Messages

I can give you a theme if you really need one for purposes of creativity. I kinda blatantly left this one open so people could be creative and show off their isometric spriting skills, but if the general populace wants me to be more limiting, I'll go ahead and impose some more limits. So how about it? Anyone else who is thinking of joining the competition but is limited by the lack of limitation, let me know. If the majority wants it that way, it shall be done.

And since Radiowaves is being a smartass and finding major faults and/or loopholes in my rules (A good thing, make no mistake), I will only ask that the sprite's creator, if they don't wish to do things in a traditionally isometric fashion, demonstrate how the individual tiles mesh. I understand that this can easily be worked around if the creator decides to just make one enormous isometric tile underneath their object and rub my face in it, but I'll leave it up to the better judgement of the spritist. I said before, I intend not to be overly picky, and if you want to go through the effort to make your own pixeltown, I'd be fine with it, if you could justify it to me as being one sprite.

Sure I would. The only stipulation is that it's isometric. I'm not planning on being very picky.

The difference between isometric sprites and non-isometric is the perspective, essentially. A 26% top-down angle, on a grid, generally not following the rules of vanishing point and horizon. (i.e. the perspective does not change with distance) A great example, if you've played them, is in tactical strategy games like Final Fantasy Tactics or Vandal Hearts. If you're an old-school console gamer, Solstice or even Q-bert are good examples of isometric games.

The size of the object is unimportant, and I didn't stipulate that the sprite had to be of a character. It could be an object, like Big Brother's chess pieces, or any of the props in Darth Mandarb's room. I'd also accept the individual props in Bulought's big room there. What separates this from a background blitz is that even if you release something that equates to a background in many respects, the individual objects should still be placable on a grid, and therefore usable to create other backgrounds.

Remember, a sprite doesn't necessarily mean a character. It's just a standalone, non-static object in a game. If you want to do buildings, or more detailed sections of buildings, feel free. I'd love to see what you make. The only rules I need followed for this edition of the competition is that the objects are isometric, and fit within the color limit.

Good luck!

Thanks for joining in, MoodyBlues! I understand it's a bit of a challenge compared to the more freeform sprite competitions, which is part of the reason I chose it as a topic. It gives people a chance to push their talents a little further within the constraints of a certain set of dimensions. I really hope you get your sprite finished - I'd really like to see what you have!

[Isometric pixels]

Welcome again to the Sprite Jam - hope you all enjoyed the last one; I was pretty fond of the topic, as there was a lot you could do with it. This week, I'd like to give people the opportunity to flex their creative muscles in a slightly less common (in the adventure game circles, at least) environment, so I offer you this week's topic:

Isometric pixels

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what isometric art is, this website offers a pretty comprehensive description of the art form. And if you'd like some inspiration, feel free to have a look at some of the art of our very own, showcased on pixeljoint here, here and here (Apologies for not asking for permission ahead of time).

The rules are simple, and as follows:

Your sprite must be isometric
There is no size limit, but wide or long sprites must be divisible to fit on an isometric grid
The sprite may have a maximum of 16 colors

Otherwise, as long as the sprite fits those three rules, feel free to do whatever you'd like with it. I'm looking forward to seeing what people come up with.

Thanks, everybody. I enjoyed the competition - and I think it was ultimately a pretty good, solid competition. It got off to a slow start, but in my opinion there's no such thing as a bad topic, just bad turnout. Now I can just hope that the topic I start gets some good action going as well.

See you in the next jam!

I hope that it's okay, I interpreted of the 'two-faced' theme more abstractly than some:

The goddess of fire embodies both beauty and fluidity of motion, while also being a force of destruction.

Not to step on TheatrX's toes, but that sprite has some massive artefacts around Chris's body. I've taken the liberty of cleaning the image up. Anyone who wants to use it, this'll save you a little time.



I also plan on entering the competition, if I have a little extra time to devote to it.

A perfectly normal strawberry. (8 colors)

Sounds good to me. A little friendly competition is rarely a bad thing, so feel free to kick away. But there's a lot of talent here to measure up to, so you're gonna have to work pretty hard to put your money where your mouth is, so to speak. Either way, good to see you've started using lower-case letters and are settling in to the forums a little. Looking forward to seeing what you've got. Oh, and this whole thing should've probably been a part of this thread. The more rules you follow here, the less sarcastic the general forum replies are going to be.

Good luck.

Welcome to the forums, Ray-O. Hope you enjoy your stay here. If you have some screenshots and a plot worked out, I'd be interested in seeing a thread on in the GiP forum. Feel free to turn off your caps-lock, and look around the forums a bit. Maybe join a competition to hone your skills, or read up on the latest build?

Anyway, have fun - looking forward to seeing your game.

After the recent Sprite Jam, I had an odd idea for a game, so here's a promotional image for it.
The title of the game, tentatively, will be Broken - hailing to the title of the jam that got me started.



I wonder if anyone recognizes the two characters in the background? - heavily inspired by a certain series of music videos.
Note, this is still in infancy in the purest sense of the word. Aside from story, this is *all* I have to show for the project.

[Markbilly's Handmade Blowtorch]

Alrighty, the time has come to pass judgement upon all who have participated in this competition. I'm happy to have at least three of you to blather at - and thanks for humoring me and joining in. Since there's so few of you (though I intended to do it regardless), I'm going to critique a bit as well as announce our winner.

So, we'll do them in order:


Markbilly's Handmade Blowtorch
This one is a touch difficult to tell at a glance what you're looking at. I recognized after reading what it was a tank on the right side, and what I think are some tubes, but I was a little confused. Still, it looks like it'd be fun to use, and sure you can hand-make a blowtorch, if you're industrious enough. I like the concept, and as you dropped down your torch before Mad, that's also commendable. If I might also offer some artistic constructive criticism, the image would look a bit smoother if you removed some of those double-pixels. All in all, though - a groovy piece of sprite inventory.


Mad's DIY Blowtorch
Another blowtorch! I was a little suprised to see that 66% of our entries were implements of burnination. Still, I reckon that they're far-removed from one another enough to be considerable as completely different things. Where Markbilly sprited up a machine, you shoved a giant hamster drinking trough up a stuffed ant-eater's rectum and filled it with volatile liquids. Who could ask for anything more? Now, the sheer volume of sprites here really helps to make the post stand out, but it's one entry per jam - and by that right, I'm considering the final product (inv23.png) to be your actual entry, and the others just a prelude thereto. The elegant and simple use of color, and the consistent inventory item style definitely contributes. Very well done.

and finally,


gASK's Human Liver
That's definitely an original piece of inventory right there. Though I think I've seen various body parts in games before, I'm certain I've yet to see a human liver. Now, this is another example of something I sure as hell wouldn't have been able to tell had I not seen what it was (But that kinda stands to reason with a chunk of meat, such as it is). I also dig the idea of a medical game (though I seem to remember that Sierra released a medical game of some sort - anybody else?). Considering the subject material, I'd have to say you did a pretty good job.

Now, it's time for the hard part - deciding objectively on a winner.

From an artistic, and entertainment value point of view, I'm thinking Mad deserves this one. Thank you all for entering the competition, and I hope to see the rest of you in Mad's, when he's got it going.

Congrats, Mad!

Honestly, I can see where you're coming from, Esper, but I think that you're falling into the trap that a lot of people do when they experience a sense of nostalgia due to something like a cartoon that they remember watching enthusiastically during their childhood. I'd be willing to say that every generation after advancing into adulthood probably hates the shows geared to the younger generation in the exact same way - My parents would never go anywhere near the living room when my brother and I would watch Inspector Gadget or Captain N, Droids, Transformers, Ninja Turtles - that whole Saturday morning lineup, because my parents believed that they were ridiculous.

We (in general terms) grew up exposed to the age of heavily diversified and serialized cartoons, cartoon spinoffs and an almost unforgiving lack of plot coherence. I recently watched, with some friends from my previous job, the He-Man first season DVD, and although I enjoyed it, I knew when I watched it that it sucked. The plots essentially made no sense, the characters were shallower than a pothole on a newly paved road, and the whole thing was obviously little more than a thinly veiled series of advertisements for action figures, which children (Like myself) would beg their parents for endlessly. I can't begin to imagine how many Masters of the Universe, GI Joe or Ninja Turtle figures I had - even the same character with one or two vague alterations to the body - a new color scheme, a chestplate that rotates to show battle damage, and so on and so forth.

We see these new adaptations of our childhood favorites and hate them because they aren't always one-hundred percent faithful to the cartoons they'rebased on, but then again, the Saturday morning TMNT cartoon wasn't based off of the Eastman/Laird graphic novels, either - the first movie was. Essentially what it all boils down to is: What is popular with children today?

You said something that makes a lot of sense:

The cartoons for kids in the 80's were great. The cartoons for young adults in the 90's were great. The cartoons for adults in the 2000's are great.

That's because they're our generation: The people making the cartoons for adults now are the kids that were watching Garfield and Friends and Ren & Stimpy in their childhoods just like us, who have grown up just like us. So it stands to reason that that would be exactly the way it works.

I don't mind really if it isn't on the list. I put the link there to give people some inspiration, but feel free to make any item you like, so long as it hasn't already been in a game. Do go ahead and add it to the thread, though.

I can't see why people wouldn't like it - it showed some great innovation, and damned if the soundtrack and graphics weren't awesome-licious. I'm all with ProgZ with that one. Gladiator Quest is one of my faves, even if I'm not even remotely hardcore enough to have played it through to the end. Not to mention that it was made in one week. I'd planned on entering that one, but I suck.

So, to keep on track, I'd have to say:

Gladiator Quest,
The Yahtzee Trilby series
Bestowers of Eternity (Or what there was to see in the demo)
The Apprentice Series
And for some reason, I still love "Alien Rape Escape". I think it's 'coz I've had to explain that it didn't belong in my porn folder because it wasn't actually porn no small number of times.

[Things that haven't been inventory items... yet]

Good day, boys and girls, and welcome to another edition of "The Sprite Jam". I am your host, SpacePirateCaine, and I am here to present this week's topic. So without further ado, here it is:

Things that haven't been inventory items... yet

I want to see some new and interesting inventory items: Stuff that hasn't been combined or pixel-hunted before in a currently-released game. Go ahead and take a look through this thread in the Popular threads index and choose one item from the list that truly hasn't been in a game yet, and turn it into a sprite of max 50x50 dimensions, 256 colors. If you think that there's something else that deserves to be sprited up, that you haven't put on the list, make your sprite, and add it to the list. But I want it to be something new and interesting.

The competition will run from the moment of this posting until midnight, March 25th, Japan time. Good luck to everyone who enters the competition, and I'm looking forward to seeing a good turnout this time.

Ready? ...go!

I can't ignore the fact that completely from an aesthetic perspective, Angelina Jolie has a great body. Even my girlfriend has openly admitted to 'loving that body' when we went to see Mr. and Mrs. Smith. She's a very attractive woman, but she strikes me as a bit "Not all there" at times. That could easily be the usual patented 'actor-crazy' acting up, though. As far as T&A are concerned, she gets pretty high marks.

And I think that Brad Pitt is hot, speaking of those two. I aspire to that level of hot, honestly, though I know that's pretty damned tough. He's been doing a series of ads here in Japan for SoftBank cell phones that prove that a man that looks good in a suit can't go wrong.

And then there's Sean Connery. Enough said, I think.

However, I find this thread to be pretty western-centric so far. So I'm gonna mix it up a tad and throw out a few actresses from this side of the Pacific, and see if we can't decentralize this thread a little bit. I love women from all over the world, so all of the rest of you in those non-American countries, let's see what you've got! I think that Nakatani Miki is damned attractive. She has a great personality, and a nice body. And though some think of her as little more than a rack with arms and legs, MEGUMI (Of Yellow Cab) is also pretty hot. I really like her face, and she's got a great sense of humor - and is a geek, to boot. Not sure I ever want to hear that CD, though.

And Ken Watanabe. Oh man, he's awesome. I wouldn't call him beautiful - he's balding and saltier than fresh fish, but he has some charsima. It oozes from his pores.

It's been ages since I even looked at the AGS forums - I really like the idea of this Jam, so thought I'd enter.


Ariana Shaw was an actress - she starred in numerous films and television shows in her teens and was respected and idolized by girls all over the country for her beauty and her charm. Hard work and a strict schedule caused her to have to prioritize, and she chose the fame over family and friends, who eventually began to disappear.

However, as she began to age, her looks weren't quite enough, and her popularity started to fade. Over time, like many once-great actors, she turned to drugs to fill the gap left by the stress of losing her following. One night, doped up on heroin, she made a tearful phone call to one of her few remaining friends. Her final words, before she pulled the trigger, were "I was beautiful once".

[BaRoN]

Well, the date for final entries has come and gone, and I'm happy to say that the contest was a good one - I tried to make a sprite that was small and simple enough to animate easily, while leaving enough room for the imagination. Everyone came up with some great ideas on how to bring my little creature to life, and I think that overall the contest was successful. Now, I would like to declare a winner, and critique the different animations in the process:

It was obvious that BaRoN put a whole lot of time and effort into the animation of my little bird creature attempting its first flight, and the movement was both fluid and memorable - I have no idea where the parachute came from, but it was a nice touch. The only thing I would've liked to see is it loop, but that's just me. I proudly declare it the winner of the competition.

Following closely in second is KhrisMUC's funny and cute animation of the creature sneezing. The movement is fluid, and well executed, and for a first animation competition entry, it's a good one. Impressive work, and something I'll be looking forward to seeing more of in the future.

For its smoothness of movement, and simplicity, I think Social Reasoner deserves the bronze. There wasn't much going on in the picture, but it gets the job done, and looks good in the process. Great work.

SSH's 'evil thing' animation made me laugh. I was expecting at least one entry with violence from a cute little creature, and he delivered - and well. Sharp, bloody teeth and good work on expression in limited space worked wonders. Awesome stuff. I would've liked to have seen a few more interim frames, but no complaints.

For something whipped up while the baby sleeps, Tocsik's entry did its job and well. The explosion could've used some more work, and I generally prefer original sprites to edits, but the concept is funny (It does looks a bit balloonesque, doesn't it?) and original.

And neelhound's 'bird-like-thing versus shark' animation is decent, despite the lack of frames and choppiness of animation. I assume he's using a more limited animation program, which also seems to severely mess with the color pallete of the images. I'd like to see some more work from you, neelhound - you have imagination and potential, and those should be exercised.


Well done, everybody. I'm honored to have seen all the entries to my little competition, and henceforth label BaRoN as the winner. Great job, BaRoN! Looking forward to seeing the next animation competition.

Congratulations, BaRoN!