Side Projects aka plug whatever you want

[Maj]

For those of you who have never submitted a popular game guide to GameFAQs, that website gets a LOT of traffic. I don't play too many video games outside of Street Fighter but usually i follow certain franchises moreso than getting the game with the most hype or best reviews. I've played through almost every Onimusha and Devil May Cry game, i've played every Legacy of Kain game except the first one, and it looks like i'm turning into a fan of the X-Men Legends games as well.

Onimusha games have responsive combat and interesting story, but they tend to get very formulaic and sometimes even boring. Devil May Cry games usually feature amazing combat but they don't try hard enough to keep the player from getting frustrated. Most Legacy of Kain games are usually mediocre in terms of gameplay, but the storyline is so far beyond awesome that i have no choice but to play whatever they put together. And of course, the X-Men Legends series is quite possibly the best comic book video game series ever made (apart from Capcom's efforts). They have their flaws and none of them are instant classics like God of War, but they're fun to play and they're not a total letdown like those old Spider-Man games Acclaim used to make.

Anyway, i ended up enjoying X-Men Legends 2 enough to hang around the GameFAQs forums and talk to the other players. The online communities that form around non-competitive mainstream games are always temporary, never lasting longer than 3-4 months. Some of those discussions were pretty cool though, and i ended up writing an "Odds and Ends" guide about two months after the game hit stores. Of course, by then a lot of players had played through the whole thing twice and moved on to something else.

Even still, that XML2 FAQ has scored 40,036 hits in 2006 so far! In comparison, my ghetto CvS1 Guile FAQ has received only 186 hits for the entire year of 2006. Not very surprising considering how CvS1 disappeared off the face of the planet after CvS2 was released. Also, my Guile FAQ is a character-specific guide buried among 60+ other FAQs for that game alone. In contrast, my XML2 guide is far less specialized and there are under 20 FAQs for that game. But still, 40k hits for something i wrote in under a week. Pretty crazy.

When the sequel to XML2 came out, called Marvel Ultimate Alliance, i had to get it cuz Galactus was in it. Actually i ended up renting it from Blockbuster for like 8 bucks (obscene prices these days), but i returned it like a week past the due date and there was no late fee so i guess it evens out. Anyway i wrote another guide for MUA, this time less than a month after the release of the game. Since i wrote it earlier, i got to pick an easier and more in-demand topic = less work, more hits.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/features/recogn ... tml?type=1

I had played through the game anyway, so it was basically free exposure. Unlike the XML2 guide, i barely put any effort into this one. Earlier today i uploaded version 0.4 and i'm probably going to stop there, without even finishing it. I mean, why bother? It already covers all the important stuff, it's for a game that nobody will play in a year, and doing more work wouldn't get me any more hits.

Here's the thing though. Exposure is only worth as much as the thing it's applied to. So i wrote a little note at the end of both FAQs, like "please visit my website blah blah" but i'm not sure how many people bother to do that. It's still free exposure, but i bet less than one person in a hundred actually bothers to take a look. Maybe it ends up being a fair tradeoff. So far i've gotten 23,241 hits for the MUA guide in well under a month. If i got 200 of those people to watch a CvS2 combo video, i'd say that's more than a fair deal.

[Thongboy Bebop]

Ya, I've thought a lot about releasing tutorial vids for other games, like Gran Turismo or something, that would up the q-rating for my more fighting-game-centric releases. If I ever manage to actually get anything out, I think it'd be a swell idea.

In the same vein, I've always wondered why no one in the fighting game community ever goes and takes over another section, like Madden or Halo. The way we play fighting games translates to pretty much any other genre if you look at it the right way, I'm honestly surprised someone who's already great in crossing over like J-wo or Vallle doesn't go take some free money in that arena.

N

[Maj]

There was a point where half of #capcom was playing Warcraft 3, but i don't think anyone won any tournament money. It's true that a lot of "Street Fighter philosophy" can be applied to any competitive game but there are also a lot of skills that are unique to each genre. Anyway it seems like most of the tournament money is in first-person shooters and strategy games that end in "craft." Maybe if the mainstream gaming tournament scene was more diverse, there would be more people from the SRK crowd crossing over. I think Jason Cole won helluva random oldschool console tournaments like the Blockbuster Championships.

[Magnetro]

My friend and I made a short video to show these 2 bugs my friend found that day.

http://www.denjin-video.com/magnetro/movie.wmv

(good title, huh?)

[Maj]

The final ranking battle of season 2 of the MvC2 tournaments at FFA just got posted. Hm, i'm not really involved in the making of this video and it's a bit random to be mentioning it here, but it's hella good and i think everyone needs to watch it.

It features commentary by dogface (everyone's favorite XSF hero) and i honestly could not stop laughing the whole way through. He has to leave about 20 minutes into the tournament, then there is some random shouting at the microphone, then MegamanDS resumes the commentary and it's good again. The matches themselves are helluva intense, especially the series between Amir and BB Hood. I think the capturing and editing is done by Magnetro. So two members of this forum are somehow involved.

homepage: http://www.denjin-video.com/
MvC2 Ranbat 2.6 page: http://www.denjin-video.com/?q=node/92

Highest Possible Recommendation, Would Watch Again, A++++++++!!!

[Magnetro]

The final ranking battle of season 2 of the MvC2 tournaments at FFA just got posted. Hm, i'm not really involved in the making of this video and it's a bit random to be mentioning it here, but it's hella good and i think everyone needs to watch it.

It features commentary by dogface (everyone's favorite XSF hero) and i honestly could not stop laughing the whole way through. He has to leave about 20 minutes into the tournament, then there is some random shouting at the microphone, then MegamanDS resumes the commentary and it's good again. The matches themselves are helluva intense, especially the series between Amir and BB Hood. I think the capturing and editing is done by Magnetro. So two members of this forum are somehow involved.

homepage: http://www.denjin-video.com/
MvC2 Ranbat 2.6 page: http://www.denjin-video.com/?q=node/92

Highest Possible Recommendation, Would Watch Again, A++++++++!!!

What he said ^_^

Yeah, Vic and MMDS are the only interesting non-annoying commentaries. I only do the editing, Shogo caps it.

[buktooth]

how can you tell how many hits a guide has on gamefaqs? i'm curious now

[Maj]

Actually now is a bad time since the year just started. The hit counter resets at the beginning of the year. Once you're logged in, click on the Contribute link and then click on the Your Contribution Hits link. It should have everything you've submitted along with the hits you've received today, this week, this month, and this year. For the month of January my CvS1 Guile FAQ has 12 hits, my MUA FAQ has 20,284 hits, and my XML2 FAQ has 1,316 hits. As you can see, there's a huge drop in hits as the game ages. XML2 is basically the same game as MUA and basically targetted towards the same audience, except XML2 is a year older.

[buktooth]

weird, it says i havent contributed anything

[Maj]

Maybe your contributor account and your forum account aren't linked. If that's the case, then you have to fill this thing out:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/features/feedba ... ?typeid=10

[Maj]

Looks like GameFAQs updated their hit counter to show the total number of hits that each file has received. Before, it would only add up the hits for the current calendar year.

Code: Select all

File Ratings
File Name                                                  Daily   Week   Month   Year   All Time
capcom_vs_snk_guile.txt (ARC)                                0      1       8      20      656
marvel_ultimate_alliance_sim_disc_missions.txt (PS2)        326    1553   11664   32357   69428
x_men_legends_ii_tactics.txt (PS2)                          32     139     821    2164    54061

Wow, the MUA guide gets twice as many hits in a week as the CvS1 Guile guide ever got. That's just sad. Ok, not really. CvS1 still sucks. That's not gonna change anytime soon. Though, it's possible that they weren't keeping track back in the year 2000, when it first got posted.

buktooth: If you didn't bother going through the registration process before, now you've got a good reason.

[Xenozip.]

Heh, I have written countless amounts of information for Persona , Diablo 2, and StarCraft, and a lot of the other games for that matter, that will probably never see the light of day.

Persona 1 is classic though. Definitely one of my top 4 favorite RPG's.

All of my past work is obsolete at this point though.

[Mike Z]

I did a FAQ for Battle Grand Prix for the SNES - the first FAQ for it, written more than a decade after its release. Yay for finding bugs in crazy obscure games. :^)

Mike Z

[Maj]

I spent way more time playing Diablo 1 and 2 than i'm willing to admit. Even went the hard way and played crappy Paladin builds. Getting killed by my own Thorns Aura after Conversion faded away was hella fun. What the hell was i thinking? Even though playing fighting games and making combo videos takes up a lot of time, at the very least i can say that Street Fighter saved me from MMORPGs. I've lost so many friends to Everquest, WoW, and FFXI. That addiction is unforgiving.

[Xenozip.]

Yeah. Not really something I want to brag about. I'd like to look back on it and say that I was enjoying it a lot, having good times, making a lot of friends and memories, and that it wasn't all for nothing.

Sadly, none of that can be said. Makes me wonder why I haven't learned from the mistakes.

[Maj]

As far as online RPG friends go, if you have any interest in staying in touch, you gotta contact them ASAP. I've tried to get in touch with old friends from Diablo 2 days, and it's almost impossible. Once that one email address dies, you've really got no way to find 'em again. Cuz really, how much do you know about them? Maybe their first name, maybe the state they live in, but that's about it. You don't have a phone number, you don't know any of their friends, you don't know what school they go to, and you don't even know what they look like. There are some people that i talked to every day for over a year, but all i've got is an expired email address and a nickname that they probably stopped using five years ago.

Problem is, there's no such thing as an MMORPG that you play for an hour a day. Anyone who does that is a scrub and most of the time the games aren't even fun until your characters hit high levels and have rare items. There are some things i liked about Diablo, but the price (in hours logged) was too high.

What i like about fighting games is that if i want to see what Shadow Charlie's lvl3 super looks like in MSF, it takes me 5 minutes. If MSF was an MMORPG, it would take me 3 months and an exclusive committment to that character. That makes me feel insulted as a consumer.

Plus the fighting game community feels more ... substantial, tangible, dependable. And more ghetto, more underground, more self-sufficient - which are always cool.

If all your networking is done through the game, then your whole community shatters once the game becomes outdated/obsolete. We have to do all our networking ourselves, so the MvC1 people didn't disappear when MvC2 came out.

[Maj]

Alright, you guys are gonna laugh at this. And if you don't, you're nerds. Which means our designated bully - i guess that would be James Chen - is gonna beat you up after school.

Ok so there's this card game called Legend of the Five Rings which has been around for over a decade, and it's got an incredibly developed storyline. Even though i stopped playing the game a long time ago, i still follow the storyline (and buy hella random merchandise). Lately one of the characters has been doing a lot of cool shit despite not getting much story time, so one day i decided to make him the star of the most ghetto possible website ever: Nimuro is Awesome

Problem is, i've got nothing original to contribute to this thing. No i'm not writing fanfiction youse nerds. I mean, if it was a video game i could make combo videos or something but it's not so i can't. So that's when i realized i could use my resourcefulness (my one skill) to con incredibly talented artists into drawing up custom illustrations to earn me a free ticket into the L5R fansite hall of fame. Of course, when i say "con them" i mean "become helluva poor as they take all my money." Also, if you're wondering what exactly "when" refers to, the answer is that it doesn't. My story has all kinds of holes but all of you put together are way too confused to do anything about it. Go ahead, just try and figure out where this paragraph really ended. I dares ya.

So that link above represents about 10-15 hours of work spread out over a month. The two original (unofficial) illustrations turned out unreasonbly well so i'm just sharing with you folks. Cuz samurai are always cool. Yep, samurai and frogs.

Seriously though. After this. No. More. Fansites.

Ever.

Ever ever ever ever evereverevereverevereverever.

The last one was supposed to be the last one. Now this one is the new last one and i'm going to make sure it stays new!

[jchensor]

From that page of yours:

"I simply described the character's background history and she did the rest. Everything from the colors, to the authentic samurai armor, to the combat stance are exactly as they should be."

So wait, you actually got those artists to draw the character for you? Like, you talked to them and asked them draw it for you? That's pretty cool.

- James

[Maj]

Yeah i just showed them the three or four existing official artworks of Nimuro and gave them a short description so they wouldn't draw something helluva out of character. It was surpsingly pricey to commission custom artwork, but definately worth it. I'm really happy with the results.

Actually there are some interesting cards in the game. Check these out:

Sonic Boom Sword? | Two Famous ST Players Put Together | Is that Kratos or What? | Air Fireballs Are Buff in this Game

[Maj]

So i've been doing more research and networking to get more custom illustrations for that Nimuro website, but there are a number of obstacles. It turns out that 3D artwork is crazy expensive and it seems a little bit wasteful to go that route too. I mean, having a 3D model made takes a lot of time and it's only worth it if that model is going to be animated or used in different images. To make just one image is way too much work.

Another thing i considered was to ask someone to make pixel art of Nimuro. Hey Xenozip, do you have a way of contacting the people who did the pixel art on Monster? I'd love to ask them if they would be down to take a commission for a sprite sheet of maybe 5-10 poses.

Also, i tried emailing akiman about this but haven't gotten a response. Maybe it's because of the language barrier though. Hey NKI, would you mind emailing him and asking if he takes private commissions? Just show him a link to the webpage and ask if he would be interested in doing a rendition of the character. Let him know that i'm not going to make any money from it and that he's free to use whatever style, pose, and scene he wants as long as it ends up resembling Nimuro enough for people to be able to identify him as much. The orange colors are the most important aspect of that, i think.

[Xenozip.]

Another thing i considered was to ask someone to make pixel art of Nimuro. Hey Xenozip, do you have a way of contacting the people who did the pixel art on Monster? I'd love to ask them if they would be down to take a commission for a sprite sheet of maybe 5-10 poses.

I can probably contact Sho Kawakami who did most of the artwork for Monster, but his English is spotty and my Japanese is nonexistent, so it might be difficult explaining things (you might want to contact him yourself). I've never spoken to any of the artists in his staff but I can get you links to their websites (they might have contact information).

And just so you know the artwork in Monster is actually 3D models turned into 2D sprites. The only pixel work in Monster are the particle effects and maybe the portaits. Also be warned, they are furry artists. A few of them gay furry artists. But, they are talented artists.

I do know a couple of artists who are both working on their own individual fighting games. Xiii (siky) and Rithli. You can see a bit of sprite work from Xiii here.

I can ask the aforementioned artists, but if it's pixel art you want then you're probably better off commissioning work from someone over at the Pixelation or PixelJoint forums. I'd also recommend trying to commission some people over at Deviant Art.

Honestly I'm not really as connected to the art world as I'd like to be.

[Thongboy Bebop]

Take a gander around the Image Mishmash forum on SRK, lots of those people are ridiculous-good and likely inexpensive due to foolish inexperience.

N

[Xenozip.]

The Fan Art section of SRK would yield better results than the Image Mishmash section, IMO.

Last time I went looking for artists in IMM I wound up empty handed.

[Xenozip.]

So, what do you want me to tell these people?

[NKI]

Hey NKI, would you mind emailing him and asking if he takes private commissions?

Sorry my English is so crappy, but what do you mean by "private commissions"...?

[Maj]

So, what do you want me to tell these people?

Actually i think i can manage with the info you've given me. I'll need to find the time to go through those pixel art forums and maybe find a few artists whose style i dig. Then i'll contact them personally and ask for rates or whatever. It would be cool to get about 5-10 random cool poses plus one or two attack animations. Generally once i decide that i like an artist's style and have a chance to describe the character to them, i try to stay out the way of their creativity and let them do whatever they want.

It would have been cool to get pixel art from an artist who worked on a fighting game, just so that i could generate a tiny bit more promotion/exposure for fighting games in general. But i'd reaaaaally prefer not to have to deal with a language barrier if at all possible. Seems like there's plenty of English-speaking folks who still specialize in pixel art.

But there's definately not enough English-speaking legendary Capcom artists who helped design Street Fighter II ...

Sorry my English is so crappy, but what do you mean by "private commissions"...? :?

Means i pay them their fee and they produce artwork to my specifications, like my choice of character or background or whatever else. But in this case the only thing i'm choosing is the character and letting them figure out the rest as long as they stay true to the character. I mean, they shouldn't try to draw him wielding a midieval European axe or riding a Tron bike.

The distinction is that we're talking about art made for an individual for non-profit purposes, as opposed to artwork that is being commissioned by a publisher for publishing. Or at least that's how i understand it. I'm just copying the artist lingo i see on their websites. You know, when in Rome...

[Robyrt]

Re: first post on GameFAQs - more whining about internet popularity contests.

Unpopular Games: My OMF guide has 6295 hits, ever, and took me several months. I am still discovering errors that no one else ever noticed.

Mildly Popular Games: My Supreme Commander FAQ came out on day one and took me 40 hours. It's still the only FAQ whatsoever for the game. It has 48k hits.

Popular Games: My God of War 2 Combat FAQ (which doesn't even include bosses, because I was lazy) took me a week, and it has 25k hits, even though it came out 3 weeks after the game did and among lots of competing FAQs.

Having actually crossed over into more popular genres, I haven't seen a spike in traffic to my website, or to my other FAQs, or anything. Maybe I need to put some stuff up on YouTube

[Maj]

Xenozip: While reading that Xiii/Rithli thread more closely, i noticed that you mentioned doing some 3D modeling work yourself. Is that just a hobby or is that your occupation? What would it take to get a 3D illustration of Nimuro made? I know that it's kinda difficult because making a detailed 3D model takes a long time and then using it for one image is not cost-efficient, but there isn't much i can do about that. Actually i asked Barringer Fox III Wingard (check out the Ryu render), but he quoted me something obscenely high like $5k. That's about $4,500 over the most i could possibly afford anytime in the forseeable future. Any advice?

Robyrt: I think that whole "all time hits" feature doesn't account for anything over a year ago since it was added just recently. For older FAQs, it's nowhere near accurate and there's no way to even estimate cuz there's a huge dropoff in traffic after the first few months of a game's release. It's not at all surprising that a God of War guide would get a lot of hits, but i don't think the true numbers are quite as lopsided as 6k to 25k. Also, i wouldn't think that a GoW guide would cause a spike in personal website traffic, but it's bound to trickle down a little extra.

[ZenFire]

I am now the proud daddy of a fledgeling FG community forum called Drakenslag, which translates to "Dragon Punch". Meh, I don't like the name that much, but it wasn't my choice. It's all Dutch and stuff. The site was as good as dead when the previous management decided to let it go. No one else wanted to run it (except some girl who wanted to turn it into god-knows-what), so I stepped up and there you have it. I don't expect anyone here to care, heh, but I'm sure it'd be good for the membership base if some of you well-known guys would register and make like a single post. Sort of like a pledge-drive for public radio, only it's for a forum.

It used to be a pretty balanced mix of 3S, CvS2 and T5 crowd. Now it's up to me to boost the Dutch FG community.

[felineki]

I finished my first Mugen creation a while ago, it's a stage based on Gradius III's "Crystal Labyrinth" stage. The coding was a bit tedious (coordinates, timings, and velocites for every single object... compared to the character coding, Mugen's stage coding is VERY basic and limited), but the end result was worth it, IMO. It was an idea I had for a while, but it was the announcement of a Mugen stage creation contest, with the theme of converting areas from non-fighting games into stages, that spurred me to create it. And I won.

You can download it here: http://sd.mistrust.com/sw/

And if you want to see what it looks like in action, here's a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4-i_A37zfU