Love the idea, and I’ll definitely have to have a go:
If I have to choose I’ll take coding part.
So, with the donations the artists will be paid, and the developers are expected to do it for free. What’s up with that mindset?
[quote]and we’d like to give away prizes for those who win the competition.
[/quote]
still the artists will be paid.
I think there a prizes for winners of both phases. I guess they may need to commission some artwork for the first phase to fill in submission gaps as the second phase is rather dependent on the art generated in the first.
Also I think it somewhat matches the differing mindsets of coders/artists, in my experience artists seem very protective of their work and feel they must be compensated for its use. Programmers on the other hand, tend to have difficulty convincing people to use their code.
While I agree with your post, I have to make clear that there are three phases in this contest:
- Artists
- Coders
- Result
It makes no sense to only fund phase 1, as phase 2 is equally important to the Result.
The sad fact is coders are a dime a dozen, while good artists who produce a consistent set of assets fitting a given specification are hard to find on the cheap. I should have gone into art … probably would have got me laid more too.
There, FTFY :persecutioncomplex:
It’s true though that regardless of the skill of the coder, it will probably ‘just work’, so nobody cares about the excellent code quality – while excellent graphics quality gets all the praise.
Oh sure, on balance you get what you pay for. There’s still a lot more halfway-decent coders out there who will code solely for the fun of it, whereas with artists on the same model, you’ll have to make do with whatever random assemblage of stuff they throw onto DeviantArt and trying to turn that into game assets. And it’s way easier to fix code than art.
But most people can judge art than judge code.
The way I read it is that there are three phases, but not Riven’s.
- Produce style guide, with commissioned artists. Paid work
- Art contest. Has prizes
- Game contest. Has prizes
The style guide is done (an interesting read) and the art phase has begun. Already a ton of useful stuff.
Looks interesting. The art phase finishes end of this month, and the coding phase runs through july. I think only the initial style guide art got paid, which is reasonable, in order to have something half decent to get things going. Something like the Zelda (2D) games looks appropriate, probably as a Java applet using Java2D. One slight wibble: I would prefer 3/4 view isometric to top-down. The main problem though these days though is time. Maybe.
Looks interesting, but they could basically replace the style guide with “follow the style from Secret Of Mana with 32x32 tiles”.
Style guide:
Secret Of Mana:
http://i2.listal.com/image/423097/600full-secret-of-mana-screenshot.jpg