Help wanted (artists/programmers)

[Miyuki]

Okay, so this is probably a long shot, but I know that are a lot of artists and programmers in the transgender community, and also a lot of people who are in a similar position to mine, being cursed with having more free time than they know what to do with. Even though I am going to be starting to work as an assisted care worker for my father soon, I'm probably not going to get very many hours, and I would like to be doing something constructive with my remaining free time. There were a few project I was working on, but without anyone else working on them with me, they were just becoming such a soul crushing grind that I was hardly getting anything done on them at all. Much as I hate to admit it, I am bad at self motivation, and I am also a compulsive perfectionist, so whenever I end up doing something on my own it usually ends up taking ten times as long as it should have. It's even worse working on things when I am getting no feedback at all about whether what I am doing is even good or worthwhile. Basically, I'm bad at working alone. But I think the things I was working on were good ideas in principle, so I am just going to post them in the hopes that maybe someone else here might feel the same way.

The first was a horizontal shooting game similar to about a girl who gets tricked by a demon into going into the underworld to find her lost cat. I didn't want to make it just another shooting game, so I was programming an engine using Box2D that would allow you to create levels with interactive physics based entities and animations. I was also going to use the physics engine to create a unique power or objective for every level, like for example a level where you couldn't shoot, but instead had to use a magic force to push enemies away. To give you an idea of the kind of game it was, here is a list of the levels of the underworld you would be exploring:

1. Unironically Happy Land
2. Hell
3. Fear Land
4. The Pit
5. Gluttony
6. Demon's Lair
7. /b/
8. The Void

I really liked the ideas I had for this game, and I think it could be extremely cool game if it were done well, but I didn't get very far because I didn't have an artist to work with, and it was taking me so long to do art I was happy with I realized it would take 10 years for me to finish it all. And I didn't exactly have to money to hire a proper artist, so yea... I would like to get back to this some day, but I really do want to do it well, so I would only do it if there was an artist here that was seriously interested in working on it. But if there is, I would like to work on developing it to the point where we could create a demo for people to see, and then create a kickstarter to try and get it funded so we be able to work on it full time. I would also be happy to accept help with programming, but just so you know the game engine is currently written in D. Like I said, long shot, but a girl can dream right?

The other project might be less of a stretch. This idea is for an educational website that teaches you how to program in Ruby by creating text based adventure games. The thing about programming that I never liked, is that it is in many ways an arcane and obtuse process. Actually knowing the things you need to know to do creative things as a programmer is getting harder than ever, and I wanted to create something easy and accessible that would teach people to program in a way that they would be able to create cool things right from the first lesson. I am a lot further along with this than the previous project, but I could still use some help to get it finished. Right now what I need more than anything is someone who is experienced with Javascript/HTML interface design to help create the editor and tutorial system, because this is a huge area where not much work has been done, and getting the game engine finished is a nightmare as it is (designing something that is simple and obvious to use for a beginner programmer, and also trying to shoehorn everything into a Ruby interpreter which has been compiled from C into JavaScript in order to run in the web browser.)

So if anyone here has the time and feels like they would like to contribute or learn more about either of these projects, let me know. I'll be here, since I pretty much don't have anything better to do.

[Galyo]

I was actually practising my C++ skills before I hit depression again. I hope to start practising again in the near future. Programming is definitely a lot of fun and can be very rewarding.

This projects sounds like a cool idea and I love these types of old school games, though I think my skills as an artist would be more useful. Speaking of art: what kind of style are you going for? I could maybe help you out, but I would have to know more sbout what you expect the end result to look like.

[Miyuki]

I was actually practising my C++ skills before I hit depression again. I hope to start practising again in the near future. Programming is definitely a lot of fun and can be very rewarding.

D is in many ways similar to C++. D was really an attempt to rethink the way C++ did things and to create a language that was more simple to understand and use than C++, but just as fast to run. It has a lot of useful features like garbage collection, each loops, and associative arrays (also sometimes known as hashes) that make it much easier to use than C++ for a lot of things. But due to a general lack of support from library developers, and the somewhat buggy reference compiler, and the lack of good tutorials for learning the language, it's still not very popular. But if you already know C++, it's not too hard to learn D, and you'd probably like using it more too.

This projects sounds like a cool idea and I love these types of old school games, though I think my skills as an artist would be more useful. Speaking of art: what kind of style are you going for? I could maybe help you out, but I would have to know more sbout what you expect the end result to look like.

Have you ever seen the art from the pop'n music games? I was thinking something like that, both because I like the clean simplicity of the style, and because it would be easier to do animations with vector based art. The animation system is actually going to be physics based, meaning that animations aren't so much a definite set of directions as a strong suggestion. So in order to accommodate that, the sprites have to be made like paper puppets, with set joints that can be moved in order to create animations. For an experienced artist, I don't think doing art in this style would be too much of a challenge, although it does require a lot of attention to detail to do well. When you are creating such simple designs, little imperfections tend to stand out more, so your proportions and line work have to be really spot on.

For the backgrounds, I was thinking it would be better to have a more impressionistic style to create visual contrast with the enemies and other sprites. So no harsh outlines, but more of a soft smooth look to everything, with a lot of colors blending together. The background work is probably going to be the hardest thing, because I want to have them done as one continuous panoramic image. Most 2D games use tiles to create backgrounds out of a limited set of visual elements, but my game engine doesn't even use tiles. That's not to say you couldn't reuse visual elements if you wanted to, but how you would do that would be entirely up to you. In fact, I would leave of a lot of how you wanted to do the backgrounds up to you, because I only have a vague idea of what I want them to look like for most of the stages. The most important thing I'm looking for is someone with a lot of creativity who can create unique designs that have both detail and personality without needing too much direction.

I'm going to send you a PM with a few sketches and other things to help give you a better idea of what I'm talking about. The most important thing I want you to know, is that I consider this game a labor of love, and I have very high standards for the way I'd like it to turn out. I'd rather not do it at all than do it in a way that doesn't live up to it's potential. I know that sounds harsh, but I'd rather you know from the start that this is going to require a crazy amount of work if you want to get seriously involved in it (most games do).

[Galyo]

Well, we already discussed a couple of things over IM but it doesn't hurt to go over things some more. XD

Since I'm still a novice programmer / scripter I'll be sticking to C++ for a while to come, until I can honestly say I've grown competent at it. Once that happens I'll have to take a look at D. It sounds interesting from what you described! C++ is a hard pill to swallow as a beginner programmer, but I have to admit I've grown a real liking to it and the syntax has grown on me too.

Like I've said in my message, I'm a fine artist painter and I'm specialized at drawing backgrounds. I'm hesitant to plug my public Facebook art page, but if moderators allow it I can post a link to it where you can view my paintings.

I hope I get to help you out on your project, that would be cool! I've never worked with other trans people before on projects! I'm also very critical of my stuff, so I think I can work with high standards.