If I switch to art, I think it could be a strong move for the project.
I'd still be looking at pull requests and testing code. I just don't want it to seem, to the other code contributors, that I'm making them do all the work :)
I haven't really messed with the labels. No current plans for them. Maybe one of the other project contributors edited them?
If most of the entries will be programming tasks, then maybe it just makes sense to mark those that are different, e.g. Bugs. Maybe I can add an Art tag too for people who want to help there.
In general, concept art is a sketch or painting that conveys artistic direction. It is often highly creative, without concern for e.g. technical limitations.
Concept art is often a rough sketch, just enough to convey a particular vision.
Some people consider concept artists unnecessary or a luxury. I think many professional game artists are expected to be able to do concept art in addition to technical art (e.g. creating final assets to be used in a game).
I think most foss projects aren't lucky enough to have concept artists, but they could be especially useful. Many foss projects are led by left-brain programmers, so it's rare for foss games to have a strong art direction. Without an art direction, technical game artists will tend to make art that easily fits into the tool set instead of making what's awesome.
Although concept art is usually in sketch form, if the sketch is too rough then it's useless -- it should convey enough details to the technical artists to create real assets. If the sketch is too finished it might not leave the technical artist enough wiggle room to work within technical limitations.
Most concept art these days for games are digital sketches (mostly 2D). Sometimes people do character concept sketches as 3D sculpts (e.g. in zbrush). Photos aren't great for concept art because a technical artist already knows what the real world looks like. Concept artists help make unreal worlds.
Note, what I mean by "art direction" is an overall, consistent, unique, artistic style. Games can look technically good but lack the style that a good art direction brings. A game might have very realistic graphics, but could end up looking quite boring and indistinguishable from many other games. Some people say that warfare fps games lack art direction -- by trying to be gritty and realistic they end up with a foggy soup of browns and grays.
A good art direction might use exaggerated proportions for characters, or intentional use of colors to convey meaning. A great art direction will make sure that every aspect of the game (songs, sound effects, voices, textures, fonts, even advertisements and websites) add to the feeling of the game. Games that do a great job of conveying mood, atmosphere, or attitude often do so because of a strong art direction. Famous examples of strong art direction: Diablo 1, Team Fortress 2, Shadow of the Colossus.
Well, I'll assume there's a ton of artwork that belongs on the "fantasy core" art no matter what story direction the game takes. Tons of common tile sets and monsters can and should be added.
It might even make sense to keep the first Flare game pretty straightforward -- maybe a Diablo style dungeon crawl with a fixed number of levels in a basic linear order, with a handful of side maps. That's not an exciting first game (especially if the levels aren't yet random) but it's definitely finishable and would be a good first step for the engine.
I've created v0.14 and v0.15 as Milestones in GitHub. Most issues aren't assigned to a milestone; those are just whenever they're done they can be added in.
I do plan to keep at this until a full game is released; in my mind, the engine isn't useful until it's been proven on at least one game.
The good news is that I've gotten lots of code help from plenty of you via GitHub, and I think the engine pieces will come along much sooner than I had planned because of this.
v0.15 Translations will be a MAJOR milestone, and will require a ton of work. Once the project makes it through that milestone, I imagine much of the engine work will be (1) making sure the right parts are moddable, and (2) adding interesting new features. Currently it's hard for me to see much past v0.15 to know what will be the next priority.
I will definitely be focusing on art assets after v0.15, as more art will probably be the main challenge after that.
Don't know if I've done a good job of answering the big question. If you have specific questions I can try to answer those?
I think putting an optional cooldown on powers is a good idea. Definitely makes sense for e.g. something like Quake. I'll add it to the issue list.
I'm not as worried about a ranger having an unfair advantage one-on-one against a melee foe; that's kind of the point. Maybe some behavior numbers can be tweaked to help with this (e.g. increase pursuit chance so the creature doesn't stand there after taking a hit; increase the "take-hit" animation speed so that the creature is free to move sooner).
I'd rather give more enemies optional ranged powers to help with this, e.g. some melee creatures should throw a stun missile (e.g. a Net attack) to help them close in on a ranged hero. Also it helps to mix up creatures in groups. This might be less of an issue when creatures attack in packs rather than one-at-a-time.
It'll probably make sense if mod files completely supercede files from previous mods. So, when opening any data file, look at the bottom of the mod list first. If the file isn't there look at the mod before it. Keep going until the first (core) mod.
Those local overrides can simply be mods too, I think. They can be small mods of only 1 file if necessary.
It could make translation simpler to have e.g. translation files only contain names/descriptions of items and powers; in other words, allow mods to alter parts of files. But those are the easiest-to-translate parts anyway. It'd be harder to separate the translations for events (NPC dialog and map events) because those don't use IDs (those would be harder to work with if unique IDs were necessary).
Anyway. We can always make it better later. Let's plan on this, as part of the v0.15 work required for Translations anyway.
Move game-specific data into /mod/fantasycore/
Any files supplied by other mods completely supercede that core set or previously listed mods
Then if we get to the point where that's holding us back, we can look at allowing mods to change or add data within specific files, instead of completely overriding them.
/mod/fantasycore/ would have all the current sounds/images along with all the current game data files.
/mod/fantasycore_fr/ would probably only have .txt files, maybe some french voice-over files and a translated title screen image.
Then if they wanted fancy weapons they could have /mod/weaponpack/ (or maybe a french version if one exists)
fcxSanya, thanks! This info is incredibly valuable.
If I switch to art, I think it could be a strong move for the project.
I'd still be looking at pull requests and testing code. I just don't want it to seem, to the other code contributors, that I'm making them do all the work :)
I think "Refactor" is the term you want. That would be a good tag, as right now it's a common task.
I haven't really messed with the labels. No current plans for them. Maybe one of the other project contributors edited them?
If most of the entries will be programming tasks, then maybe it just makes sense to mark those that are different, e.g. Bugs. Maybe I can add an Art tag too for people who want to help there.
pro
In general, concept art is a sketch or painting that conveys artistic direction. It is often highly creative, without concern for e.g. technical limitations.
Concept art is often a rough sketch, just enough to convey a particular vision.
Some people consider concept artists unnecessary or a luxury. I think many professional game artists are expected to be able to do concept art in addition to technical art (e.g. creating final assets to be used in a game).
I think most foss projects aren't lucky enough to have concept artists, but they could be especially useful. Many foss projects are led by left-brain programmers, so it's rare for foss games to have a strong art direction. Without an art direction, technical game artists will tend to make art that easily fits into the tool set instead of making what's awesome.
Although concept art is usually in sketch form, if the sketch is too rough then it's useless -- it should convey enough details to the technical artists to create real assets. If the sketch is too finished it might not leave the technical artist enough wiggle room to work within technical limitations.
Most concept art these days for games are digital sketches (mostly 2D). Sometimes people do character concept sketches as 3D sculpts (e.g. in zbrush). Photos aren't great for concept art because a technical artist already knows what the real world looks like. Concept artists help make unreal worlds.
Note, what I mean by "art direction" is an overall, consistent, unique, artistic style. Games can look technically good but lack the style that a good art direction brings. A game might have very realistic graphics, but could end up looking quite boring and indistinguishable from many other games. Some people say that warfare fps games lack art direction -- by trying to be gritty and realistic they end up with a foggy soup of browns and grays.
A good art direction might use exaggerated proportions for characters, or intentional use of colors to convey meaning. A great art direction will make sure that every aspect of the game (songs, sound effects, voices, textures, fonts, even advertisements and websites) add to the feeling of the game. Games that do a great job of conveying mood, atmosphere, or attitude often do so because of a strong art direction. Famous examples of strong art direction: Diablo 1, Team Fortress 2, Shadow of the Colossus.
Well, I'll assume there's a ton of artwork that belongs on the "fantasy core" art no matter what story direction the game takes. Tons of common tile sets and monsters can and should be added.
It might even make sense to keep the first Flare game pretty straightforward -- maybe a Diablo style dungeon crawl with a fixed number of levels in a basic linear order, with a handful of side maps. That's not an exciting first game (especially if the levels aren't yet random) but it's definitely finishable and would be a good first step for the engine.
I've created v0.14 and v0.15 as Milestones in GitHub. Most issues aren't assigned to a milestone; those are just whenever they're done they can be added in.
I do plan to keep at this until a full game is released; in my mind, the engine isn't useful until it's been proven on at least one game.
The good news is that I've gotten lots of code help from plenty of you via GitHub, and I think the engine pieces will come along much sooner than I had planned because of this.
v0.15 Translations will be a MAJOR milestone, and will require a ton of work. Once the project makes it through that milestone, I imagine much of the engine work will be (1) making sure the right parts are moddable, and (2) adding interesting new features. Currently it's hard for me to see much past v0.15 to know what will be the next priority.
I will definitely be focusing on art assets after v0.15, as more art will probably be the main challenge after that.
Don't know if I've done a good job of answering the big question. If you have specific questions I can try to answer those?
I think putting an optional cooldown on powers is a good idea. Definitely makes sense for e.g. something like Quake. I'll add it to the issue list.
I'm not as worried about a ranger having an unfair advantage one-on-one against a melee foe; that's kind of the point. Maybe some behavior numbers can be tweaked to help with this (e.g. increase pursuit chance so the creature doesn't stand there after taking a hit; increase the "take-hit" animation speed so that the creature is free to move sooner).
I'd rather give more enemies optional ranged powers to help with this, e.g. some melee creatures should throw a stun missile (e.g. a Net attack) to help them close in on a ranged hero. Also it helps to mix up creatures in groups. This might be less of an issue when creatures attack in packs rather than one-at-a-time.
It'll probably make sense if mod files completely supercede files from previous mods. So, when opening any data file, look at the bottom of the mod list first. If the file isn't there look at the mod before it. Keep going until the first (core) mod.
Those local overrides can simply be mods too, I think. They can be small mods of only 1 file if necessary.
It could make translation simpler to have e.g. translation files only contain names/descriptions of items and powers; in other words, allow mods to alter parts of files. But those are the easiest-to-translate parts anyway. It'd be harder to separate the translations for events (NPC dialog and map events) because those don't use IDs (those would be harder to work with if unique IDs were necessary).
Anyway. We can always make it better later. Let's plan on this, as part of the v0.15 work required for Translations anyway.
Then if we get to the point where that's holding us back, we can look at allowing mods to change or add data within specific files, instead of completely overriding them.
/mod/fantasycore/ would have all the current sounds/images along with all the current game data files.
/mod/fantasycore_fr/ would probably only have .txt files, maybe some french voice-over files and a translated title screen image.
Then if they wanted fancy weapons they could have /mod/weaponpack/ (or maybe a french version if one exists)
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