In past discussions,
difficulty in attracting artists for collaborations has been cited as a factor in why simple little puzzle games dominate the NES homebrew scene. So I hereby propose a new forum in Category:NES / Famicom called "NES Graphics", in hope of attracting pixel artists to the NES scene and letting people already in the NES scene help each other overcome programmer-art syndrome. Topics would include graphic techniques and tools. (Compare "Graphics" in "Multimedia and Design" section on
GBAdev.)
I'd like to hear your thoughts on this idea and gain a consensus before putting on my admin hat and making it.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
Great, that makes a lot of sense, considering that we have a music forum and all.
I take it it would not cover game physics, collision, etc.? If you include those, you've basically got a NES Game Programming sub-forum, minus sound. Either way, sounds like a good split. That leaves the plenty of other non-graphic topics for the NESdev sub-forum.
blargg wrote:
I take it it would not cover game physics, collision, etc.?
I imagine that any programming discussion in the new sub-forum would be related to animations, effects (raster or otherwise), things like that. The things you mentioned are part of the game logic, and should be discussed in the NESDEV sub-forum.
I'm not sure what to expect of the new sub-forum though. Whether it will be more visual or more technical remains to be seen.
Awesome! This is a great addition, and I will probably spend a great deal of my time reading what people post in this sub-section
. Will we be able to post techniques here for creating graphical effects in this forum? That might be a dumb question, because I assume we'd be able to.
I think we should definitely keep the code stuff in the NESdev main forum (and/or newbie forum), for the most part. Dealing with the 2C02 is the main thing with NES programming, the CPU is pretty straight-forward (and other than the NES specific parts, very widely known and documented).
You'd probably want to ask yourself, is what your posting about scientific, code, or implementation (NESdev)? Or is it artistic, data, or design (NES Graphics)?
OK, that's a good clear line: would it apply to another platform with a totally different CPU and graphics chip, as long as it had the same visual limitations (colors, palettes, number of sprites, etc.)? So if you're talking about register addresses, cycle timing, synchronization, etc., it goes in the main NESdev sub-forum. If it's about how to design graphics or make tradeoffs of colors etc., it goes in this new forum, which is the point: that is accessible to anyone with a basic understanding of NES graphics limitations, but not how to program such things.
How do we make that clear in the short space that's available for forum descriptions?
Yeah, pixel art for any kind of platform in general should be OK.. remember there are always tricks like stacking sprites on eachother (or on the background) to give the appearance of more color-depth. In that sense, graphics for pretty much any kind of tile-based system are still relevant to the NES.
tokumaru: Once there are a decent amount of posts, then anyone will have a pretty good idea of what kind of stuff gets talked about in there. Which is also why it's important to try to not scare away the non-programmers, heheh.
blargg wrote:
OK, that's a good clear line: would it apply to another platform with a totally different CPU and graphics chip, as long as it had the same visual limitations (colors, palettes, number of sprites, etc.)?
For example, I'd want to share NES Graphics between the NES and Game Boy sections, given how similar the capabilities of NES and GBC are.
"A place for your artistic side. Discuss techniques and tools for pixel art on the NES, GBC, and similar platforms."
EDIT: The first topic I'll move into the new section is probably
the one that dissected CV3 and Faxanadu.
Yeah I like the idea. I think lack of graphics resources is one of the biggest stumbling blocks in homebrew scene. Besides, if a forum like this doesn't gain popularity it shouldn't be too hard to break it down and move the existing threads to General Stuff or whatever.
Another idea also came to me some days ago. How about a forum for game development blogs (free form)? People could share their current progress, ideas and ask questions. It would be cool to have most game dev blogs (maybe tool dev etc also) in the same place.
I like the idea. When you think about it, Art isn't really programming and takes a special person to do, so I like the sub-form.
Yeah, I think this is a good idea. You don't necessarily want to bloat up the forums when there aren't that many users anyway, but it is a logical addition given the other special forums like music.
tepples wrote:
EDIT: The first topic I'll move into the new section is probably
the one that dissected CV3 and Faxanadu.
I was just going to ask this.
I should do another one sometime.
So the consensus is to create it. Once it goes live tomorrow, PM me with other move requests.
For the first couple weeks, I might appear even more move- and split-happy than I normally am while I try to define the scope of NES Graphics by example. When I move topics in and out of this forum, I'll try to leave a shadow (the "Moved:" link).
This thread isn't exclusively for NES art but I think it would fit well in the new forum too:
http://nesdev.com/bbs/viewtopi ... sc&start=0