OT: searching artist for a new project

[saman]

Hello,

excuse me for this topic.

I'm the admin of the open source project GothWaG. We are searching artists that will make icons and pictures for our project. I post this message here because I think that Wesnoth's icons are fantastic!

GothWaG is a gothic wargame inspired by boardgame like warhammer and confrontation, you can find it at sourceforge.net/projects/gothwag.

We're waiting for you !

Thanks
Marco

[Elvish_Pillager]

Um, I don't think people are going to like this. We want to work on Wesnoth! You are trying to lure us into wasting our time on something foolish!

[Dacyn]

yes; this should be moved to Game Development.

[Jetrel]

This is quite unpolitic - rude almost, for you to post this.

At the least, you could have done it in the game development forum.

[freim]

Relax people... he probably should have posted this in the game development forum, but I see no need for being so unfriendly.

[saman]

This is quite unpolitic - rude almost, for you to post this.

I'm sorry but I think this isn't so uncorrect. This is a forum where a lot of artists speak about their creations. Wesnoth is an open-source project, there's no software house behind developers. So I post this message to broadcast the fact that another open-source project is searching for artists.

I respect all the developers of Wesnoth and I hope you respect me and other GothWaG's developers. It's strange.....open-source developers usually help other open-source developers!

Marco

[Dacyn]

...

[ziberpunk]

This is quite unpolitic - rude almost, for you to post this.

He probably tried to do his best, he even marked clearly as off-topic. No need to be so hard.

I'm the admin of the open source project GothWaG. We are searching artists that will make icons and pictures for our project. I post this message here because I think that Wesnoth's icons are fantastic!

I'm not an artist, but I wouldn't join your project simply because I see no project. The link you give has _no_ information about the game. There's no homepage, no code, no screenshot... You should give something touchable to gain interest. Just my opinion. I desire you best luck for your project.

[saman]

I'm not an artist, but I wouldn't join your project simply because I see no project. The link you give has _no_ information about the game. There's no homepage, no code, no screenshot... You should give something touchable to gain interest. Just my opinion. I desire you best luck for your project.

You're right, a the moment there's only code. Take a look to the CVS!

There are no screenshot because we are in the developing phase yet.

[Jetrel]

I'm not an artist, but I wouldn't join your project simply because I see no project. The link you give has _no_ information about the game. There's no homepage, no code, no screenshot... You should give something touchable to gain interest. Just my opinion. I desire you best luck for your project.

You're right, a the moment there's only code. Take a look to the CVS!

There are no screenshot because we are in the developing phase yet.

This is one of the problems with open source, or really with people doing anything creative in their free time. People start projects that they may not have the impetus to finish.

I mean, really, people start a [censored] of projects, and one of the problems with open-source is the multitude of projects-that-are-basically-the-same-damn-thing. The basic purpose of KDE and Gnome comes to mind, as one (though the KDE project has morphed into a whole bunch of other stuff. Or mozilla and KHTML.

Sometimes duplicate things come out nicely. KHTML and Mozilla get along quite nicely. They both follow the same standards, though Mozilla is deeper and slower, and bigger. It offers a nice choice.

My suggestion for you, is to ask yourself why you are doing what you are. If you are trying to make a game that behaves an exact way, it may be a better idea to fork from another project, and/or borrow graphics from them - hell, you could probably do that to wesnoth.

Wesnoth's graphics, in the very early pre-muñoz days were largely borrowed from other open-source games, if I am correctly informed.

If you are trying to just get better at coding, I would suggest joining on with some other project as a team. That's kinda what I did.


I realized that I needed to be much better at graphics before I could make any game of my own and sell it as shareware or donationware. Plus, I wanted the opportunity to see from the inside how another game handled things like saving games, and reading/writing levels.

That's why I'm here. I could be just drawing and not doing anything with those drawings, but I would like to be confident that I could do such work for a client, or for a purpose of my own design.



The real reason I made such a point as this is, yeah, people are free to do whatever they want, but if we stick together, we can actually do [censored] that rivals commercial outfits, instead of starting all these individual overcomplicated projects that will never get done.

I am giving enough of myself by working on wesnoth. Wesnoth, I am fairly sure, will be a success. It has a lot of impetus behind it. If I joined your game, and fought valiantly for it, I could probably become it's fmuñoz. But, for all my efforts, I think Wesnoth would outshine it. I would rather be a minor member of a project that becomes a huge success, that be a hero for something that might never become much.

If you want to attract helpers, prove yourself first. Make some graphics, even if they are [censored] ones. Hopefully some guy with some free time will enjoy playing your game, despite its bad graphics, and will then lend his skills to you. If I am correct, this is exactly what happened to wesnoth.

An analogy for this could be wesnoth scenarios. There are probably 20+ scenarios in development, just like many anime fans have their own manga brewing in their heads. [censored], I mean even I have a few ideas for scenarios. The only scenarios in the game though, are the ones whose authors pushed them until they were impressive enough to attract people to help make them.

Prove to the world that you are serious, and people will help.

"But I can't do art!" Suck on it. Make something - ANYTHING to the point where you have some game that people can sit down and run, even if it is shameful to look at. Get the ball rolling yourself before you come crying for help.

Then people will be proud to work with you.

[Dave]

I think that Saman's project looks interesting. In particular, using Prolog for the AI is interesting indeed.

I was planning on using Haskell for Wesnoth AI at one stage, but that fell through when I decided I really didn't want to write a cross-language interface

I think that FLOSS projects should help each other, rather than act like companies who feel that other companies are trying to poach their employees

Otoh, I do think that Jetryl is right that it's going to be difficult to get artists until you've actually got something to show.

Just 'steal' Wesnoth (or other game's) graphics until people start contributing graphics to you

David

[saman]

First of all, thanks for your answer.

This is one of the problems with open source, or really with people doing anything creative in their free time. People start projects that they may not have the impetus to finish.

You're right but this is a problem of the software development, and more generally, of the technological development. If you read some book of ISW you will learn that about 35% of software project are failed. This stats are taken from all the software, commercial software over all. Do you know warhammer online ?

The basic purpose of KDE and Gnome comes to mind, as one (though the KDE project has morphed into a whole bunch of other stuff. Or mozilla and KHTML.

Gnome and KDE have got a very different roots. GNU software and commercial software are their roots.....I think that you cannot compare two software only because are both window manager + desktop suite programs for X11.

My suggestion for you, is to ask yourself why you are doing what you are. If you are trying to make a game that behaves an exact way, it may be a better idea to fork from another project, and/or borrow graphics from them - hell, you could probably do that to wesnoth.

Thanks for your suggestion. But this project -GothWaG- has been projected since 2001....and there are a lot of good motivations to develop it.....some of these are:
-to allow to my collegues and other interested people to study the building up of a knowledge database and the related artificial intelligence
-to fit the hole in the games horizon: me and other developers know no game similar to GothWaG.

I avoided to copy graphics from Wesnoth (altough I got the rights using GPL license) because I'd like to have dedicated graphics. Notice that I need only icons....we already have in our team good painters.

I realized that I needed to be much better at graphics before I could make any game of my own and sell it as shareware or donationware. Plus, I wanted the opportunity to see from the inside how another game handled things like saving games, and reading/writing levels.

That's why I'm here. I could be just drawing and not doing anything with those drawings, but I would like to be confident that I could do such work for a client, or for a purpose of my own design.

I am giving enough of myself by working on wesnoth. Wesnoth, I am fairly sure, will be a success. It has a lot of impetus behind it. If I joined your game, and fought valiantly for it, I could probably become it's fmuñoz. But, for all my efforts, I think Wesnoth would outshine it. I would rather be a minor member of a project that becomes a huge success, that be a hero for something that might never become much.

You, as any other person in the world, can think everything. There are people that believe game has 1 or 2 years of life. There are people that continues to play with his Commodore VIC 20.... There are people that believe a good musician will become rich and famous...
Now, I suggest you: don't believe too much in a success of a game. Games are a business, entertainment business and the customer of games are overall children and teen-agers.
They prefer incredible graphics to a good game. And, unfortunately, it's really difficult for a best effort made game to has a good graphics. So be happy with yourself because you're making a service to other users and Wesnoth's attacheds.
I don't promise honour nor glory. I just want some icons !!!!
GothWaG don't need hours and hours of graphics development.

Prove to the world that you are serious, and people will help.
"But I can't do art!" Suck on it. Make something - ANYTHING to the point where you have some game that people can sit down and run, even if it is shameful to look at. Get the ball rolling yourself before you come crying for help.

The seriuosity of an project manager is the ability to plan and to manage team. If a gui developer will start to develop the path-finding probably he'll need a lot of time and his work will not be good. So, it's ridicolous what have you said....in my opinion.

Then people will be proud to work with you.

Perhaps you have a lot of experience of the developing process....but remember this words: in the developing process aren't important the number of the developers......but their quality.
So....if a developer observer that GothWaG it's a good project but there are parts developed by novices (as I'll seem if I'll make the graphics) he will think: GothWaG hasn't got a good project manager, I'll avoid to lose time with him and his teams.

Thanks for your attention and sorry for my english.
With friendly
Marco

[turin]

IMHO, something bad now is better than something great never.

[ziberpunk]

You're right, a the moment there's only code. Take a look to the CVS!

There are no screenshot because we are in the developing phase yet.

Oh, you're right, my fault. I saw: CVS Repository ( 0 commits, 0 adds ) and thought there was no files. Still, don't think artists will look at it. As there's been already mentioned, making some graphics, even if they're ugly, or borrowing from other games to get something playable would be a good idea.

I think that Saman's project looks interesting. In particular, using Prolog for the AI is interesting indeed.

Yes, I concur. I think I've not seen any free game using these kind of languages for AI, which is something I always wanted to see