From The Mana World
Revision as of 16:01, 11 September 2005 by Crush (talk | contribs)

In general

  • Don't be afraid to show us your unfinished pieces, we are there to guide and help you through the process.
  • If possible, hang around the #tmwart channel on freenode 24/7.
  • When you're available / doing work on tmw related stuff, please contact me on the previously mentioned channel.
  • We're soon going to have a centralized repository for all the art related stuff where we're going to archive all of your versions: so you can just start to contribute there without the need to track down a dev. The details on the repository and the preferred version numbering are coming soon. EDIT(20050419): Ask me for details, it's up now.
  • Preferred formats: .png and .ogg

Concerning conceptual art

  • You can always come up with new ideas to present to the team. Actually that's preferred and we like that.
  • With conceptual art you might want to define important places, capture the generic athmosphere, look and color scheme of a certain place or define the looks of an important npc.

Concerning tiles

  • We REALLY need a LOT of these, so if you think you can do ANYTHING, please give it a shot.
  • Especially on these actively seek out our attention so we can assign new tasks to you. The fact that we won't contact you personally every day doesn't mean we don't need your efforts.
  • Please keep in mind that a mapper has got only 3 layers: 2 of them are always displayed below players and monsters while the other one is displayed always above. The lowest layer is usually used for ground tiles/walls, and since the limited number of layers, ground tiles should be non-transparent even if this increase a lot the number of tiles in a tileset. Transparent tiles should be only used for objects you can place in different places with different backgrounds such as plants, barrels, ... It is preferrable that cups, and food and whatever else stands on a table is drawn with the table tile below it. Paintings shouldn't have transparent borders, but wall behind them. (if you plan to use for example paintings in different tileset, save them elsewhere as transparent objects and then reapply them to another tile).
  • Although we prefer high quality tiles over low quality ones, please keep in mind that we try to resemble the look of old SNES games. So please try not to make the tiles too realistic. This mean please don't use textures you get from reality, such a picture of a wooden piece and use it for your tiles. We strongly encourage you to manually pixelate every tile and avoid use filters such as blur.



All the images have been taken from the enterbrain tutorial. I suggest every pixel artist to take a look at it since is both a good tutorial and a style reference.

Another very good tutorial in english language about pixel art is the legendary tutorial So You Want To Be A Pixel Artist by Tsugumo.