Motivation
Creativity is a wonderful thing, but creativity must be constrained by
sound planning and decision-making in order to produce artwork in a
timely fashion. With deadlines to meet and only finite resources
(time and money) to put towards creating content, tradeoffs between
quality and quantity must be made. Your team will have to decide
where to focus your efforts and where to streamline your aspirations.
Given an array of artists with individual creative visions, rational
stylistic decisions must be made in order to unify their combined
effort. Your team will need to make decisions that will guide the
overall visual and aural coherence of your game's content.
Planning is just as important in creating content as it is in any
other aspect of game development. Changing the design of a character
during the concept stage will cost a few hours of time at the
drawing board, while changing the design of a character that has
already been animated will cost you both the weeks that went into the
first revision, as well as the weeks it will take to make the next
revision. Similarly, making technical decisions that will change the
nature of content needed for a game can be very costly if made later
in the development cycle. Switching from MIDI- to OGG-based music, or
switching from bump-mapped to normal-mapped textures can incur a
significant cost in both lost old work and required new work. The
purpose of this assignment is to familiarize your team with some of
the decision making and trade-offs that go into creating content for a
game, so that you will be able to make better decisions earlier in the
content development cycle.
Overview
For this project, you should continue to work with the group that you
formed for the previous project. Each group will be responsible for
identifying, selecting and creating an array of content to be used in
a sprite-based game of their design. You will also be required to
make your artistic decisions explicit by writing a brief document
explaining your decisions.
Your first task will be to write a short statement (100 to 250 words)
describing the "artistic vision" for your game. This is the "soft
plan" for your game's content. Describe the motifs, styles, colors,
sounds and textures in any way you see fit. Feel free to reference
movies, games, places or anything else that may evoke the feel you
wish to capture with your content. Rough sketches of characters or
settings may also be used, but are not required. The most important
thing is that your description is clear enough that, if you were to
hand it to several independently contracted artists, they would all
return with similar work.
Your second task will be to identify all of the assets that you would
need for the full version of your game: sprites, tiles, sound effects,
music, icons, etc. You are to document functional requirements for
these assets (sprite size, number of frames and types of animations,
length of sound loops, etc.) to as much detail as you can, using
ranges of possible values where you are unsure. This is the "hard
plan" for your game's content.
Unfortunately, we will not have time for your team to generate all the
content needed for your game this term. As you will only be
constructing a prototype, your third task will be to select content
from a properly-licensed content library for use in your prototype.
You are to briefly describe how your selections fit your artistic and
functional requirements, as well as justify the use of selections that
fall short of your requirements. In the Resources section below, there are several
libraries that you may use, but feel free to use content from any
appropriately licensed library, so long as you document where these
libraries are from and how they are licensed.
Finally, your team will be required to generate a small amount of
original artwork. Your team will be responsible for creating at least
20 assets for your prototype. This could take the form of a single
sprite (hint: one sprite that can face in four directions and five
frames of animation per direction = 20 frames of animation), or it
could be tiles, icons, sound effects or any combination of at least 20
assets that fit your functional requirements. The artistic quality of
your team's artwork is less important than the fact that the assets
are your team's original creation. Do not turn in any copyrighted
images or third-party work for this part of the assignment.
Details
Your group is responsible for turning in one document containing all
of the following: your statement of artistic vision, your functional
content requirements, your listing of content to be used and
justifications thereof. In addition to this documentation, your team
must also submit the original content that has been created for your
game.
Your statement of artistic vision should be 100-250 words long and
describe the general "look and feel" of your game's content. There is
no specific format that this document must take; your only requirement
is to effectively communicate the "soft" requirements of your game's
content. You may reference existing works (movies, games, etc.) as
inspirational - but if you do be sure to make explicit which aspects
and properties of these works you wish to emulate. You may include
representative descriptions or sketches of specific characters,
environments, interfaces, etc. - but only do so for the purpose of
including an example that will indicate the overall style (the purpose
of this document is not to fully describe the style of the entire
game). You may use any other means of written communication that
unambiguously describes what you wish to artistically achieve - for
instance, you may quote poetry if it evokes a specific enough sensory
experience.
Your functional content requirements should be a full technical
specification, with as much detail as possible, of your game's
content. It is ok if these details are just best-guesses, and it is
ok if you specify ranges instead of specific values. There is no
specific length requirement, as each game will have different content
needs. There is no specific format, but the document must be
organized and readable (prose, spreadsheet, or whatever works). Your
requirements should include information about what sprites, tiles,
sounds, music, images, icons, and other content your game will need.
For each sprite you will need to at least specify its dimensions, the
animations it will need, and the number of frames for each animation.
For each icon, image or tile, you will need to at least specify its
dimensions. For each sound you will need to at least specify sampling
frequency. For each music loop you will need to at least specify loop
length (in seconds, measures, bars or whatever), and format.
Your listing of content selection should pair up every piece of
content listed in your functional requirements with the name of an
asset (a file name, or a library name and sprite name, or etc.) that
you have acquired. The format of this document is again, up to you -
but a spreadsheet might be easiest. The length of this document is
implied by the amount of content your game will need. You may skip
the selection of assets for content that you plan on generating for
this assignment, or you may select "placeholder" assets that you will
use for the few days before your own content is ready.
Your justification of content selection should be 100-250 words long.
It should briefly explain why you chose the assets that you did, as
well as describe the tradeoffs and compromises that went into making
your selections. Be sure to address these topics with respect to both
your "soft" and "hard" requirements.
Finally, the content that your team generates should include 20
"assets" that can be used in GameMaker. For this assignment, count
one image, tile, icon, frame-of-animation, sound-effect, or
measure-of-music as one "asset". Along with your content, please
submit some short inventory (as a .doc, README, or whatever) that
lists the files you are submitting as content, and what each contains.
Submission
One member of each group should submit all materials electronically
via turnin by 11:59pm on Monday, February 7th. Please remember to
put all group members' names on each document.
One member of your group will need to upload the files you are turning in
to their CCC account on one of the CCC machines (ccc1 to ccc10).
While logged into a CCC machine, that member will need to enter the
directory where these files are stored and execute the following:
/cs/bin/turnin submit <course> <assignment> <file1> <file2> ...
where in our case, <course> is id111x, <assignment> is
project2, and <file1> ... are the names of your
documents/assets.
Once done, you should verify that your files have been entered into
turnin by executing the following command:
/cs/bin/turnin verify id111x project2
