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A few days ago, we released Wagic 0.17.1 for the PSP, Android, iOS (iPhone/iPad… now that a jailbreak is available on the latest revision of iOS, you have noe excuse to not try Wagic!), and Windows.
Thanks to the work of Xaw Otihs, this new version of Wagic is now also available for the Nokia Platforms Maemo and Meego (respectively, the N900 and the N9/N950). That release of course gets all the bug fixes and improvements that we described in the 0.17.1 release. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s been 6 months since the last release of Wagic, and I’m sure some of you might have thought the project was on a halt. The truth is, we’ve been working on several major things on Wagic that postponed this release. This release is a major milestone for us, as this is the first official release were we support iPhone/iPad and Android.
Often compared to commercial games for its replay value and quality, Wagic is a heroic fantasy card game, in which you fight as a wizard against the computer. Read the rest of this entry »
iPad and iPhone users, rejoice! Thanks to Mike’s excellent work, we are finally able to include iOS in our release. For the first time Wagic is available on both Android and iOS. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s finally here! This is still a beta, so we expect to fix a few bugs for the final 0.17 release, but if you want to help us smash bugs, feel free to give it a try. This version of Wagic is open to all people who are registered at the Wagic forums (registration is free, and note that it’s not the same forum as /talk, so if you own an account at /talk you might need to create a new account).
Wagic is an heroic-fantasy card game, supporting more than 15’000 cards (more than 8’600 unique cards). The beta is currently available for the PSP, Windows, and Android. Yup, Android joins the Wagic fun. Read the rest of this entry »
I hate vaporware and that’s why I usually don’t blog too much about an upcoming release in Wagic. But the last release (0.16) was such a long time ago that I don’t remember when it was, so I feel like I should mention the project is still very active and alive. Today I started the process for releasing Wagic 0.17. Now don’t jump around too soon. This process usually takes 3 or 4 weeks. We go through an alpha stage with the other devs, where we basically try to fix the most ugly bugs, before releasing a public beta. The beta usually lasts about a week, followed by the public release.
Wagic running on a Motorola Xoom
For those of you who still don’t know, Wagic is an heroic-fantasy strategy game, initially inspired by Magic the Gathering, which with time has evolved into a flexible system allowing players to create their own cards, campaigns, rules and mods. For Wagic 0.17, we’ve been mostly focusing on Android. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the many great open assets that can be found on opengameart. This image is taken from the card game WTactics
Note: A list of sites where you can download free art that you can legally use in your video games (including for commercial usage) can be found at the bottom of the article, read along.
Working on Wagic has introduced me to the painful reality: I suck at graphics. Initial graphics in Wagic were mostly made of copyrighted content, and this eventually led me to trouble. Our game has since then been blessed with the help of several talented designers (including Julio, Jeck, Ilya B., Kaioshin…), and, let’s be honest, art is basically the only thing players have to make their first impression on a game, so I’m really really thankful for these people’s help.
If you’re a game developer and suck at drawing like me, there are a few options for your game, and you’ve probably thought about some of them already.
The easy solution, the one most people unfortunately choose, is to take your graphics from somewhere else, without looking at copyright information, or knowingly stealing graphics from games/movies/anime… You won’t see any harm in that initially, but if your game ever becomes successful (and don’t we all want that to happen?), this will bite you. For the youngest among my readers, taking a character from an anime and removing the background does not make the art “yours”, and redistributing it is copyright infringement in most countries.
Another option, which many of us choose, is to use “easy to make” art, that even you can create. Your main character becomes a blue cube, and its enemies are red circles… Obviously there’s so far you can go with such a solution, once all possible clones of tetris and pong have been made on all platforms.
The luckiest among us have a friend who happens to be a designer, motivated by their project, and who will help as a full part of the team. But if you’re in this situation, you’re most likely not reading this article. I’ve seen on many homebrew forums people offering their services as a designer for free. I’ve grown extremely suspicious of those. Many people who have claimed to be “designers” to me on those forums were kids with close to no drawing skills, who had been running a pirated version of Photoshop for 15 days, recompositing stolen art and claiming it to be theirs. My advice would be: avoid like the plague such “artists”, not only will they bring you legal trouble, their creations are often not great, and they have no experience in teamwork. Depending on the size of your project, trust is extremely important between the devs and the designers. A good designer will not join your project if you haven’t proven that your game is seriously going to happen. The same way, as a good project “leader”, you shouldn’t accept a “designer” who cannot prove they are good. In my case, with Wagic, the game came first, and then designers came, and provided graphics. They didn’t “offer” their help, no, they came to us with art, telling us “hey, I made that for your game and thought it would be interesting for you”. We provided a working game, they provided “working” graphics, no false promise of “help for the future” here, or rather, the promise was in the achievement. Both the dev and the artist were able to tell each other “I can work for a good amount of time on this project, and provide a result” before even actually talking for the first time. forums discussions starting like “I’ll code a game” and “yeah, and I’ll do your graphics” rarely lead anywhere.
Another option if you have a bit of money is to look into royalty free stock photo websites, such as dreamstime.com (this is a random example, I am not affiliated with them, and have not tested their services). These sites can sell you pictures for as low as 1$ per picture, and allow you in most cases to use those in video games, even commercial projects. However I’ve dug recently into many of those sites, and let’s be honest, it is very unlikely that you will find lots of useful content for video games… no textures, no 3D model, close to no drawings (mostly photos…)… but it can help for a loading screen here and there.
For the rich among us, art commissioning is also a possibility. I don’t have details or good resources on the subject, but the basic idea is that you pay an artist to do the work for you. I’ve seen prices for such commissions go as low as 5$ per request on ebay, but never checked if this gave you the right for commercial use, or even redistribution. I guess it’s up to each creator and how you can convince them. I’ve also seen prices go up to 1000$ per image for a complex request, and commercial use.
The best solution I found recently is to focus on Creative Commons, Public domain, or GPL art (GPL art is kind of an heresy, really, but it exists nevertheless). A few sites are designed to gather that kind of art. I’ve unfortunately ran into many sites claiming they have “Public Domain” art, when a quick google search showed that this was pure b***s***, so going only to trusted sites is an important thing here.
The best site on the subject I could find is opengameart.org. They have thousands of sprites, 3D models, 2D graphics, sounds, all available with very precise license explanations, and most of them being available even for commercial projects (as long as you are ready to make derivative art available with the same license, which is not too much to ask, I think). The major point of that site is the centralized access to open resources you would have to hunt on the Internet otherwise. Free Art Search and FreeGameArt are similar sites, but not as well organized as OpenGameArt IMO. Burningwell.org is a site with Public Domain images. These images are free for any use, including commercial works. Again, we run into the problem that images on burningwell are “only” photos, and will need some tweaking on your end to be usable in your game.
Those are the easy ones. If you’re ready to dig more, google books has options to look for books published before 1910. Those that contain images will be in the public domain, so things like that can be investigated as well.
finally, this page has a series of links to free game art that you might want to check.
opengameart.org is to me the most interesting of these websites, with its community-oriented system, and the fact that I have been successfully using some of their resources recently for one of my side projects. I wish I could contribute directly to that site, but I’m not an artist so for now I’ll just say that my way of contributing is that Wagic is open source (and has been so since the beginning). If you happen to be a talented artist and want to help the indie gaming community, opengameart.org could be the best place for you 
We recently organized a Mod contest for Wagic 0.16. It took me a while to take the decision. First of all, the 3 entries are all awesome, and I’m hoping they won’t stop here, but will keep being updated.
Now that this is said, let me say that my winner is Entertherat’s thicker than water, and I will contact the author asap to send him the 100$ prize.
About the reasons behind my choice, again, all 3 entries are awesome, but I felt “Temple of Wololo”, despite being an awesome concept, was probably fairly easy to code, and the addition to Knights and Dragons is simply great (and I sure hope we develop this game even more), but I was biased as I created it initially. Finally, the original music in Thicker than water is what sold me. I’m personally not an artist, and I get impressed when I see what musicians or designers can come up with. The music in Thicker than water is entirely original, and helps creating the campaign atmosphere.
Congrats to Entertherat, and many thanks to the 3 competitors for their awesome work
The 3 mods can be downloaded here
A few weeks ago I announced a contest for Wagic 0.16. Contestants had to come up with a mod or a campaign running on Wagic 0.16. If you’re not familiar with this concept yet, Wagic is progressively becoming a generic card engine allowing you to tweak the rules of the game, creating your own cards, and your own campaigns.
We “only” got 3 entries, but the 3 of them are of extremely good quality, and the choice will be hard. My favorite entry will get a 100$ prize, but before I choose, I’d like to ask you guys which one is your favorite. Nothing formal, just give a try to these campaigns, and let me know which one you prefer
There was a time I would post new blog articles every day… these days I don’t have much time to post here, and the news slowed down on the PSP scene (or is it just that I’m less involved since the HBL days?)…
But I’m not dead, far from that. Actually the main reason I’m not posting on the blog recently is that I’ve been working very hard on Wagic these past few weeks/months. Our biggest fans might have seen our recent “quiet” release of an alpha version of Wagic for Android. The truth is, the entire Wagic team is hard at work to provide a good gaming experience on Android, and this is eating up all my free time.
So, am I going to progressively stop talking about the PSP scene, and migrate to Android discussions? Well, in all honesty, part of the excitment for this blog comes from the fact that the PSP is entirely locked, from the mad joy that comes to me when a guy is able to say “screw you Sony, I want to use my hardware the way I want, and here’s a hack to prove it”. I love my Android phone, but it doesn’t need to be hacked to run the stuff I want, so nothing specifically fun to talk about on this blog.
So, will I instead start talking about the PSVita from now on? I’m seriously pissed at Sony for what they did to geohot and other hackers, so I really don’t want to give them my money, but I’d love to be there when we run homebrews on the PS Vita… I guess this will depend how much enthusiasm the devs in the /talk community put into hacking that device
On the subject of not giving any money to Sony… I recently got a life insurance…of course all negotiations were in Japanese, so my wife did most of them for me. It turns out the best insurance for us was, by far, Sony’s offer (their insurance branch is called Sony Life). When the insurance “adviser” told that to my wife, she replied (per my decision) that we would go with the second best choice, because “my husband doesn’t really like Sony”. The adviser was super surprised, but the week after that, Sony was hacked badly as we all know.
My reason to not choose Sony at the time was the geohot thing, but as we met the insurance adviser again, he thought I had decided not to go with Sony not because of my principles, but because I was aware that Sony’s shares would fall. He was like “that was good judgement, they’re not in a very good financial situation these days”. It kind of pisses me off he ended up thinking I did a financial choice, while it was 100% a matter of principle.
Anyways…that insurance is close to 500$ per year for the next 40 years or so I believe, so, take that Sony, that’s a pile of money you’ll never see (instead we went to some insurance company whose symbol is a sheep, can’t remember the name on top of my head.)
And that’s the end of my awesome Sony anecdote…check out Wagic on your Android, it rocks!
If you haven’t heard, I’m running a little contest for Wagic users, and there’s 100$ in cash for the winner (check here if you’re interested).
We recently got our first entry for the contest, Vikta’s Temple of Wololo. This is an original take at the campaign system, as it doesn’t have much of a story, but basically allows you to “donate” some credits to the “Temple of Wololo”, and in exchange get a set to unlock for you. Very useful, especially if you’re close to the end of the game and only have a few last sets to unlock (they get more and more difficult to unlock with time…).
Temple of Wololo can be downloaded from Vikta’s thread here, but other (more serious?) campaigns for Wagic can also be downloaded from our campaigns subforum. To install a campaign, just unzip it into the “campaigns” subfolder of your wagic resource folder. To play it, simply run the game and select 1player > Story then choose the campaign you want in the selection menu.
You have until September 15th to submit your campaign to the contest. Right now Vikta’s entry is the only competitor, so there sure is room for more entries
