VCMI - Content Creation Project

[Conundrum]

Greetings, fellow Wesnothians. Your Mighty ancestors require your help!

I come here today as a mere community member in representation of the VCMI project - an open source engine that attempts to recreate none other than New World Computing's magnificent turn-based strategy game, Heroes of Might and Magic 3, which many of you may know (and hopefully love). The project is well-established and currently on version beta 0.88. While its primary goal for was to do a simple reconstruction of the engine and have it working with the original HOMM3 game assets, recently there have been developments within the VCMI forums towards the foundation of an artwork project as well. This would be a community effort attempting to replace all of HOMM3's artwork with community crafted/funded content and perhaps, even creating a brand new story mode to go along with it, as not to infringe the Heroes of Might and Magic copyrights, and thus make the project completely independent from the original game.

Obviously this means we are looking for artists interesting in helping us, but if you're just a HOMM3 fan, you can help too! At this stage, the most precious contribute anyone can offer is your opinions and ideas on how to revamp the artwork style. If you're a fan of of the HOMM series, join us and give us a piece of your mind on how do you think a worthy HOMM3 successor should look like. If you're not acquainted with the HOMM series but if you think you have a say on the matter, have no reason to be shy as well! The Wesnoth community is prominent for being a highly creative and productive one. It would be a great honor if you would like to share some of that with us.

*EDIT*

Oh, and here's some screenshots of VCMI engine running Heroes 3 (click thumbnails to enlarge)

Main Menu


Town menu


Custom map running on high-resolution mode



Link to full gallery

[MetalKing]

Is it opensource?
Regards, MetalKing

[The_Other]

an open source engine

[Blarumyrran]

the obvious bottleneck with graphics for a homm3-clone is animated in-combat unit sprites; I can think of 2 ways you can possibly complete those for EVERY unit:
1) every creature is a ~ 15x15 pixelart thing (small size takes little time; also small-size pixelart creatures made by different contributors are very easy to conform to a standard, which would become a problem otherwise! But I think you'll agree that this would abandon the "feel" of Heroes, as the in-combat units of Heroes have always looked huge; and if you're looking to emulate Homm3 rather than Homm2 then you perhaps don't want pixelart either)
2) units are simply unanimated, but chesslike (sounds like a half-baked solution? But could be done well; I think Heroes combat has always had a very chess-like feel to it - and you could eg depict units in the style of Lewis chessmen)

[Conundrum]

the obvious bottleneck with graphics for a homm3-clone is animated in-combat unit sprites; I can think of 2 ways you can possibly complete those for EVERY unit:
1) every creature is a ~ 15x15 pixelart thing (small size takes little time; also small-size pixelart creatures made by different contributors are very easy to conform to a standard, which would become a problem otherwise! But I think you'll agree that this would abandon the "feel" of Heroes, as the in-combat units of Heroes have always looked huge; and if you're looking to emulate Homm3 rather than Homm2 then you perhaps don't want pixelart either)
2) units are simply unanimated, but chesslike (sounds like a half-baked solution? But could be done well; I think Heroes combat has always had a very chess-like feel to it - and you could eg depict units in the style of Lewis chessmen)

Units will be rendered from high-res, fully animated 3d models, much like the original HOMM3. We already have a competent 3D modeler on board. What we lack at the moment is 2D artists to create concept art according to a general set of characteristic which will be decided by the fans and members of the HOMM community. This will be a slow process, I won't lie, but the main goal of this artwork project (which ironically I forgot to mention) goes beyond that: all of the artwork produced will be licensed under CC-BY-SA license, and donated to sites like Opengameart.org, so that everyone can make use of it. The production of artwork assets will also account for maximum usability by any prospective developer whilling to use it: final 2d sketches, for instance, will ideally include standard front/side stances to serve as references for 3d modelers, along with several "action" stances and coloured sketches, to serve as inspiration to 2D animators.