Open Game Art and the Liberated Pixel Cup

The website http://opengameart.org/ is dedicated to the sharing of art, music, and sound assets (under various Creative Commons licenses) for use in games. Included as part of the Open Game Art site is the Liberated Pixel Cup, a set of free for use game assets (even commercially! Though alterations must be released under the same license) that include a style guide and plenty of starter assets for games that use a 32x32 tile-size and NPC base size.

Granted, many of you may use the OHR and thus some of the assets are the wrong size or have too many frames, but the site is dedicated to sharing artwork of games - you could find backdrops or assets that you can resize and use, sound effects, music; likewise, you can share the work you've made for the OHR for everyone else to use. It's win-win for everyone involved, since it gives the game artist some exposure, and the game designer some assets.

Of particular interest to pixel artists from the Liberated Pixel Cup is the style guide: if you're still learning pixel art, or you like to get all the information you can, the style guide has some great tips that work even when you're not working with their art style, as well as many links for information at the end of the article here: http://lpc.opengameart.org/static/lpc-style-guide/styleguide.html

Who knows, maybe having the assets on hand may be all that's needed to spur people into plotscripting their own custom battle systems in OHR? I remember the days of doing that, and that was back when we made our sprites out of maptiles and NPCs, before slices and images and all this fancy new tech.

Give it a browse, and tell your game developer friends about the site - at the very least, we can spread the option of a game-artists creative commons to anyone who would use or participate!

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I... I still exist... somewhere.

Come join us on irc.esper.net in channel #slimesalad for help, chat, and general fun! We love company.

So you're promoting the website and also the style guide? That's good, I just ask because I had the experience of reading your message and thinking "yep, that's all good.. now what exactly is the overall message here?" I still don't know, so perhaps you are being a little too indirect?


Incidentally, you can use the liquid rescale plugin for GIMP to cope with wrong-sized tiles pretty easily, as long as you're willing to process each tile individually.

For example, I
1. Took this 32x32 source tile from OGA:

2. Invoked 'Liquid rescale' from the Layer menu.
3. Set the image Width to 20 (Height automatically matches it)
4. Click OK
5. 20x20 shaped profit:

Great tip, I'll look at that resize extension tonight, it seems pretty useful and maybe I can create an extension-...extension to let it work on tiling subsections.

The purpose of the post is to let people know about their existence, give a short summary, and then suggest they at the least share about the site with other game developers in the hopes of increasing their userbase and providing shared goodies for all. (I'm not affiliated with their site, I just find them a useful resource.)

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I... I still exist... somewhere.

Come join us on irc.esper.net in channel #slimesalad for help, chat, and general fun! We love company.

Yeah, that'd be pretty cool . Probably you'd want to

1. Use Python-Fu (or alternatively, Script-Fu) to script the entire process.
2. Create a new layer to hold the scaled tileset. Adjust the image canvas size to match it.
3. Extract each tile from the original tileset layer into an individual layer using the GIMP PDB functions gimp-image-select-rectangle, gimp-edit-copy, gimp-edit-paste, gimp-floating-sel-to-layer
4. Invoke Liquid rescale in non-interactive mode on it via the batch-gimp-lqr PDB function, for each layer you created
5. Reassemble the individual scaled layers into it by using gimp-layer-set-offsets to position each layer in the right cell of the grid, then finally flattening the image using gimp-image-flatten

Just to clarify why Liquid Rescale works much better than nearest-neighbour: when scaling, it tries to preserve the key features of the image.

I quite agree that OGA is a good resource, I think I've promoted it here myself before

Hi Minnek, nice to hear from you again.

Newbie Power told me long ago that he was going to be paid to draw some of the 'starter kit' art for this contest (which the artists entering the actual contest would imitate in style).

But last time I checked, the LPC hadn't started yet. So I'll go add it as a resource to the wiki now. Wonderful.

In future I want to add support for arbitrary tile sizes to the engine.

This is true, although my contributions weren't what were imitated in the end (in fact they recommended against using my tiles as example).

Ouch. Any reason in particular they didn't want your tiles? Were they looking for a different style?

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I... I still exist... somewhere.

Come join us on irc.esper.net in channel #slimesalad for help, chat, and general fun! We love company.

I didn't say they didn't take my tiles (and one game in the coding portion of the contest did use them), I said that the participants in the art contest weren't imitating those particular ones.