Hi. I've been makin' a game using openbor. Why? Cause it's a beat-em up game based around fightin' cute enemies. I'm a zako guy, which means I like hordes of female minions, and I wanted to explore the idea of active weakness rather than passive. Instead of them just having low HP or doing weak attacks, what if they flinched at punches? What if they fell over? What if they would fall to their knees and beg for mercy? I liked that idea a lot, realized I already knew how to do it, and started workin'. I
Basically the entirety of gameplay is art. It's enemy reactions, which are sprites. I made my enemy from an edited base, and she's got like 430 frames in her sheet overall. Mostly cause small things add up. A blink, a head turn, a bounce, it's all an additional frame, and to give enemies life I have variants, so each variant is about 200 or so frames themselves. That's a main character. It's not hard work, but it IS work, and it complicates my options.
Cause I can't make new sprites, man. I don't know how. I like working with sprites because small things and small changes can have a big effect due to the evocative nature of sprite work, which makes creating a fun and reactive enemy easier. Trying to do what Aerisetta did or what some other 2.5d type games did and use 3d models would require far more effort in posing to do something that moving something a pixel can achieve. But I don't know where to go from here.
The way I see it, there's only a few options:
1: Commission artists for sprites
A seemingly easy idea, it runs into a problem where the kind of work I want isn't usually what people do on commission. There's no way I'd be asking for 430 fuckin' frames, so I instead put together a guide from models for what would amount to the 'keyframes' that I'd use to create everything else. But still, those get up there in the 30s and most people tend to only want to do a single sprite or a single animation. While the sprites I want would be relatively small, that doesn't mean they're not hard work that takes a lot of time and skill to make. There's also the question of individual styles and what people would feel comfortable making. Would everyone want to stick to the streets of rage size and style? It feels a bit too small and restrictive, people may want to go up in resolution or try different art styles, and then how would the product compare to other art? However, it'd be easy to track the costs of since it'd be a lump sum.
2:Hire an artist
While this is the most straightforward, its got lots of inherent complications around pay and the type of project it IS. While having a specific artist on hand would allow for consistency, it'd also require consistency from all other art in the project, and at that point things become way more than just making a sprite-sheet. Payment is the real issue here. This may surprise you, but I am not an independently wealthy millionaire who can just hire a pixel artist out of pocket to work on something for a few months or so as a project for a niche community he's part of. If I straight up hired someone, they'd want to get paid and I'd have to find some way to pay them, and now we're thinking of consistent monthy donations or even trying to make a commercial project with a loan, and that gets even more complicated because then we need properly sourced background art and sound and music and we're making a real ass game and listen man that's not something I think I can do, man
3: Cheat
Maybe, somewhere out there, there's some sort of awful AI that can turn my model keyframes into workable sprites. I don't think so, but its possible. I don't want to go this route, because sprite art is a real skill and I want to see it rewarded in a desperate attempt to ward off the chinese slop machines from consuming all art and turning it into commercial products made by computers, but it's one of the few options I've got.
4: Become an artist
This is hard
5: Give Up
This is always an option, and going back to the drawing board with how to do sprites would fit into this category as well.
So I'm stuck. I feel like the idea is solid and the community its aimed at did react positively, but the gameplay IS art and I'm not able to provide that on my own, making this a very difficult hobby project. As porno game people, a lot of your gameplay is art as well. How do you deal with this? What's the best way you've found to get around a problem like this? I'd love to know.
You must be registered to see the links
a proof of concept in... oh god that was May holy shit. It got a positive response from people and I've expanded the combat from there to what I think is an acceptable baseline before I start figuring out the SEX STUFF that Aerisetta has already proved is more than possible. But there's this... fundamental knot that I don't know how to untie.Basically the entirety of gameplay is art. It's enemy reactions, which are sprites. I made my enemy from an edited base, and she's got like 430 frames in her sheet overall. Mostly cause small things add up. A blink, a head turn, a bounce, it's all an additional frame, and to give enemies life I have variants, so each variant is about 200 or so frames themselves. That's a main character. It's not hard work, but it IS work, and it complicates my options.
Cause I can't make new sprites, man. I don't know how. I like working with sprites because small things and small changes can have a big effect due to the evocative nature of sprite work, which makes creating a fun and reactive enemy easier. Trying to do what Aerisetta did or what some other 2.5d type games did and use 3d models would require far more effort in posing to do something that moving something a pixel can achieve. But I don't know where to go from here.
The way I see it, there's only a few options:
1: Commission artists for sprites
A seemingly easy idea, it runs into a problem where the kind of work I want isn't usually what people do on commission. There's no way I'd be asking for 430 fuckin' frames, so I instead put together a guide from models for what would amount to the 'keyframes' that I'd use to create everything else. But still, those get up there in the 30s and most people tend to only want to do a single sprite or a single animation. While the sprites I want would be relatively small, that doesn't mean they're not hard work that takes a lot of time and skill to make. There's also the question of individual styles and what people would feel comfortable making. Would everyone want to stick to the streets of rage size and style? It feels a bit too small and restrictive, people may want to go up in resolution or try different art styles, and then how would the product compare to other art? However, it'd be easy to track the costs of since it'd be a lump sum.
2:Hire an artist
While this is the most straightforward, its got lots of inherent complications around pay and the type of project it IS. While having a specific artist on hand would allow for consistency, it'd also require consistency from all other art in the project, and at that point things become way more than just making a sprite-sheet. Payment is the real issue here. This may surprise you, but I am not an independently wealthy millionaire who can just hire a pixel artist out of pocket to work on something for a few months or so as a project for a niche community he's part of. If I straight up hired someone, they'd want to get paid and I'd have to find some way to pay them, and now we're thinking of consistent monthy donations or even trying to make a commercial project with a loan, and that gets even more complicated because then we need properly sourced background art and sound and music and we're making a real ass game and listen man that's not something I think I can do, man
3: Cheat
Maybe, somewhere out there, there's some sort of awful AI that can turn my model keyframes into workable sprites. I don't think so, but its possible. I don't want to go this route, because sprite art is a real skill and I want to see it rewarded in a desperate attempt to ward off the chinese slop machines from consuming all art and turning it into commercial products made by computers, but it's one of the few options I've got.
4: Become an artist
This is hard
5: Give Up
This is always an option, and going back to the drawing board with how to do sprites would fit into this category as well.
So I'm stuck. I feel like the idea is solid and the community its aimed at did react positively, but the gameplay IS art and I'm not able to provide that on my own, making this a very difficult hobby project. As porno game people, a lot of your gameplay is art as well. How do you deal with this? What's the best way you've found to get around a problem like this? I'd love to know.
