Birth... Death... Home... Help... Thanks...
posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 11:24 AM
Last week marked a milestone for us. We passed our second birthday. Yup, this project is now two years old. Yes, things have been slow around here the past few months, but I can't let the date pass without acknowledging what a remarkable thing that is. The past year has also marked a few births around these parts. Both Terry and I welcomed new babies into our lives, which (and I think I am stating the obvious here) is probably the biggest reason you haven't seen me as much recently. There have also been new jobs, new schools, new homes... you know all the real life stuff. The biggest event for the coop in the past year has been the release of our first complete pack, back last fall. It was a long time that we worked on it and I am still proud that we were able to welcome this baby out into the world. I even have a nice update to it that Terry did earlier this year that makes it even stronger and more useful -- hopefully I will get that posted soon.
Death
Another big reason I have been absent from the coop is that upon the release of the Gilman pack I finally decided to make good on a bunch of promises to work on projects that I had been putting off for a long time, some paid, some volunteer. Now, after about eight months of working on a large number of projects with many people who have been great to work with, I am kind of coming to the same realization I had when I started the coop with Terry. There are just too many dead projects out there. So much of the work I have done over the past seven years has been on projects that stall, fizzle, or die. They all start out with great enthusiasm and planning, coast on the backs of the hard work of a few people and then slowly drift away. I hope to work on some of these projects again, but for now it is time to concentrate on making sure the coop here does not join the ranks of past and passed-away projects.
Home
This summer has been a period in my real life of returning home. In May, I took a job close to home (four miles close in fact) and have been working hard at making the day job fit better into my home life. I'm not fully there yet, because I often work long hours, but being close to home has allowed me the opportunity to participate in my kids' lives more little by little. In that same vein, I will now be making a similar change in my virtual art life -- returning to my home here in the coop. With the scant time I have to work on art projects, I will once again be dedicating myself to concentrating on this project and slowly shedding the multitude of miscellaneoous projects I have been on. So, back to the props! Also, in addition to working on the coop projects, I will be starting the process of learning how to make a whole game -- more on that later.
Help
Along with me returning to my home here on the web, I would also like to invite you into our home. Come on in and pull up a chair. You are welcome to join us in our goal of making the best library of original free game art for indie game developers. We have a proven track record of following through with completing work, which is a real rarity in the world of volunteer virtual teams. We are very quick to give credit where credit is due, our work has been downloaded by thousands of developers and there are, at least to my knowledge, dozens of serious projects that are using our work. In the past we have allowed for a very organic process for joining the team or submitting work to the community effort, but I am considering proposing to add some more structure to the way work is created, which ultimately would allow more non-artists the opportunity to contribute to the effort in a concrete way. In short, if you are looking for a place that will let your work shine, consider joining in the effort. And, for all you devlopers out there using our models -- send us screenshots. The biggest help in motivating us to do more work is to show us how you are using our work.
Thanks
There are always many, many thanks that need to be passed around in a group effort like this. At this point, I would like to take the time to offer up a new bit of thanks that I have not mentioned before. Thanks to the generous monetary donations of a number of you (and in a few cases very generous), our hosting bill for the year has been paid. As soon as I get the time to noodle with the template for this blog, I will be removing all the commercial revenue generating links that we have on here, like the google ads and the amazon affiliate links. They never did a bit of good anyways and really did not fit the personality of our site and project. We were never here to make money off of this, but knowing that this project can sustain itself due to the kindness of the community makes the effort worthwhile. Thanks for throwing us a few dollars. We plan to keep this going for a good while longer.
Oh, and before I forget, I've started posting new stuff in the forums. It's time to get this thing rolling again.
Stay free.
~shs~
Birth
Last week marked a milestone for us. We passed our second birthday. Yup, this project is now two years old. Yes, things have been slow around here the past few months, but I can't let the date pass without acknowledging what a remarkable thing that is. The past year has also marked a few births around these parts. Both Terry and I welcomed new babies into our lives, which (and I think I am stating the obvious here) is probably the biggest reason you haven't seen me as much recently. There have also been new jobs, new schools, new homes... you know all the real life stuff. The biggest event for the coop in the past year has been the release of our first complete pack, back last fall. It was a long time that we worked on it and I am still proud that we were able to welcome this baby out into the world. I even have a nice update to it that Terry did earlier this year that makes it even stronger and more useful -- hopefully I will get that posted soon.
Death
Another big reason I have been absent from the coop is that upon the release of the Gilman pack I finally decided to make good on a bunch of promises to work on projects that I had been putting off for a long time, some paid, some volunteer. Now, after about eight months of working on a large number of projects with many people who have been great to work with, I am kind of coming to the same realization I had when I started the coop with Terry. There are just too many dead projects out there. So much of the work I have done over the past seven years has been on projects that stall, fizzle, or die. They all start out with great enthusiasm and planning, coast on the backs of the hard work of a few people and then slowly drift away. I hope to work on some of these projects again, but for now it is time to concentrate on making sure the coop here does not join the ranks of past and passed-away projects.
Home
This summer has been a period in my real life of returning home. In May, I took a job close to home (four miles close in fact) and have been working hard at making the day job fit better into my home life. I'm not fully there yet, because I often work long hours, but being close to home has allowed me the opportunity to participate in my kids' lives more little by little. In that same vein, I will now be making a similar change in my virtual art life -- returning to my home here in the coop. With the scant time I have to work on art projects, I will once again be dedicating myself to concentrating on this project and slowly shedding the multitude of miscellaneoous projects I have been on. So, back to the props! Also, in addition to working on the coop projects, I will be starting the process of learning how to make a whole game -- more on that later.
Help
Along with me returning to my home here on the web, I would also like to invite you into our home. Come on in and pull up a chair. You are welcome to join us in our goal of making the best library of original free game art for indie game developers. We have a proven track record of following through with completing work, which is a real rarity in the world of volunteer virtual teams. We are very quick to give credit where credit is due, our work has been downloaded by thousands of developers and there are, at least to my knowledge, dozens of serious projects that are using our work. In the past we have allowed for a very organic process for joining the team or submitting work to the community effort, but I am considering proposing to add some more structure to the way work is created, which ultimately would allow more non-artists the opportunity to contribute to the effort in a concrete way. In short, if you are looking for a place that will let your work shine, consider joining in the effort. And, for all you devlopers out there using our models -- send us screenshots. The biggest help in motivating us to do more work is to show us how you are using our work.
Thanks
There are always many, many thanks that need to be passed around in a group effort like this. At this point, I would like to take the time to offer up a new bit of thanks that I have not mentioned before. Thanks to the generous monetary donations of a number of you (and in a few cases very generous), our hosting bill for the year has been paid. As soon as I get the time to noodle with the template for this blog, I will be removing all the commercial revenue generating links that we have on here, like the google ads and the amazon affiliate links. They never did a bit of good anyways and really did not fit the personality of our site and project. We were never here to make money off of this, but knowing that this project can sustain itself due to the kindness of the community makes the effort worthwhile. Thanks for throwing us a few dollars. We plan to keep this going for a good while longer.
Oh, and before I forget, I've started posting new stuff in the forums. It's time to get this thing rolling again.
Stay free.
~shs~
posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 11:24 AM
4 Comments:
Good to see you back pal!
(I feel like you are my pal, even when I dont now you. Why? well, for two simple reasons. I read romanticism on your posts, and I feel identified. And second, you, with your work and motivation, are helping me, make my little dream of a game)
What are friens, if not people that helps each others to realize their dreams?
Thank you.
Novack.-
(atosmdq at gmail From Argentina)
5:52 PM
Well, what a great message and a great way to end my day. Thank you for your kind comments. I hope to see your project one day.
Scott
12:08 AM
Babies everywhere! I'm feeding Elouise (daughter) as I'm typing, at 7am, and very glad she sleeps so long at night. I've started tapping into that free night time (just like you do Scott), working on uni assignments, but when the semesters over, I hope to use that time for other productive things (hey hey co-op).
Its a shame not all your projects stayed the course. Did any of those projects have intention to become commercial? were they the ones that fizzled, or not?
Theres so little chance of making money in this game, saves a lot of heart-ache just doing it for fun and help others (are we helping others? I hope so). Sometimes it doesn't feel so fun tho, for me its hard to keep the self-motivation going.
Its great you mentioned you want to learn to make an entire game Scott, I've been endeavouring to learn programming for a while now. I'll start small tho, I need to make a program for keeping track of the family's finances (need more than spreadsheets), which should give me the confidence to move onto harder things, maybe web programming.
One thing thats always bugged me about how we work is that we have only exported to one engine so far, but its hard work, exporting to anymore would put more strain on our time. We haven't had anyone export any of our stuff to other engines yet (or they haven't told us), is it because they don't know how? or are they pressed for time too?
I guess if they were very serious about their project, they would save time and money by spending a few hours exporting our stuff, instead of hiring artists or doing everything from scratch themselves.
If its a case of them not knowing how, can we help them?
Id like to get a feel about what engines people are using, maybe in your next post you can ask people to tell us their preferred engine?
Its now 10am, taken me 3 hours to write this while looking after bub, LOL ;)
take care
4:48 PM
Hey Terry, Great to hear from you. Were you doing the typing with one hand while holding the baby thing? Every day is a challenge to find the time to work on art. I too find it hard to self-motivate and I think a big part of me wandering out to work on other people's porojects is that I was hoping for a little external motivation. It is a very unique and strange thing that we have here in having a project where everyone who has contributed has been here for entirely self-motivated reasons.
I'll get into who the users of our work are at some point, but for now I would say I am more heartened than you I think because emails come to my email address. There is a lot of great work out there being done with our work and I hope to show that stuff on the blog soon. My favorite bit of feedback has been that our models and tutorials are being used as part of the curriculum in at least five separate college level game design classes. In fact about one-fifth of our traffic comes from schools.
And as for the making my own game thing, I will be working in Flash. I have made a number of almost-games as part of my day job and feel great about going one more step and making a pretty basic, but complete, game. More on it soon.
Scott
3:34 PM
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