"

For the blog - gotta go with Wordpress.  It's simple, effective, and easy to use.

As for the website itself - I use dreamweaver.  I don't actually like dreamweaver too much, but someone bought a copy for me, so I use it.

As for a donation button - use paypal.  It's a relatively simple process of just registering and then putting an image with a link on it.

I'm assuming you want to prevent against spambots. Use a simple PHP script, or even simpler, make the email address an image.

I actually had a question about this myself. 
Basically, how do I use these? 
Can I just grab some code somewhere and then stick it into my website and have it work already? 
How do I even go about finding that code?

In addition, I was wondering if anyone could tell me how to create a block of information to be used in multiple pages.  Like, my top menu that contains the links to [HOME,GAMES,BLOG,ABOUT].  I want that to appear in every page without having to copy and text the same code in every page.  It becomes kind of a hassle when I have to edit stuff...

Try fizzball:

http://grubbygames.com/fizzball/

It won a bunch of awards.  There's tons of animals to collect.

It's a really neat game!

Just my two cents:

I was annoyed a little by the hesitation when I jumped.

I was REALLY annoyed at the long hesitation when I normally just attacked.  I felt that a regular attack should occur a lot faster, while a special attack could take that long.

Because I didn't feel like learning combos, etc. it was more fun for me to just shoot enemies until there HP was reduced.

Also, the walking sound of the enemies I thought was annoying.

(Don't get be wrong, it seems like an interesting game and I can't wait to play a better version as I like 2D games myself.)

It's simple. Pixel art doesn't scale itself. So size is problematic. The bigger the size(usually) the more detail required to look appealing.

Right, but what I'm trying to get at is whether that's an inherent problem/feature with the pixel art approach/style, or whether that's true for any approach to 2D art.

If you take a game with a non-pixel-art style (off the top of my head I'm thinking of stuff like World of Goo, Samorost, Machinarium, Braid, Aquaria, Castle Crashers etc, where either the source art seems to have been hand- or digitally- painted, or comes from photo composites, or is in a generally "cleaner" more vectory style), is it still the case that doubling the resolution would quadruple the workload? Or is it not as much of an increase in workload with those styles to just create higher-resolution assets in the first place?

*** I just answered this question, but basically reiterated what everyone else said in more detail... ***

To answer your question directly, from my understanding, changing the size of non pixelated art work, of course, increases the work load slightly, but not as much as pixel art.

I do think it's because of the inherit nature of pixel art.  In addition, maybe people aren't usually as comfortable with pixel art than art with say a tablet.

Pixel art seems to be something that has to be learned and practiced regularly to be good at.  There seem to be other art styles that are just inherit to people.

***
Of course, I could be wrong too!  I'm more of a designer than anything as well
***

Hey Montoli,

Yeah that was actually the way the system was working at first.  We decided to change that, however.  Now, however, we are still calling it an UNPAID position.

What we mean by UNPAID is that we won't pay anyone until the project is ENTIRELY complete. It would require a large commitment on someone's time for a variety of reasons: 1.  the game is still being made; 2.  there is A LOT of art to be completed.  Unlike last time, we didn't want to pay anyone while the work is getting completed (we're not going to do a milestone payment system this time).

Currently, what we are offering people is $2000 US dollars or 20 % of the profit of the PC sales of the game (whichever is greater).  This only applies if a person completes ALL the work.  If a person leaves early, they won't get anything.

A problem that we ran into last time as well, was hearing from our artists - "You're not paying us enough to do this work."  Even though the terms of what we were offering were pretty clear from the start, 2 of our [best] artists still made that comment.  We are trying to avoid that completely.

Relatively speaking, the only other cost is music which would be handled by us and be relatively cheap (less than 200 dollars).

So, it puts us into a strange position:
1.  We have a bit of money to pay people.
2.  We're willing to share our profits with people so that we can BOTH win.
3.  Learning our lesson with The Cherokee Indian, we can't guarantee that a person will make more than $2000. 
4.  $2000 is probably not enough money to cover the cost of just paying someone for all the work, so we don't want to hear anyone complain about it.
5.  Really, we're looking more for a collaboration with an artist who's willing to work, grow, and learn with us.  With that said, it doesn't make any sense for us to work with a complete beginner.

It's like: "We can pay you if you can do the work, but you could probably make more somewhere else.  If you couldn't, we'd like to work with you but you have to know SOMEWHAT what you're doing because it just doesn't make any sense to have completely bad art in a game."

Thanks for explaining that, Montoli, and I've posted a help wanted on the deviantArt forums that seems more in line with what you are talking about:

http://forum.deviantart.com/community/projects/1360893/

Would you have any suggestions regarding that exact posting that we could do to improve the posting?

Thanks a bunch!

***
I hadn't updated this posting at all because we have never gotten any responses from this site so I thought it would just be buried.

Caliber,

What about, for example, if I had a character that was:
25 X 50 pixels
A walking image would be 6 frames

Enemies, at largest, would have an image sequence of about 4 frames.  Most enemies are pretty simple.  Usually, the largest image they would have would be walking back and forth (which would use 4-5 frames).
60 % or so are as big as the player or SMALLER.
Right now at least 70 % of them have simple movements:
stand still = 1 frame
get ready to attack = 1 frame
attack = 1 frame

Would that more realistic to be completed in 4 months?

In addition, the game isn't the SIZE of Castlevania.  It's just in that style of gameplay.  To give a rough estimate, it be nice to have 7-8 level settings each containing 2 large backgrounds and a single set of tiles.  The tiles are relatively simple - think of Super Mario World (SNES).

It looks like the game window will have to be reduced to 800 X 600 as well...

Hey all,

I contacted one of the artists about our latest game The Old Fairy Wars. 

You can find a very ROUGH demo here:

http://jrjellybeansgames.com/theOldFairyWars_v0_0.exe

To make a long story short, currently, it's a 2D platforming game in the spirit of Castlevania and is running with a window size of 1024 X 768. 

The smallest size of a block in the game is 60 X 60 pixels.  The main character is 60 X 120 pixels.

Basically, the artist I spoke with told me that it was too much work for the artist to do at the current size (I was looking for an artist to all of the art [characters, bosses, backgrounds, etc.] within a 2,3, or 4 month period.)

He told me that it would be unrealistic to find an independent artist who was willing to work that and that I would need to find a professional artist and pay him.

I can reduce the size of the characters in the game fairly easily (it would just take some time).  Obviously, since the size is already in place, I'd like to keep it.

My only real concern about the art is that it "looks good."  I don't really care too much about sizes - I just care more about finding someone who can get it done with no payment up front.  Even after completion I'll pay them, but nothing near what they could probably be getting.

So:
1.  Is 60 X 60 pixels too big of a base size for an artist to work with within this time frame?  If it is, what size would be better?
2.  If it isn't then how would I go about finding an artist who would be willing to complete the work?  The artist told me that most people on the site deal with retro / smaller art.
3.  I should also mention that we're using Game Maker to program it, although I'm pretty sure that speed won't be too much of an issue as we feel pretty confident that it can be optimized.  Does anyone else have any other thoughts on this?

Thanks in advance!

I'm a bit shocked that he lasted as long as he did.  Usually, when people get the typical (and very intelligent) advice of:

"You're being unrealistic.  You need to scale your vision WAY back,"

it turns into a flame war by the 4th page.

Kudos to him for lasting until the 6th [7th maybe, I'm too lazy right now to check].



(I'm going back to lurking.  Someone PM when another one of these posts comes up - it shouldn't take too long as they seem to come up every 4-5 months.)

We're still trying to find a sprite artist everyone.  If you think you'd be interested in our project, please send us an e-mail.

In addition, if anyone has any suggestions on how to go about improving the number of people who are interested, please let us know.  Aside from actually putting up a demo of the game, we can't really think what we could do to generate more interest from artists, and we'd like to hear what other ideas people have. 

This is the third time that we've struggled to find an artist and we feel like we're just hitting a brick wall.  We'd hope that once WE figure out how to find quality artists, we can help other people who would potentially have the same problem.

So, if you're a sprite artist looking for a project to join or if you have any suggestions in this area, please let us know!

Hello everybody!

Jr. Jellybeans is FINALLY settled into our next game, and we decided that we wanted to find an artist EARLY.
We've been posting on all of the art / game forums, so I thought I would post one here as well.

It'd be really great to find an artist from TIG because THIS community gave us such great feedback last time.  So, the sooner that we find an artist, the sooner we can get a demo ready, so we won't run into the problems we had last time!

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

A bit about the project:

"The Old Fairy Wars" is a 2D game about fairies where the player will kill enemies, level up, and go on a fantastic journey.

Our goal is that it plays like a quicker version of Castlevania!

The game is early in the process, so there is plenty of room to be experimental. Generally speaking, however, we're envisioning a "Heart of Darkness" type of art style!

We would like to finish the game within the next 4 months.

We currently have a 8 level demo that should give you a great idea of where the game is heading!

We would like some feedback from other people about the game, but will NOT release a demo UNTIL some art has been put into place. As such, we NEED YOU!

This is an UNPAID position, where we WILL agree to PAY you once we make a profit. In fact, IF you complete all the art work and stay on the project for the ENTIRE time, I'd hope to pay you SOMETHING.  (For our last game we did PAY ALL of our artists what was agreed, but ended it up costing us too much money AND took too long, so we've decided to be more careful this time). We have a contract that you will need to agree to!

********************************************************

As for us:
Jr. Jellybeans has been officially around for about 9 months. We finished our first project "The Cherokee Indian" in July. You can find our website here:

http://jrjellybeansgames.com

You can check out the video of The Cherokee Indian here:





PLEASE send your portfolio, any additional info, and any QUESTIONS to:
jrjellybean [AT] live [DOT] com

If you've already spent a bunch of money on graphics (you got gypped), that's probably even more reason to take care of the most obvious barrier to reaching your sales potential, before interest fades and people stop giving a shit.

I wouldn't say we got gypped.  Personally, I think the majority of the art is rather good.  I agree that it doesn't BLEND well, but I wouldn't say it looks decent enough to me.

Either way, that's something we've been thinking about.  However, again, redoing the art by one person would take too long and it would just be too costly.

It's actually cheaper for us to push forward with our next game (which will be WAY simpler).

We did lower the price to try to gather up sales faster.  I'll post an update on how things go.

AT deadeye:

These are the exact sort of comments that we could have used.  Thanks a bunch!

The fact is, we had a huge rage of artists (I think about 5-6) in total.  There was just a ton of art in the game.

**********************

In addition, we started off by tasking all the art to a single person (he was working too slow).  Then we moved on to a team (they just decided to stop working on the art).

In other words, finding art for this game was a real b***h.

There's nothing more that I'd like to do than redo all of the art (in fact, we'd probably redo the entire engine to make everything larger).  We've already spent a lot of money on the art already (and there's the time constraint as well).

Which is a pity as it seems quite pacey (which is something easy to overlook in a sorta' strategy platformer) and looks like it might have some depth and interest to the play.

It's funny you should mention this, we were going to write a blog about this later:

Depth was exactly what we were going for.  We were trying to make this casual / hardcore game with a great story.

http://playthisthing.com/ just did an article about this game (which is awesome).  But, he called the game "Pleasant enough, and suitable for the kids."  If anyone's played until the end, they'd learn that the story takes a strange twist.  It's nothing disturbing but we thought... unique.

All in all, we don't really know if this is a success or fail.  People who seem to play it like it, but think the art is terrible.  We think it's an interesting game with a well told story.  Sales have been a bit slow...

Maybe we'll do a complete redo of the game AFTER we finish our next one

Thanks for the comments all!

Do not be afraid, boy!

Although our trials are dangerous, even DEADLY, they are a necessary part of life.  Every boy must one day become a man and for YOU, that time is now.

Like the flow of the river, or the endless breath of Our Mother, you cannot stop change.  Instead, embrace your DESTINY and seek out the DANGEROUS future.

Though you may be young and weak, it is time for you to learn the ways of our people.  The time has come for you to protect the great Cherokee Nation and to bring honor to your ancestors.

So, have no fear, boy!  When the sun smiles upon your face tomorrow, you will be on the path to becoming a man!

***************

Jr. Jellybeans is proud to present The Cherokee Indian (Special Edition) available for $24.30!

The Cherokee Indian (Special Edition) is a 2D platforming game inspired by the Harvest Moon series of games.  Controlled entirely one handed, you will guide a young Cherokee Indian boy on his path towards becoming a man.

The Cherokee Indian (Special Edition) features:
- Over 150 levels (an estimated 10-15 hours of play) of great platforming action
- An exciting story based on Native American History
- The ability to hunt and capture animals, build Native American buildings, and plant Native American crops
- Cool mini games that unlock new costumes, new weapons, and more!
- Simple gameplay - you play the game using the mouse!
- Participate in The Sun Dance - a traditional Native American celebration

Demo: The Cherokee Indian (SE) Direct Demo Link
YouTube Video:



Order Form: The Cherokee Indian Buy Now

Website: Jr. Jellybeans: Home of The Cherokee Indian - A Game About Native American History

Affiliates - earn 50% commission!
We use BMT Micro for our service and will be accepting affiliates soon!

******************************************

We WANT to answer any questions you have regarding review copies / interviews! 
Just send us an e-mail to: [email protected]

but in all honesty I think you'll have trouble selling it just because it looks properly crap

What exact parts of the game look like crap?  I'm assuming it's the beginning background, which I can admit does look a bit [not good].

Besides that, could you tell me exactly what parts of the game looked so bad?

(I'm genuinely curious as this sort of helpful criticism has been hard to come by.)

In all honesty, I hope your artist is working for free because those tiles are terrible


What's strange about this is that some of the tile sheets are rather good!  Others aren't as good.

In either case, the game has been updated with slightly different graphics.  I'll be updating the images and video later today.

The game is available for sale at our website.  I'm also going to make a regular announcement post about it.

Jr. Jellybeans The Home of The Cherokee Indian - A Game About Native American History

Any comments or questions in regards to feedback, please send them to [email protected]

Thanks!

The Cherokee Indian is a 2D platforming game inspired by the Harvest Moon series of game.  In it, you will plant Native American crops, hunt and capture animals, and build authentic buildings.

It is a paid game that we are going to sell for 24.30.


Here is a link to the demo download:

The Cherokee Indian Demo

Additional Pictures:
Pic 1

Pic 2

Pic 3

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

YouTube videos:









The Cherokee Indian Video 2

The Cherokee Indian Video 3

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


If you play the game, please send me your computer information.  In particular, we would like to know:
1.  Your CPU power
2.  Your RAM
3.  We're mostly looking for bug testers.  If you encounter any errors, please save a copy of the exact text and send it to us.

In addition, we are currently looking for people to play the entire game.  The game should take about 15 hours to beat.  If you're interested, please let us know as soon as possible.

Please send us your information to:

jrjellybean [AT] live [DOT] com

Hello all,

Listen, RIGHT NOW, we've got an art budget of 4000.  We were looking for an out sourcing company in China or something along those lines, but were unable to find one.

In terms of finding someone to do the work, that isn't really a big problem.  What we need is 1.  to find someone to do the work AND 2.  To do it insanely fast AND 3.  To do it in the style that we are looking for.  Ideally, we're looking for someone who'd be able to complete 2 months of work that would take a single person possibly 60-80 hours per week ASAP (we'd hope to get it done in about 1 months time).  In addition, that is the MAXIMUM amount that we can pay.  Basically, once we pay our next artist, they pretty much have to agree to stay on for the completion of the project regardless of how much work it is (if anyone has any experience estimating times, you can understand how these numbers could be off).

Ideally, we'd find an art company or a group of art friends that work together or something along those lines that can complete this project in 1 months time.  We've got about 10.9 MBs of pixel art to complete (all saved as .PNG) ranging from 16X16 to 128X128.

If anyone knows anyone or anyone has any suggestions on what our next move should be, we'd love to hear them .  Or, if you know anyone, we'd love to hear from them.

[Oh, and to answer your question about gamedev.net, the results were rather dissappointing.]

[Completely off topic as well, but has anyone bothered to get to the second zone yet?  That's really where the games elements fall into place.  Although, essentially, the first zone is a good indication of the entire game - collect resources and build statues/other stuff]

[As for Lost In Blue - point noted!  Thanks for the suggestion!]