annotate docs/artists.rst @ 835:340632d9a444 pyntnclick

Make alert header translatable as well
author Neil Muller <neil@dip.sun.ac.za>
date Tue, 29 Jan 2013 17:45:05 +0200
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1 Artists HOWTO
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2 =============
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3
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4 This is a guide to contributing artwork to Suspended Sentence.
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5
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6 Suspended Sentence is a point-and-click adventure game. It is set on a derelict
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7 spaceship carrying prisoners in cryosleep to a prison planet. The ship has
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8 experienced a catastrophic accident and after drifting for many years the AI
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9 has begun to effect repairs. Some repairs the AI cannot perform itself so it
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10 has been waking the prisoners up one by one to effect repairs. A few such
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11 prisoners have died or gone insane. The adventure starts with the latest
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12 prisoner being awakened from cryo sleep. The AI's name is Jim.
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13
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14 Broadly artwork for the game can be divided into artwork for Scenes, Things and
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15 Items.
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17 Scenes are the background against which all the other action takes place. Each
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18 scene consists primarily of a 24-bit colour, 800x600 pixel image. For example,
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19 our first scene is a room filled with cryogenic chambers.
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21 Things are rendered on top of a particular scene and are used to add animation
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22 and areas for the user to interact with. A Thing might be a door the player can
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23 open, a puddle of dripping water or something for the player to pick up. A Thing
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24 can be any size up to the full size of the Scene and may use an alpha channel
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25 for transparency. For example, the cryochamber scene has individual cryochambers
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26 that can be inspected, a corpse with a titanium prosthetic leg and a door that
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27 needs to be levered open using the prostethic leg.
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29 Items are objects the player has picked up and which can appear in his or her
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30 inventory. Typically Items are picked up by clicking on a Thing. Items require
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31 two different images: an inventory bar icon and a cursor. The inventory bar
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32 icon should be a 50x50 pixel image on a transparent background. The cursor should
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33 be a similar size and will often use the same image as the inventory icon.
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35 Complex Items that the user might need to interact with (for example, to repair
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36 it or change its settings) are handled by associating a Scene with the object. The
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37 Scene background is then an enlarged view of the object.
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39 Our preferred image formats are PNG and SVG. PNGs are what Suspended Sentence
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40 loads images from. SVGs are more of a pain to produce but are convenient for
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41 generating multiple PNGs at different sizes.