Mercurial > boomslang
comparison docs/artists.rst @ 45:a0ab7cea67fc
Outline for artists.
| author | Simon Cross <simon@simonx> |
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| date | Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:32:58 +0200 |
| parents | 7517a3cc06e7 |
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| 44:79062a225703 | 45:a0ab7cea67fc |
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| 1 Artists HOWTO | 1 Artists HOWTO |
| 2 ============= | 2 ============= |
| 3 | 3 |
| 4 How to contribute art to Boomslang. | 4 This is a guide to contributing artwork to Suspended Sentence. |
| 5 | |
| 6 Suspended Sentence is a point-and-click adventure game. It is set on a derelict | |
| 7 spaceship carrying prisoners in cryosleep to a prison planet. The ship has | |
| 8 experienced a catastrophic accident and after drifting for many years the AI | |
| 9 has begun to effect repairs. Some repairs the AI cannot perform itself so it | |
| 10 has been waking the prisoners up one by one to effect repairs. A few such | |
| 11 prisoners have died or gone insane. The adventure starts with the latest | |
| 12 prisoner being awakened from cryo sleep. The AI's name is Jim. | |
| 13 | |
| 14 Broadly artwork for the game can be divided into artwork for Scenes, Things and | |
| 15 Items. | |
| 16 | |
| 17 Scenes are the background against which all the other action takes place. Each | |
| 18 scene consists primarily of a 24-bit colour, 800x600 pixel image. For example, | |
| 19 our first scene is a room filled with cryogenic chambers. | |
| 20 | |
| 21 Things are rendered on top of a particular scene and are used to add animation | |
| 22 and areas for the user to interact with. A Thing might be a door the player can | |
| 23 open, a puddle of dripping water or something for the player to pick up. A Thing | |
| 24 can be any size up to the full size of the Scene and may use an alpha channel | |
| 25 for transparency. For example, the cryochamber scene has individual cryochambers | |
| 26 that can be inspected, a corpse with a titanium prosthetic leg and a door that | |
| 27 needs to be levered open using the prostethic leg. | |
| 28 | |
| 29 Items are objects the player has picked up and which can appear in his or her | |
| 30 inventory. Typically Items are picked up by clicking on a Thing. Items require | |
| 31 two different images: an inventory bar icon and a cursor. The inventory bar | |
| 32 icon should be a 50x50 pixel image on a transparent background. The cursor should | |
| 33 be a similar size and will often use the same image as the inventory icon. | |
| 34 | |
| 35 Complex Items that the user might need to interact with (for example, to repair | |
| 36 it or change its settings) are handled by associating a Scene with the object. The | |
| 37 Scene background is then an enlarged view of the object. | |
| 38 | |
| 39 Our preferred image formats are PNG and SVG. PNGs are what Suspended Sentence | |
| 40 loads images from. SVGs are more of a pain to produce but are convenient for | |
| 41 generating multiple PNGs at different sizes. |