A Life in Hell
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Registered: May 2002
Posts: 204 |
Game Over(view) graphics, music, oh my!
It's a little known fact that over the past couple of years, we've actually had a few people who were ostensibly the go(v) staff - maybe one day we should add a "game over(view) staff" entry ala other diskmags - but that's not the point, it's the usual symptom of a disk magazine. The hard core go on deluding themselves that people are reading, while the others promise big but never deliver. I can relate to them, since I have been at various times in my life one who never submits on time/at all. But my past is not what is here for discussion today :).
This is a different kind of cry for help. We are really behind the eight ball right now (yes, I know that we are considered to be _always_ behind the eight ball, but I mean more than usual), and not only are we running behind on the writing but we have also run out of friends to beg and, temporarily, time to create art ourselves on top of also writing the magazine - hence we now find ourselves here begging for music and, more urgently, logos.
Music is easy - the usual shite, $1000-$2400ish. We've used up to $2800 before, but it depends on how mcuh text is in the issue. We'll certantly take it and use it on a smaller issue to hide the pathetically small amount of text which we write.
The logos are slightly more complicated since they are made of sprites :). But in order to keep things simple, I will tell you the two formats that we need logos in right this moment (ignore everything in graphics if you are easily confused :):
- Hires, Five colours - one of which must be blue. Three of those colours (of your choice) will interlace (since they are in multicolour sprites, for the tech geeks. It is actually formed by overlaying a two hires sprites on two multicolour sprites for each 24 lines. This means that, yes, you can change 5 of the 6 colours at the 24 x-pixel mark if you wish to get complicated, or change three of the six colours ever 21 y-pixel mark. But currently our importer does not handle this case, and so I'll need to write a little more code to do that, or hardcore :-p).
- Multicolour res, Six colours - again, one must be blue. (for the tech geeks again, this is formed by overlaying two x-expanded hires sprites on the two multicolour sprites).
These can be important from a whole bunch of formats - I personally recommended to the original people I asked to draw the hires mode in an IFLI editor on the c64, and the lowres mode in a FLI editor. And at one point I actually wrote the IFLI (gunpaint) -> spritemode convertor. But if I can suck the data out of ram, it's all good.
However, the current logo was imported through an even simpler process than that - it was pixelled in some PC paint program who's name I forget in the five colours. And since we already have the software for that, there is no reason you can't do that. Note that we _don't_ have software to "wire jpegs" to this mode, so they must literally be five/six/sixteen colour gif images - which I'd imagine any pixel generator would generate.
Our biggest non-writing contributor, btw, is Bud/WOW who has not only done the logos for 15 of the 23 issues so far, but who also game up with the name - which is much more, uhm, refined than loscha (the only other contributor to actually complete any of the articles he wrote! unfortunatly, he lost interest in the c64 and left, though he didn't bother to tell me at the time. it made me sad.) and my original idea of "Game Slut Monthly" :-p.
Thanks in advance, guys.
-- jj
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