# of Artists

[Dunezone]

What is the usual number of artist(s) that worked Maniac Mansion,DOTT,any Lucas Arts Game or King's Quest?

[Meowster]

This is an interesting question, and I also would like to know what programs they used and how they went about creating the backgrounds. However, very little information is supplied. I tried emailing the people that worked on MI1 but they're insane! By they I mean Tim Schafer.

It's kind of hard to figure out from the credits, as they're not the most reliable source of information... there are 3 people listed under Additional Artwork, and 1 person listed under additional design... and Everybody Else at Lucasarts listed under Additional Additional Design....

MI1
Garry Winnick.
Steve Purcell
Mike Ferrari
Mike Egbert


MI2
BACKGROUNDS BY
Steve Purcell
Sean Turner
James Dollar
Peter Chan
ANIMATION BY
Micheal McLoughlin
Sean Ahern
Steve Purcell
Sean Turner
Ken Macklin
Collette Michaud
Peter Chan


MI2 would appear to have a significantly larger team, which makes sense as it's larger, has more animations, backgrounds etc.,.

The MI1 team is very small, with most credits going to those at the start of the game, and most of the ending credits being in-jokes. In reality, probably only four of those people actually worked on the animation and backgrounds.

MI1 being earlier (and having crapier graphics) has less people. I would halve the number of artists working on MI1 for every few years you go back... until you start getting 0.14 artists working on a game....

For Maniac Mansion, I would guess only 1 or 2 artists. The backgrounds were practically not shaded and stuck to quite strict perspectives. For Sierra games I would say the same (Early ones such as KQ1 I mean)

[Dunezone]

Its very interesting to know what tools they used because you can tell then what is made by which tools.

[Miez]

I know that Fate of Atlantis had one artistic designer, and three people that actually moved their mouses about and clicked all the pixels into existence. I also remember reading somewhere that they used DPaint (256 colour PC version) as their main tool.

[BOYD1981]

weren't the monkey island backgrounds painted onto big canvases then scanned ?
i know a lot of pc software developers used DPaint, id software (boo!) used it to make the textures and skins for all their games up until Quake3 when they employed a vegetable powered poo to make lots of grey and red textures, whereas in Quake they employed something grey and red to make lots of poo textures...
i think a lot of the old amiga adventures would have used either DPaint or Personal Paint for the backgrounds then just been ported to pc for the pc version, the really old pc games probably had graphics coded or used ANSI or something, i don't know of any old pc paint packages other than DPaint...

[scotch]

I want to know exactly how they did the CMI backgrounds, it's obviously penciled first.. not sure how the coloured them and what they used to reduce the colours..
It'd be useful to know, the art I'm doing atm is most similar to CMI.

[Meowster]

CMI were first sketched and then scanned into a computer for cleaning and coloured in a paint program.

I think LCR was done on canvas and scanned in, but what about other adventure games? Dpaint only does so much. That said, the most recent versions were never ported to PC. I have the 1985 version, which is older than me. And I am doing graphics with it.  For a game. And it's older than me. It's the same age as Microsoft. And a bit younger than Bill Gates.

[Jimi]

Dpaint........that does sound old.  :o

[BOYD1981]

well, you could get an amiga or an emulator, get Delux Paint 4 or 5 (if they made a 5), do the art in that and then use CrossDOS to get the files to your pc if you're using a real amiga, i'm not sure how you'd do it if you used an emu though, i loved DPaint3 (4 was kinda too 1337 for my A600, especially in HAM mode)...

[Miez]

well, you could get an amiga or an emulator, get Delux Paint 4 or 5 (if they made a 5), do the art in that and then use CrossDOS to get the files to your pc if you're using a real amiga, i'm not sure how you'd do it if you used an emu though, i loved DPaint3 (4 was kinda too 1337 for my A600, especially in HAM mode)...

You could definitely do that: use WinAUE or Fellow - two kickass Amiga emulators. But, why not just use PSP or Photoshop? It sounds like a lot of extra work, with no extra result :|

[Necro]

Lol HAM mode....

I still have 2 Amiga's , And even with my HUGE memory upgrade of 512k Deluxe paint 4 was Painfully slow compared to Deluxe Paint 3 that just plain ruled...

Anyone remember the animations on the art disk of deluxe paint, the crying face and the waterfall, they ruled!

[MachineElf]

I read somewhere a document by the lead designer of CMI where he wrote exactly how they worked with the backgrounds. Don't remember where though but I think I got the link from someone around here. It was probably one and a half year ago or so though.

[Miez]

If you people are really interested I can go on an exploratory journey into all my old "Amiga Format" and "Amiga User" magazines - I remember there being some articles about the artwork of the LucasArts games.

[Meowster]

The reason I'm using Dpaint and other ancient programs:

1. So that when I'm walking hand in hand with Tim Schafer up the stairs toward the elevator that leads to the heavenly offices of Doublefine in years to come, I can chat merrily with the old pros about how glad I was when Dpaint 4 was released, or how the gradient tool was vastly overused by many game developers at the time...

2. To get a completely old look. The more sweat and blood that goes into each picture for that game, the less likely I am to skimp and save time.

3. Do the following: Load up Dpaint. Turn on EURYTHMICS, TOM PETTY, DURAN DURAN or AHA. Immerse yourself in the 80's Aroma.
This is the closest I will ever get to time travelling.

[Miez]

Speaking of gradient fills - DPaint had some really usefull ones, as opposed to PhotoShop. DPaint's gradient fills could follow the inside of a shape, making lovely 3d-ish blobs and stuff. Ah ... so cool ...
[Mies puts on some OMD]

[Dunezone]

I have DPaint V1.0 and the Gradient feature it has is awesome compared to the photoshop version. I really dont use it since its so old but maybe V3 or 4 is better.

[Ben]

Were 3 and 4 ever available for the PC? I can't seem to find anything later than 2e.

Maybe I'll just have to go and find me one of them emmulators.

[Gilbert]

No ben, the latest version was 2e. So that's why some ppl made Grafx2.

[BOYD1981]

another really cool thing about DPaint on amiga were the mirrored brushes, you set the ammount of brushes and one of the two symmetry modes (one was like kaleidascope kinda effect, where the brushes do the opposite to eachother, or you can make them follow each other, which was cool for drawing flowers and stuff) DPaint just oozed functionality, i used to make custom levels for Worms with it...
Personal Paint was also kind of cool but you really needed an A1200 to use it properly, i remember making my own fonts in ppaint...
did you know that Paintshop Pro is actually made by the same people that did Delux Paint? (i'm not too sure on that, could be Personal Paint, i just remember seeing something on .tv about it...)
i also had this other cool prog called Fanta Vision which was kinda like what i'd describe as the amiga version of Flash...
i actually forgot what else i was going to say...

[Gilbert]

Fantavision? I remember it, but not teh Amiga version, I was using the Apple II version, and it's more colourful than that PC version.