robertbrooks Posted June 10, 2015 Share Posted June 10, 2015 You may already be aware, that I'm setting up a site offering free and low priced 2d assets, I'm working hard to produce as many as I can. Whenever I create an asset I always offer the asset in various styles and views. If we were talking about an animated fish, Of which there are a few on the site already, I would offer the fish laid out on a spritesheet and I would offer individual frames and I would also offer inverted versions of the animation in both the spritesheet and individual frames. As you might have guessed this is a mountain of work, and takes more time than designing and drawing the asset. So I really need to find out what is really necessary and what is not. That way I can save time and produce more. So my questions are as follows. How do you use your assets in your engines/games, Do you use inverted versions of sprites, Meaning sprite facing left and sprite facing right, or do you do it in the engine? I have written my own html5 games from scratch ,without an engine and I used inverted sprites just to save time, but I have experience with unity3d and other engines and with them I didn't need inverted sprites. are inverted sprites something you find necessary? Do you ever use individual keyframe animations or do you always use a spritesheet? should I not bother exporting each frame as a single image or should I just lump each animation sequence onto a spritesheet? By the way if you're interested in seeing or using some of my assets you can view them here http://www.gamedeveloperstudio.com and as always if you have any ideas as to what you think might be some popular game asset ideas I'm always grateful to hear them. I can't do commissions as I don't really have time, this website is sucking the life from me. But fresh ideas are great to hear. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
b10b Posted June 11, 2015 Share Posted June 11, 2015 Great graphics! I had a quick look and would say a search tool, and categories / tags would be of huge benefit. I also am unsure about your pricing strategy - I'm not going to want to reach for my credit card to pay $0.05. Either do a membership for $50 with unlimited download, or charge $5-$25 per item. Or just use the humble method if you want to be super low price initially. To answer your question about spritesheets - everyone's workflow is different, and probably even different per game. For both Canvas & GPU using an atlas with a conventional grid is quite optimal. Simply flipping X or Y at runtime is also ultra-rapid so there may only be marginal benefit in storing the "inverts" (as you call them, "flips" as I call them). But I would prefer to have freedom of an asset to make my own judgement, and create the asset sheet as I see best. So, my suggestion is, concentrate on the adaptability of the raw asset (the vector or the png) unless you are tailoring for a very specific user base (e.g. a certain game engine and genre). And then improve the methods by which people can find them and pay for them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
robertbrooks Posted June 13, 2015 Author Share Posted June 13, 2015 Hey thanks for taking the time to reply, this information is invaluable to me, What you're saying about about workflows makes sense and having easily adaptable vectors or ps layers is a good idea. although I always try to develop with the idea that some users may not have the ability to use vector or digital image programs well. It seems that producing variety may be inevitable although I might actually drop the x-y flips. Yeah a search function is coming soon. At first it wasn't worth building it as there were so few graphics it would have been a bit redundant but now there are more graphics it seems that it should now be rolled out. The pricing system actually works on a credit based system, people credit their account with 5 dollars then when they download, the asset price is charged to their on site credit not their card , This allows me to keep prices down and not lose money through administration fees for accepting such small payments. the fact you didn't notice this indicates that this is not obvious to users and is something I need to make clear. I really appreciate that you took the time to write this feedback for me, It has proved to be most useful. Thanks alot Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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