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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If all your networking is done through the game, then your whole community shatters once the game becomes outdated/obsolete.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.

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!

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

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

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.

Maj wrote: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.

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

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.

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

Maj wrote: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"...?

Xenozip. wrote: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 ...

NKI wrote: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...

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

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.

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.

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

ZenFire: Good luck sir! Do your forum members understand English? What would you like us to say? Interesting mix of games you mentioned. No Marvel? That part about the girl made me laugh. To this day it still bums me out that the fighting game community has constructed so many fences to keep girls out. Then again, girls do have a habit of ruining perfectly good forums.

felineki: Dude that looks sweet! The whole thing works together really well too. The foreground platform matches the blocks in the background which helps a lot in making the design seem connected. If a stage like that appeared in a Namco fighting game, i'd be a fan. The only part that bugs me is how Ryu lost to that overpowered canister thing. It could not have been the real Ryu because Ryu is strong.

Maj wrote:-snip-

Ho ho hooo, 'twas a hobby.

I don't really have much advise for you, except maybe to look around for students who might be willing to do it for cheap/free in order to gain experience/exposure. Or learn it yourself via online tutorials and experimentation.

Yes, 90% of Dutch ppl under the age of 40 understand and speak English well (fictional statistic). What to say? I actually have no idea. Maybe something like "Get some Marvel drama going" or "I approve these forums!". Or maybe something to make the guys feel like they're part of some weird international brotherhood of geeks just because they play fighting games competitively.

There was one guy who played Marvel seriously and after I played him I started practicing some. Then there were a bunch of ppl it rubbed off on. As a result there was one MVC2 tournament way back. I don't believe I know anyone that plays it regularly. Also, PAL Dreamcasts break so fucking easy. Few ppl still have a working one. Something about a bad quality GD-ROM drive.

That girl actually plays 3S. She's not total shit either, but I'm not sure she'd know how to set up and maintain a forum, transfer the domain or run tournaments. However, she's good looking. I bet she would have at least upped the number of registrants.

Well, i signed up and posted something dumb. If anyone sends me a PM, i think i'll get an automatic email letting me know. So if anyone on your website has any obscure CvS2 questions, they can always contact me.

Awesome, I just saw it. Yes, you'll get an email if they PM. I wonder if anyone will ^_^

Do they know about Monster and IaMP?

Well, I posted about Monster but there wasn't much interest. Some ppl already knew about it. Even I don't know what IaMP is >_<

I wasn't actually serious, sorry. Although, this gives me the opportunity/excuse to post about my latest project(s).

This is my IaMP blog: http://zenosip.blogspot.com/

This is my (currently idle) Monster blog: http://xenozip.blogspot.com/

You can see a bunch of Jap tournament match footage for IaMP on Sibladeko's u2be page. And you can see a bunch of casuals for IaMP and Monster on my u2be page, but it's prolly better to view my playlists.

http://www.tipstricks.com/streamingstra ... dOfWar.php


I made GoWII videos for tips and tricks like a month ago... it's taken forever for them to put it up though. Whatever, there they are..


Anyway, I tried to include at least 1 good thing in each combo. They're done tutorial style... so you should understand them. I dont know if I can send people the non-edited footage.

Dude that Titan Storm Combo was awesome. These clips turned out great. How come they all have 10 seconds of blank at the end?

By the way, do you have any way of finding out how many views these videos are getting? Also, do you know which game you're going to be working on next? If any of it is confidential information, don't worry about answering the questions. I'm just a little curious but i can wait and see.

Not sure about other games yet.

They have no audio and 10 sec of black vid at the end cause the company doesn't know what's going on : (

Guess what I'm doing:

oh, haha, tips and tricks magazine was canceled so no more videos for them, haha.


That goes for their website too!

: ( but I'm not surprised really.

ZenFire wrote:Guess what I'm doing:

Shooting dice...?

ZenFire wrote:Guess what I'm doing:

Creating high res cappachow for the tippytow, my hammy?