I have some questions and, while it sounds blunt, there's not much point in me waffling.
1) What to do with SVGs? It would feel wrong to rasterise them all. Stick them in a ZIP?
2) Speaking of which, are there any plans to allow people to upload SVG spritesheets directly to the site? The browser compatibility is there.
3) Should JPEGs ever be treated differently, or just spritesheet them up into a PNG as usual?
4) What about animations? Would an animated GIF for an icon be appropriate, or too distracting?
5) Would images included with a game that aren't part of the actual gameplay experience, such as concept art, be appropriate to upload?
6) Is there any cutoff as to what counts as a sound and what counts as music? e.g. duration or complexity (would more of a jingle still count as music?)
P.S. Your "remove attachment" button submits the post instead of removing the attachment. >:(
I'll give answers to a few of these:
3) JPG's should be converted to PNG's.
4) I typically don't recommend animated GIF icons since it's not something you see on the site all that often, unless there's a really good reason to do it.
5) Only if said concept art is accessible within the game itself
6) Jingles count more as sound effects if they don't loop and are a low enough length IMO.
Seems my judgement has been okay so far then. Today I saw some animated icons on the homepage and I'm not too sure on them. If no-one else is hot on GIFs, I won't bother as it's more effort anyway.
The art I have gets opened within a web browser (local HTML files), so I guess I won't upload it. It's interesting, but anyone who purchased (or... ahem... freely downloaded) the game in question will be able to easily access it anyway.
I guess I'll have to wait for a staff member to say what the SVG situation is. Mostly games seem to stick with raster graphics, but vector graphics are often used in Flash games especially. I'm now also wondering if the sprites in Flash animations may be of interest to anyone, but somehow I don't feel that would fit on this website due to not being video games.
I think i remember a user named Carpaccio who had managed to rip most of the graphics from Castle Crashers, and he tried to ask much the same question about how uploading vectorial graphics would work
I can't find the old thread though
And searching on TSR, there is no castle crashers game page, so i imagine the negotiation in that old thread didn't end up being fruitful...
wish you luck !
I'll try to address these but I'd like some feedback from other staff members as I don't remember 100% what we had ultimately decided on with some of them.
1) If that's how they're originally stored, zipping them most likely makes sense but I'm not too sure on this one specifically and I'd like to hear other takes on it.
2) No plans currently as they're not overly common nor are they quite as user friendly to work with (for most).
3) If they were originally stored as JPEGs, zipping them as is should be fine but I'm iffy on this one too as a sheet is more useful and there is no quality loss when converting to PNG if done correctly. On the other hand, preserving the original formats is preferred so I'd like to hear feedback here as well.
4) Small animations used infrequently are okay but we typically don't like to see too many of them as they can get distracting. If having the icon animated is needed to properly show its content or really enhances the sheet in some way, go for it. Otherwise, leave it static.
5) Definitely. We have plenty of unused content up on the site. It does not have to be accessible through normal means but should be labeled as unused if you can't find it without digging through the files.
6) We don't have a length cutoff but small jingles are still considered music as far as we're concerned. Something like the puzzle complete sound in Zelda would be fine to upload but a short jingle from a commercial playing on a TV wouldn't. If in doubt, just leave it out. We don't want to step on any toes when it comes to soundtracks.
(06-03-2019, 11:42 AM)Petie Wrote: [ -> ]1) If that's how they're originally stored, zipping them most likely makes sense but I'm not too sure on this one specifically and I'd like to hear other takes on it.
5) Definitely. We have plenty of unused content up on the site. It does not have to be accessible through normal means but should be labeled as unused if you can't find it without digging through the files.
Well I'm not sure they're originally stored as SVGs in the SWFs, but they're certainly vectors and the output from JPEXS looks identical to in-game. I'll upload the extra content but leave vectors for now.