Question concerning placeholder art.

[Trachmyr]

(Apology, slightly long)

Hello all...

I am yet another hopeful game designer and I have a question to pose to you.

The game I'm working on is called "The Archer's Curse", it's a dating-sim game with the addition of a bit of a suspense plot-line. It's not my first (or second, etc.) game concept, but it's a "smaller one" and I want to get something out the door to see "if I've gor the right stuff".

I will be using Renpy, I've got about 90% of the script & Dialog done, but I've just begun coding the game.

Eventualy I will have to "talk" some of my more artisticly endowed friends into creating the artwork & music, but for now I'm using rather ugly placeholder art. You know the kind that is really just a colored box with text saying what it's supposed to be...

Well it's getting me kind of down, and if I tried to create my own artwork I would be even more depressed... not to mention frusterated. So I came up with a (not so original) idea, I could take screenshots from a particualr game (Neverwinter Nights), trim, convert and use for my placeholder art. Not only will this get rid of my colored-box-blues, but when artwork is created for the game it will give the artists some idea of what I' looking for...

Here's the problem, I'll have to distribute a Demo to atleast a few on-line folks who've offered to help once it's done... I'm just kind of concerened using such "illegitamate" (not to mention potentialy illegal) images.

So would you do it? I appreciate any comments or feedback you have to offer...

[mikey]

My suggestion would be using photographs as placeholders (there are many free photo sites on the net) and for the characters, just draw some stick people. Although plain text with placeholders is not THAT bad IMO, because it gives the potential artist the freedom to think about what they could draw.

I'd say use this in your game - and send some screenshots of NN along with it, to demonstrate how you'd like the overall artictic direction of the game (dark, cheerful/colorful etc...)

[Grey]

Yeah, Ren'ai SGD style

[Trachmyr]

Yeah, Ren'ai SGD style

SGD?

Forgive me if I'm being a total blockhead...

[Grey]

Ah, sorry, the infamous Shirt Guy Dom of Megatokyo, who occasionally does strips there when Fred/Piro the creator can't update with even a Dead Piro Day (piece of art) or something.

[papillon]

Sometimes it can be better to use BAD placeholder art.... REALLY BAD, so that you are not eventually tempted to keep it. I've done games where I was just throwing together a sample demo of an engine and STILL spent five days doing pointless sprites to try and make it look vaguely right even though I wasn't planning to keep them... and then once you've got those sprites you worked so hard for, how do you throw them away?

If you try to put together good fake art, even using NWN as your source to do it faster, you'll end up spending a lot of wasted time on it. It's probably better to just make one mockup screen with good fake art and do the rest as badly as possible.

[Trachmyr]

That's a good point Papillion...

Yeah, it's taking longer to generate the NWN placeholders than I thought... but I did expect it to take a while. I also wanted a bit of a break from writing, so as not to get burned out... I've also been toying with a few other ideas and changes, and mulling over a few cuts... so I wanted some time to think/flesh 'em out.

But your right, I might be tempted to just leave in the NWN scenes once the game is coded and actually working... it's a lot more tempting than comissioning artwork with my own $$$.

I think I'll take your advice and leave it out, what I've already got from NWN I'll just keep it seperate to give any artists I comission an idea of what I'm looking for.

Thanks for your reply.