Graphics artist for "Quest for the rings"

[gazj82]

Evening all,

Overview

I am looking for someone to do some graphics for my next Blitz Basic project which will be quest for the rings. Like my previous games it will be a conversion from the Philips videopac G7000 (Odessey2).

With past conversions I have stayed very true to the original games, mostly because they work so well, even keeping the graphics mostly the same as the original. This time I am going to try and take some creative liberties because all though the original plays fairly well it is not perfect and secondly I think this game could really shine with some updated visuals.


So what is "Quest for the rings" and what makes it so special?
There is nothing quite like this game that I know of. It is a hybrid of half board game and half computer game. You go round the board and when you get to a castle you flip it over and depending on what tokens are underneath determines what is in the castle. You select the the proposed enemies and dungeon type using the keyboard overlay and the console then launches the appropriate game for you.

Now, no doubt with the Videopac being an extremely limited console it did not have the capabilities to reproduce the lovely board and rules needed to run the main game, but the Amiga has. I plan to have an option at the start of the game so the player can choose to use the original board and play pieces and let a human ringmaster place the rings or use an on screen board and let the computer setup the quest.

Where I am at!
I have some very basics of a game up and running, with some free graphics as place holders. These are open source graphics either from Nethack or DCSS, can't remember now, but obviously they don't fit the game perfectly. I was always abysmal when it comes to art so I am hoping someone can help. I don't want to push further then have to alter all the code to accommodate new graphics (extra frames etc).

The tech stuff
The game looks like it will currently have to be dual playfield. The tiles are 32x32 pixels, this makes the tile per screen come close to the original game. Layed out something like this.

Level - The Dungeons
The whole graphics for this level can be on one graphics layer. In there current form they are 8 colours.

Level - The Infernos
The whole graphics for this level can again be one graphics layer. In there current form they are 8 colours.

Level - Shifting halls.
At the moment this level is using the same graphics set as the Dungeons, but it would be nice if they were different. Now because the walls shift across the map on this level the background (floors) need to be on the back layer and the foreground (floors) on the front layer. The enemies are also going to end up being blitted on this front layer, so as far as I know the walls for this level will have to share the same pallette of 8 colours as the enemies.

Level - Crystal caverns.
On this level the walls go invisible every now and again, now I think I can get away with the walls and the floors being on the same layer. I do have to blit and unblit the walls every few second (about 10-20 32x32 objects), this seems to be ok on my accelerated A1200, haven't tested it on the target system (A1200, maybe A500) yet. If this is not faster enough the foreground may have to be on the foreground layer again like the shifting halls. If so they may again have to share the same 8 colours as the enemies.

Characters
The heroes - There are 4 to pick from with any two being on screen at a time. These will be rendered as sprites so they can have there own 16 colours to share between them. They are currently in high res mode being 32x32 pixels, high res makes them tall and thing. If someone can do them in 32h x 16w that would work well. (not sure if high res sprites is an AGA thing, if it is it would be nice to lose it)

They are :-

The Warrior - Needs to wield a sword
The Wizard - Needs to fire a spell of some kind.
The Phantom - Can walk through walls, maybe needs to be drawn semi transparent in this state.
The Changeling - Becomes invisible - no extra graphics are needed for this other than maybe a transition. You are not supposed to be able to see where you are going when using the ability, but enemies will ignore you.


The Monsters
The should be blitted onto the front playfield as there won't be enough sprites for these too. I think to match the games original proportions these should probably be 24x24.

They are
The Spydorth Tyrantulus - Basically a spider
Doomwinged bloodthirsts - Bats with fangs.
The Orcs - Self explaintory.
The Dragon - There is only ever one on a screen maximum, this is bigger than anything else and should probably be around 64 pixels high and 32 wide. The original graphics looks more like a T-Rex than a dragon so hopefully we can get something more convincing.

Other stuff
I need a character select screen, so a nice large picture of each Hero would be nice. I think I will fade each one in and out maybe of the left half of the screen with some descriptive text from the original manual for each one.

Maybe a loading screen for each type of level you are about to enter, I don't think the loading times from floppy disk will be huge mind, so this might not be needed.

The board. I might try a scan of the original board, but I am not sure if this will work (do any of you Blitz guys think this can be done with HAM mode). The original board is portrait so it will probably need to scroll from top to bottom in two halves.

Some Icons - These are brass tokens on the original board game will probably be needed. They consist of :-

A castle
A D - For plain dungeons
A Crystal - For the crystal caverns
A flame - For the infernos
Two opposing arrows for the shifting halls.
A Dragon
Nightmare monsters - Has a bat and a spider on
A Ring
A Quest icon - To represent the heroes position on the board.
An hourglass showing how many turns have passed.
A possession icon - This is looks like a hieroglyph of an eye.

Pictures of the game, in the next post.

[Predseda]

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[gazj82]

Originally Posted by Predseda

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Thanks - Pictures coming.

[gazj82]

Original box art


Manual


Keyboard Overlay


Game board


Game counters / pieces


Original cartridge


Current crystal caverns screenshot


Current dungeons and shifting halls screenshot


Current infernos screenshot

[gazj82]

Not one for bumping usually. Just wanted to do a weekend bump as I expect this is when it will be seen by most people.

Apologies, there won't be anymore bumping, after this I will "try" to come up with some suitable graphics myself.

[Shatterhand]

Had never heard about this game before, seems to be a neat idea.

I hope you get an artist. Unfortunately I also suck at creating art.

[Tigerskunk]

I have seen that in a catalogue of G7000 games back in 1982 or 1983, and imagined that as the greatest game of all time...

[DancingWolf]

I'm game if you like.