Flare

Free the Monsters! campaign

Justin Nichol is a contributing artist to Flare. He is the artist behind all of the NPC portraits, the texture work on the Wyverns, and the skin textures on the upcoming Wandercall base human models. Justin brings tremendous skill and creativity to the team, and that makes it even possible to dream big about the future of Flare.

That’s why I’m so excited about his new indiegogo campaign titled Free The Monsters. The goal is to create a professional quality set of monster concepts and models and release them to the free culture community (CC-BY-SA license, the same that my games use).

It helps Wandercall

What you see in the Flare alpha demo is mostly me barely able to operate Blender. I’ve come a long way since then, but reworking all new assets at a higher quality takes a ton of time and effort. Wandercall represents a grand project to make an Action RPG and set of assets that is fun, beautiful, and completely free/libre. But I can’t do all of that on my own.

I absolutely love all of the monster concepts shown so far in the Free The Monsters campaign. They will each be perfect for the style and tone for Wandercall. Having concepts or entire models already done will help me get new monsters out the pipeline faster, and more content tools in the hands of creators.

It helps Open Game Art

Two common complaints about Open Game Art: it’s hard to find professional quality work, and it’s hard to find a large set of consistent styles to use in one game.

This is the kind of project that bring OGA closer to that dream. Having this set of high quality fantasy monsters will spawn a new quality of FLOSS games. Also, it will set a style guide that others can use to contribute to this collection. In the future I want to see dozens of monsters featured here, covering the needs of fantasy games with a strong artistic style.

The style is strong but inclusive

Have a look at Justin’s goblin concept. He’s pushing style and shapes that give the goblin a definite feel and tone. But he manages to do this without forcing a specific style on the entire game. This goblin would look great and be visually interesting in most fantasy games (barring those with a completely unconventional style of their own).

And style is important. It’s critical for this goblin to read as “goblin” but still have its own style that isn’t directly Tolkein or Warcraft. A strong style prevents the model from just looking like “short green man”. Here the strong shape and silhouette give the monster an identity. So later when we make room for other humanoids they will each be visually distinct.

Why you should contribute

If all these monsters get posted CC-BY-SA, why should you personally donate money? I’m preaching to the FLOSS choir here so bear with me.

First, if you love Flare and are looking forward to Wandercall, this is the best place to put your money right now. These creatures will be an absolutely huge help to Wandercall and will get that project moving far sooner than anyone expects. Whatever monsters come from the campaign, I will use to create 2D isometric sprite sheets ready to plug into the Flare engine.

Second, if you love Free Culture and want to see greater works come from it. Open Game Art just does not have a professional quality set of 3D monsters yet. This will fill a huge gap in their library. This campaign has the potential to help dozens of projects in the short term, and countless ones in the future.

Third, you’re an art patron. What Justin and company are doing here isn’t just creating strong art and design on their own. They are enabling a new group of young creators to chase their dreams. These assets greatly lower the bar for what game projects are possible without a budget. I want to see the kind of games and art people create when the tools and assets are ready to go.

Games are a largely untapped medium because the barrier to entry is so high (between programming, 3D modeling, etc). If you love the medium and want it to thrive creatively, consider helping us free these monsters.

-Clint Bellanger

Run Cycle

Although the three female models for Wandercall are very different sizes, they are able to use the same skeletal animation.

Tile Scales

The new art assets use the more universal scale of 1 tile = 1 square meter. The pixel resolution of tiles depends on how we’re using them. Have a look at these different rendering scales.

The scale of 256 pixels (as in, the base tile size is 256×128) is the upper limit for these new models. This scale could be used for equipment paper dolls, or could serve in a few years as the default size for 4X resolution displays.

128 pixels (the middle one above) is about the right size for our heroine when playing at or near 1080p.

64 pixels is near the size of current Flare alpha assets. This resolution is great for small screens (about 640×480) or low-power machines. If we reused these human models for an RTS game, this would be a good size for regular human units at 1080p.

32 pixels is about the lower limit of these assets. We’d use this scale when porting to 320×240 resolution (or smaller) devices.

Another piece for this modern clothes set: classic canvas sneakers.

Modern Style

The art for Wandercall will have a significantly higher quality bar than Flare’s “Fantasy Core” set. Assets will require finished textures, normal maps, etc. to make use of the pixel density.

To get used to this new quality standard I decided to start by making something familiar: denim jeans. This lets me focus purely on the technical aspects and not worry about being creative at the same time. Here are the jeans at Wandercall’s default scale: 128×64 base tile size which represent a square meter.

Here’s the 512px diffuse texture. The base denim texture is a public domain image. I painted the wear, edges, and folds in GIMP. The model also has a normal map baked from a pair of jeans with more details modeled in.

This scale should be just right for current HD resolutions. The art will hold up at double this size (e.g. for 4K displays). Here are the same jeans at 256×128 base tile size. I’ve fitted the jeans for the three sizes of models (US sizes 8, 16, 24).

Why make modern clothes for a fantasy game? I don’t think Wandercall will be strictly medieval fantasy. I want to do some time bending and intentional anachronisms. The game world will have little physical or temporal cohesion; it will feel more like a dreamscape or afterlife.

Flare’s fantascyore art mostly represents my level of 3D skill as of a few years ago. To me it’s worth starting with a clean slate in Wandercall. Here’s Flare’s male hero wearing the starting cloth armor, rendered to the same scale as the images above.

Although the mesh resolution hasn’t changed much, the finish quality is drastically different. I made that Flare art about 4 years ago now; hopefully it’s evident that I’ve learned a lot since then.

If I’m going to keep making art at this resolution, there’s going to be diminishing returns as I get better with 3D. The art I’m making 4 years from now won’t be so drastically different? There’s only so much detail that can be squeezed out of a few pixels. This is comforting though. I want to settle into a style that won’t be obsolete soon. I’d like to be adding to the same set of assets for a few years to come.

The jeans took about 6 hours to make over two sessions. This is faster than I expected. I figured that moving on to more detailed art means that all assets take far longer to create. But I’m also getting more efficient and skilled with the tools. I guess I’m not making “programmer art” anymore.

Today’s the last day of June. My June project, SRS Archangelle, won’t be done in time. I’ve been a little burnt out lately and decided to slow down over the last week or so.

Even though I made and released games for that half year, some of them weren’t truly finished. Heroine Dusk has potential and I want to turn it into a full game for sale. The finished/inked version of Press Any Key To Live is only 20% done. These small projects turned into longer term commitments. Having tertiary projects is too much to juggle mentally.

So at the 6-month mark I’ve decided to waive the white flag. I won’t be doing a July game. I may return later in the year to make more monthly games, but for now I want to focus on my current projects. This includes Flare of course.

-Clint

Wandercall women base models

Wandercall will use the Flare engine but will feature almost entirely new art. Here is a peek at the base female models. Players can choose their heroine’s size (small, medium, large) and skin tone (light, medium, dark). I’m also showing the WIP zombie/infected skin tone.

I’m using sizes here that are average for current industrialized nations. The models for these are US dress size 8 for small, 16 medium, and 24 for large.

I wonder: will people use the largest size? It would be great and inclusive if I support that size. I also know it’s an extra few hundred hours over the life of the project. For now I’m going for it. I’m hoping these options are close enough for most people sized 0 to 30 to make a character like themselves.

PS: I hired awesome friends to model for these three body shapes. They all lead physically active lifestyles: one enjoys nature hikes, one plays roller derby, and one is a burlesque dancer.

Building and Running Flare Games

Lately we’ve added some powerful, flexible options for running Flare games. But it could make building and running complex. So we’ve added some basic instructions to the Flare-game README.

The Simplest Setup

If you are building and running Flare Game from source, this is the simplest way to get started on all operating systems. Here you build and play Flare in a local folder instead of installing it to a standard OS folder (e.g. /usr/local or Program Files).

• Clone the flare-engine repo and build the executable.
• Clone the flare-game repo into your user directory.
• Put the flare executable inside the flare-game folder
• The executable and the “mods” folder should be in the same directory
• Run Flare

Dorkster also wrote up new instructions for Building and Running on Linux.

If you get stuck let us know — we’re still looking for ways to improve this. And if you know a lot about building/packaging and know ways for us to automate these steps, please open a discussion issue about it.

Teaser

Wandercall — when the fates curse someone to leave their home and go on an adventure.

Heroine Dusk

My April One Game A Month game is complete! It’s called Heroine Dusk. The sun hasn’t risen in days and creatures are swarming towards human civilization. You’re a serf who takes up arms agains the darkness.