Art Creation
So, you’re an experienced artist or a curious world builder who is interested in diving into creating art for your Metaplace world – here is the place to start! The first thing you’ll want to remember is that art works for Metaplace just like the Web does. We support the common picture formats like JPG, GIF, and PNG. You can host these images anywhere you’d like; however we’ll offer some space for you to host with us if you’d prefer. You will want to make sure that you pay close attention to the file size of your images – because all the images will be downloaded to the users while they’re loading your world. Someone might write a client that loads the images on the fly, but you’ll still want to be considerate of the compression of the images to ensure that users can login to your world and play without too long of a wait.
When you’re creating a world, there are several types of art that you may want to upload to your world. This includes more advanced assets like user interfaces, backgrounds, parallax art, particles, animating sprites and skeletal animations – which we’ll talk about in future blog posts here. For now, we’ll start with the easy stuff: terrain and sprites.
In your Metaplace world, you might want to have a Tetris clone with a purple polka-dotted background. You might want a map for your role playing game that consists of a grassy field with a stream running through it and a castle in the distance. This can be done easily using terrain tiles – small image files that can be any size (our default zoom is 64 x 64 pixels). We use the tile as the unit of measurement – game systems measure speed in tiles per second, for example. Generally, you’ll want to make your tiles square-shaped, otherwise they will be autosquashed to squares and resized so that they will fit in one tile. You can also define the tile to be whatever size you want it to be: 8m by 8m, a yard across, or two centimeters across. The size of the tiles and the size of the objects are completely independent of each other so you can have any size object sitting on top of your tile. You’ll also need to decide what view you intend the terrain tiles to be for, as we have several different views: overhead, isometric, and side view.
An overhead view is best described as a view of the world from above, with the camera directly pointing down at the world. This is displayed in games like Cosmic Rift or old-school Gauntlet.
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Isometric view is similar to games like Ultima Online or Baldur’s Gate. It is an overhead view of a world with the camera tilted down at an angle. If you are making tiles for an isometric world, you will want to make them square and not diamond shaped, as our client will texture map the tiles for you. You can set the view angle anywhere you like.
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A side view is most commonly seen in games like Mario and other side scrolling platformer games. Really, it’s the same as the grid view. Shh, don’t tell anyone.
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We load the tiles per “place” so you can have radically different terrains in each place. (A place is basically a room, a screen, or a zone within your world). This is a great way to make your creepy dark dungeon look completely different than the bright sunny countryside!
Next, you’ll want to add your sprites. In 2D and isometric worlds, sprites are all the objects in your world – everything from the trees and houses to the bullets and weapons. You can make your sprites any shape that you would like, they are completely arbitrary. You can also resize them within the client to whatever size you want, but the default size is one tile wide. Sprites can also be used to make your UI elements, and they support transparencies. When a user loads up your world, all of the sprites in your world will be loaded up front – which means that you can wear the same t-shirt from place to place within your world.
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For more advanced users, you will be able to do things like add lights; they just need to be alpha images. We also have a cool skeletal animation system for 2D and support for sprite sheets for old-school style animation, but we’ll save those details for another blog post. ;)
Some quick hints that will be helpful are related to the loading of art assets. Our Flash client currently loads everything before the user enters the world to prevent things like “load ganking”. We expect that client writers might easily come up with a client that loads art on demand or adds support for more formats. For example, one of our test clients supports BMP, but BMP is really big to stream to users. Streamed art (and sounds too) could also be cached if the client writer does that - the Flash client uses the browser’s cache. In the future we’re committed to loading standard formats. Once we go 3D, we’re planning on just having loaders for typical 3D formats. We welcome discussions on formats that you would like to see!
So there you have it, enough details to get started with your art creation process! We have support for uploading entire folders of images, so feel free to start uploading your work to the web right now if you would like. We even have a community-led Tile Making Contest to take part in if you’re chomping on the bit in anticipation of making art for your world! Also, check out this wallpaper we’ve created for your desktops. To download, right click on the size you’d like and click “Save As.”
Joe "metaskiv" Skivolocke
Art Director
