No harm in pitching the project, my only warning would be to warn you that an average 5-minute 'short' is more than 5000 frames worth of animation... 5000 frames is a helllll of a commitment by an animator. Like I know you mentioned you were breaking it to manageable chunks but i think to be lead just on a script.. even 5 min segments is alot to ask for.
A well animated 5-8 piece is likely to already near the file size limit. Even if you managed to have it waved youd be looking at a substantial filesize.. something near 50mb .... even if its waved, no casual viewer in the portal is going to want to sit and wait for even 25 mb to load.

Good luck to you tho.

At 10/1/08 12:28 PM, Senti wrote: Does it not make sense that 10 songs used should gain 10% of the profits?

It makes sense and it would be cool. Its just simply problematic with deals that have already been made and you go back to retrofit the current features into it.

I sorted my terms out with my audio artist ages ago and paid out of pocket to buy out the songs, its kind of dumb that the system itself is now 'forcing' its way into my revenue to pay out third parties that I have already worked out deals with.

If I knew the system would pan out to work this way then I'd have negotiated different terms. Like ok I'll pay x amount of what was sponsored and then you can gain x amount off royalties from the api.

I think its a good system, but its just difficult to retrofit into past stuff. Atleast when it comes to money.

At 10/1/08 09:05 AM, Paranoia wrote: Anyway, I don't think we should be penalising people for using a wide variety or audio portal entries. One 'audio cut' would make a lot more sense.

Right. and thus the system will be fixed. The truth is tho alot of portal artists did complain about the royalty sharing, and so Tom had alot of pressure to try and satisfy that angry mob.

I think that one just doesnt forsee the microscopic issues it can have. Such as the multi track scenario. My suggestion to him was to delete the actual percentage aspect of it. And just put the reserve field there. All the audio artists I've ever worked with i paid flat fees to. Which is what they wanted anyway.
At any rate, its interesting / frusterating to make new features available and the new pandora's boxes that inevitably spawn from it. I guess its part of the process though.

At 9/30/08 10:00 AM, Peglay wrote: Hehe here is a one i made in like 45min....its simple and hasent got alot of colors......my cousin designed the skull.....

kool. send me a PM ill mail u one.

At 10/1/08 12:39 AM, Glaiel-Gamer wrote:

At 9/30/08 09:20 PM, Wurmy1029 wrote: How much % to music artists?

98% of the time I do my own music, but for the few where I didn't I just did 1%. Those submissions aren't making money off of NG ads or anything so the % doesn't matter too much IMO, plus going through 40 submissions to alter % and credits got old fast... so I just took shortcuts especially knowing there's no money being made off my older stuff.

Im doing the same. Also Tom is going to get rid of the mandatory 1% thing. I originally thought it made sense but most of the deals ive negotiated with audio artists are based on a lump sum rather than on a royalty system. So it doesnt make sense that im forced to give up 1% on every song they've done for me... when ive already paid for em. 1% aint much but when its a game with 10 tracks 10% starts to become a titty twister.

I like these new toys... i kinda dont like the force 1% thing tho... like in pico blast we have one audio guy doing all our songs and we bought his songs and custom songs that he later uploaded to the portal so he could benefit from reviews. but now i gotta tag it with a percentage point for each single song.. makes me scared if i had used the complete slew of songs by the same author i had in mind. 1% doesnt bug me, but like 10 songs at 1% probably would.. meh maybe this is a unique case.

At 9/30/08 11:17 AM, Baleout wrote: Hehe, yeah I was thinking of doing something upside down :P

If you have one upside down, youd have to sand out the top off his head or lop it off.
Ehh i dunno, i think it might be trying TOO hard to be unique.

At 9/30/08 01:06 PM, ChillyCheese wrote: Now that that is over......

The new simple line...

The trailer for it looks really kick ass.

wouldn't you agree?

Looks promising. I hope they use better typography -________-

At 9/29/08 08:46 PM, K0Nx wrote: I looked all over and I couldn't find a thread for this...

So I'm making my first game right now...
and I'm working really hard on it....

To answer your question, if you really are working your ass and your game has a good deal of beef in it i'd look into finding a sponsor. Preferably one that will allow you to plug-in api's like mochi or ng's.
The thing about mochi and ng api's are that you arent going to become a millionare from em. They are more suited towards smaller games and or games where you make money in the long run rather than the short run. Som people build games in bulk and are able to find more success from api's because their games are fairly small in schope and they can pump out games and have some bank from them while newones are released while simultaneously more are in production.

At 9/29/08 10:28 PM, unbelivable wrote: Mochiads is better in terms of CPM and such, click the link in my sig and sign up.

you arent just trying to bank on a referral are you ;)

Not enough time to be askng all these redundant questions.

Simple steps:
1- Pick a month
2- draw something ng related
3- post it in the official finished work thread

the end.

its kewel to believe everything you read on the intrawebz

btw if i see people just making junk posts for the sake of advancing the pages on this thread i'll ban you for a day :)

Seriously, stop it. Let it happen naturally...

i know it was frusterating not having pubes when you were 12... but you gotta wait like everyone else for nature to take its course.

Hopefully someone will e-mail you.

My recommendation would be to download a trial version of flash, see if you can get the hang of it and take a more proactive approach to seeing if you can bring your ideas to life.

Flash is definately a struggle... but its a struggle every creator has had to go through to gain experience and success. Theres no easy roads in life.

Anyway I'm locking this before you get flamed like many have in the past.

TRIPPLE POST

If you already have yours or have begun working on it, go ahead and feel free to post WIP pics... its kind of motivating to see it come together. Actually its very motivating.

Also someone asked me about a deadline yesterday. There isnt a concrete deadline because I'm still mailing the sponsored Troops out but in my mind, I'd like to begin wrapping this project up by the first week of Nov. By that time you should have enough time to have recieved your figurine, figured out what you wanted to do and painted it up with it ready to mail out.

We'll see how it goes. Thats something to shoot for.

Please avoid basing your designs on commercial characters.. (ie mario, solid snake, etc)
You have a blank figurine with a chance to expres your own creativity.. I would think it'd be boring to just try and recreate a character that is commercially accessible to people no?

Obviously if its your Teddy Trooper you can do what you want :P

I'll be sponsoring the ones that have concepts not based on commercial properties. Characters from NG or in the portal are OK. I did mine on Madness last time, it was fun.

At 9/28/08 10:51 AM, TurkeyOnAStick wrote: Haven't fucked up the pic quality on this one. With proper screws for eyes.

This is interesting. I'd be curious to see if you can pull it off PM me

This is a great idea, I'll have to give this a go.

At 9/29/08 02:00 PM, citricsquid wrote: I thought the mexican for Dick was "Can"? I must be wrong if you've never had a can in your ass.

It very well might be, its just a shame im not mexican.

At 9/29/08 01:15 PM, citricsquid wrote: This is from one sitting:

Hmm i misread this... i thought it said this is where im sitting. looked painful, then again I've never tried sticking cans up my ass... i could be wrong.

lmao... i jinxed that place i was supposed to book by posting that photo before bookin it. Sorry gaiz.

I did find a new place but I aint going to hype it up this time until I know its mine. Kudos to Tom for letting me put it on his NG Black Amex card.

Tit residue is a known delicacy in some countries thats all i'll say about this.

This was a pretty cool stray from the usual youtube experience. The game looks pretty good also.

WarioLand : Shake it

1337 day

So when that page finally comes around itd be proper to only speak in 1337 nerd talk for that page... any regular english will be purged!

Convict was a character that was inspired by an old spiderman villain called Chameleon (if you google it, youll find they look kinda similar). Anyway Convict physically morphs into people, the spiderman villain... just kinda swapped clothes which i always thought was kinda lame.

Anyway we thought it'd be a neat twist to throw him into NG Rumble.. kinda like a Shang Tsung in MKII, or atleast thats what he was tailored to be in the NG Rumble game.

In terms of his story, he is Penilian, but not really an ally of Cassandra. He kinda has his own agenda but wants to destroy everything like most Penillians and goths.

Jewelry, and other bling

Lol, random question.. do you guys/gal (hi renaenae) wear jewelry at all? I suppose piercings count.
I occasionally wear a chain and a watch. I do have this stupid wooden charm thing i always have on my neck... mainly cause im too lazy to take it off. Thats bout it.
I do love watches... even tho i dont usually wear one.

At 9/28/08 09:05 AM, TheFunkyMunk wrote: Once flash CS4 comes out, you won't have to grasp it. :)

Buying the newest flash isnt going to make you a good animator suddenly. In all the versions of flash, theyve added new toys but the basic concepts of the program are still relatively untouched.

You can put lipstick and makeup on a whore, shes still gonna be a whore :)

I dont think there IS a problem. People are all amateurs on the site, everyone(ok maybe not everyone) does flash because they have some creative juices to burn off. Video games play a big role in peoples lives and naturally i think it attracts the attention of many artists. I dont necessarily see that as a bad thing, submitting to the portal is something people do for fun and to share with others. Its not a job or something. So people just have fun with it. I dont really think its constructive to go around telling people to not animate something just cause you dont like it or have outgrown video games. I think there is plenty of animators not doing video game related stuff to satisfy any sort of viewer type out there, you can just skip over the shit that doesnt interest you.

In terms of 'originality', i think that term is kind of overrated. I think as humans our brains are like sponges, where we are naturally inspired by all sorts of things... sometimes even sub conciously. Its just the way we are wired, so in a way I dont think there really IS a such thing as being purely original. I think you are naturally going to tell your take on things in your own way to some degree by default. You dont need to be so hardcore and nazi and lock yourself in a padded room.

I dunno just have fun out there. Lifes too short to be stressing out.

At 9/28/08 08:47 AM, TheFunkyMunk wrote:

At 9/28/08 08:45 AM, Bumblbee wrote: I recently came into possession of Flash and there are some things that are confusing me.

1) What's the difference between key frames and just frames?

2) What's the purpose of converting something to a symbol?

1) A keyframe is a new frame. Its like, not the same. A regular frame is a copy of the previous frame.

I understand what you mean but its kind of a confusing way of putting it for someone new i think.

A KEYframe to me is a frame that forces flash to process it fully, in other words it tells flash hey this frame needs special attention ie you're introducing something new in terms of art/actionscript/whatever. As a time saving feature, you can push F6 and create a keyframe with the art from the previous frame carrying over. This makes it easy for making light tweaks and changes, its a fairly popular technique associated with 'fbfing' frame-by-frame animation.

When you create just a frame. You are telling flash that this frame has no need for special attention or extra processing... and so through the beauty of flash, it will save on filesize by simply carrying the information that it process on the first instance of the keyframe. Background art is typically suited for that type of handling. The thing to remember about a frame is that since you are not creating a keyframe, you are basically dealing with the same art all along. Meaning that extending that frame across your timeline and then adding more art to it will affect every frame on that layer (until it runs into a keyframe)

I dont know if that explains it a bit more.. its a difficult concept to grasp at first. Hang in there

I went through and snipped out all the piracy advocacy... not really my way of starting my morning but lets all be semi responsible and abstain from such discussions.

I know cs4 is the new toy and everyones excited but the rules youve grown to love are still the same :)