And where do they get the Inspiration from?

ldw designed virtual villagers

If you go on the "Menu" screen of your (VV2) game, then to "Help", then in the left bottom, to "Credits", you may have the answer.
For "where do they get the Inspiration from", IDK but you could ask to themselves!

Matt and I design the villagers together. He is the actual artist, though. What I do is that I give him direction on what I want (sometimes I just give broad adjectives, sometimes I give him tribal pictures from books or the internet). Most of the time he tries to recreate my vision and some of them are from his own creative vision. On my side, I do a lot of research and read a lot of books. Arthur and I also traveled to a couple of islands.

Bravo to you both!! I really love their look!! that's a great job!!

Yeah! you've done a great job. It's so original. I just love your games, the kind you would never tire of.

What islands did you and arthur visit?
I also think you and matt did a good job creating the villagers.

Cool, I love reading about how ldw makes their games!!!

Wow that is pretty neat & it is cool that U can go to different islands Which ones ???

If you ever need an "assistant" on one of your island hopping trips I think I may be available lol

I'd like to hear about the time Arthur & Carla were on that one island & they couldnt find anything to eat so decided finally to crack open a coconut...Carla was so happy she kissed him then all of a sudden, whaddya know? A baby! (But before the baby arrived Carla did not want to be asked to do any work for a short time.)
hee hee

Hi guys. Yes, the look of the villagers comes from Carla and I throwing ideas back and forth, she pretty much covered it. There's a lot of experimentation and trial and error on my end, sometimes the sprites take a few "passes" before the read well at the final size I render them out at. Heads in particular sometimes come about from experimentation, I'll send her a render, she'll suggest a change or a different color, and that's basically how we come up with them.

I have a background as a painter and illustrator, but I generally just go straight into my 3d modelling program, cooking stuff up from Carla's influences and directions, and throwing some of my own her way for approval. And the colors and outfit patterns are done in Photoshop with my Cintiq tablet. I have my favorites among the villager models, once the game is launched, I'll point them out. ;-)

-Matt

May I say, you've done an excellent job with Carla on creating these villagers. We can't thank you enough for your work.

That said, I can't wait to see what your favorite villager models are when VV3 is launched.

I agree that you have all done an excellent job with the villagers.

Matt or Carla, there is something I have really been wanting, and I wonder if it could be released to the public. I would like to have files which separate the clothes from the arms/legs of the villagers. I also use Photoshop. When I try to change the color of the clothing which contains reds or yellows, it changes the skin color, as well. And it's a royal pain to separate the skin parts from the clothing so you can make the changes ONLY to the clothing.

What I would dearly love is a file of the "naked" villagers (get your minds back to PG people). Since their bodies are covered with clothes, it would only include their extremities (arms, legs, neck). If I had such a file, then I could do whatever I wanted with clothing, layer that on top of the "naked" villagers file, and presto, my own new clothes!

Even more fun would be to have things, such as armbands, ankle bands, etc. that we could add if we wanted. All we'd need is the .psd file with those in a separate layer. We could then change the colors and add them to any villager we want.

I think this would be fun to a lot of people. It would be great to get an actual .psd file! I'd even pay for it! Making mods is a large part of the fun I have with the games.

You've done a wonderful job with both games and I am looking forward to VV3.

I feel that you have an untapped market here because your games are different from any other other games I've played and tested. Yes, there are quite a few that try to copy what you do but none have come close to the core of your games.

Kudos to LDW.

As someone who knows nothing about game production, I would love to see a section (or maybe a video) that details what exactly goes into producing a game. How long does it actually take to produce a game from start to finish (6 months/6 years?)How do the ideas come about....who draws them....how are they put together to form continuity in a game...what happens during beta testing etc...etc..? I think a lot of people here would benefit greatly (myself included) if there was an understanding of what was involved......and it would possibly reduce the amount of 'when will it be ready?' posts

Yea, but Im sure that there will be a dishonest bunch who would copycat the game if they saw how it was made. That kind of ruins it for the rest of it. I'm sure that some of that is secret info.

To PS my own post....Lady bought to my attention that Wikepedia have this information under 'Game Development'. Its well worth the read. Thanks Lady

Wiki's info is really good for those who'd like to have some info on how it's done. Here's the link to make it easy for everyone:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_development

I'd like to quote one small section which I think may help others understand why a game can sit at 99% for longer than most people would expect:


Red emphasis mine.

When I ran my own small business of writing applications for small businesses, I learned to always quote the time at least 3 times more than I ever dreamed it would time. You can never believe how the very simplest of things can put everything into a screeching halt.

For example, I ran into a problem on one application in which the results were not correct, but only part of the time. They were correct the rest of the time. As Spock would say, that's illogical. I went through every tiny shred of code. Scrutinized every loop, every branch, everything!

It turned out to be a _bug_ in the software I was using to write the code. Whenever it ran directly after another code, it would not work correctly. But when another command was issued, it would reset the first one back to working correctly. Very strange. The solution was simple enough once I figured it out. I just had to write a patch routine and call it every time I was needing to use the flawed command. That way, regardless of what combination of selections the user made, the patch would always reset that commend just before it was used.

Can you imagine what it took just to find that one simple thing? And it wasn't even the fault of my own coding. It was an anomaly in the language itself that no one had found yet (I reported it so it was fixed later).

You never know when one tiny thing can throw you way off. All you can do is use your best judgement based on your own previous experience and hope you don't run into something like that last minute. But sometimes it happens, and you have no choice but to delay the project. It's not what you want or what your customers want, but it's what must be done or else you'd deliver a defective product which really messes everything up for everyone.

That's why I'm so patient, I guess. I don't want to see people who are working to give us a product in which we will receive great pleasure to be under great pressure. Sure, they get paid for it. They have to eat, after all. But there is absolutely no reason why any human being should be pressured to rush anything as unimportant as a game (it's not life or death). They'll rush themselves enough as they can't wait to deliver the product (and put food on the table). I just think work must be balanced with actual life. So if they do run across some unforeseen _bug_, then that's what happens, and we'll just wait a bit longer.

When VV3 finally ships, I very much hope it is as joyful an event for those who developed the game as it is for us who play it.

Thanks for that complexity..being new, I didnt know how to put the link in. I highly recommend everyone read the section on testing...:)

You're very welcome.

Adding a link is extremely easy. Just copy the url from your browser and when you're writing your message, simply past the url — as is — in your message. It will automatically be changed into a clickable link.

The only thing you need to do is make sure there is a blank space before and after the url you post.

There are other ways of adding links, but this works great, especially when just starting out.

Unfortuantely, it's not really feasable at this point. I sorta left out a step. When I use Photoshop, the skins are painted in Photoshop, then the textures are imported into a 3d modelling program, then they're applied to the 3d model. Then the 3d model frames are rendered out and organized into strips, which then go to Carla, so that she can go insane trying to align them all. (just ask her!) The source Villager files are 3d models, and the clothes are essentially part of the 3d model, so it's hard to separate the two without going back to the source files. I suppose it's possible to render out the outfit minus the extremities, but it'd take a loooooot of time, and then there'd be all sorts of other issues with masking, deleting geometry, etc, lots of technical boring 3d rendering stuff. ;-)

frangipani- the best resource to find out more about game development is a game industry site called Gamasutra.com, it's got what are know as "postmortems" where developers talk frankly about what challenges came up during the development of their projects. It's a fascinating site to just click around in if you're interested in how games are made, and you might just find an interview or two with Arthur in there somewhere. ^_^

Yeah, I can appreciate what you're saying.

I have considered creating my own template by combining arms and legs most uncovered. I noticed that there's not just one template for all characters as there are slight differences in leg positions, etc. to help offer a more natural appearance. But it doesn't seem as if there are that many models so while it would take some time to do it, it wouldn't be terribly bad either.

The real pain would be having to remove the arms, legs, neck from all of the positions for each character. Creating the bottom layer of arms and legs isn't so bad, but there's no way around having to erase the arms and legs from the outfits of each and every position of each and every outfit you want to change. Ugh.

I think I'll stick to modifying the clothes that do not have red or yellow values unless there is a significant difference in brightness.

Maybe after VV3 has been released and most people have finished their first try at the puzzles and all, LDW can do a contest of mods? That would add that much more fun to the games for us all! Plus, then I can be lazy and just steal other people's hard work. LOL!

Found, read, and thoroughly enjoyed. I didn't know Author was such a star in the business!

For those wanting to read some of his interviews and other info regarding VV, here's a link to the search I used:

"Last Day of Work" search on gamasutra.com

I didn't read everything, but I did find one line that I couldn't help but chuckle. Regarding the question of, "What metaphors are most cozy or interesting to the target demographic?", the article said,"...Humphrey [Author] suggests, anything involving food or shopping is a safe bet. (Link to article quoted)

Of course, that begs the question... When will our villagers be able to build stores so they can start shopping?

Lol, that would be funny.

You have good eyes. Another way, if you want to mod the game's art would be to pixel-edit out the limbs (as in, erase the clothing and leave just the limbs) and use that as a masking template in Photoshop. it'll be tedious, but once you do it the first time, the mask will do the hard work for you for any other villagers with similar outfits. It might not be perfect, but it's a place to start.

The villagers are always interested in food, and Plant Tycoon and Fish Tycoon look after the shopping.

Thank you for starting this thread. Thanks for the many insightful posts into the making of a game. It's really interesting to learn about it. Even more when it concerns out little villagers. I had no idea it was so complicated.

It's also gone a longggg way in helping me to be much more patient.

The villagers in VV2 could shop for clothes.

The part I emphasized in your quote is what I had hoped to avoid! LOL!

I'm pretty good with photoshop so I know I can do it. I was just hoping there was something already available to save me the time. Why reinvent the wheel when it's already invented?

However, I can fully appreciate that there is a lot more to making the villagers than just using Photoshop. So I'll make my mods when I feel like it. Sometimes I just enjoy working on something that's somewhat mindless (erasing pixels), but still enjoyable (making new outfits).