General topics about Barons of the Galaxy
Evolution of the Splash Logo
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Doctor Dread Administrator Posts: 1478
3/4/2017
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I’ve been working on Barons of the Galaxy for a while now, years on and off, and I have seen it change dramatically over that time. One of the things that have evolved from inception to production over the last year was the website and splash logo. Every Indie developer has at least one good story about developing their game. To me this is the one that stands out most in my mind.
So my game is a SciFi themed strategy game with a heavy emphasis on politics, like a space opera. Where do I start with a “look” for that kind of game? There was a table top game I played a long time ago called Succession Wars. It was a war game based in the Battletech Universe but the scope was the galaxy and the players were representing the 5 Houses moving entire battalions of mechs around. I remember how I liked the Box Cover Art of that game and how at a glance you can tell what the game was about. It had 5 different kinds of leaders over some combat units. A modern game that had the same look was Novus Aeterno. I based my splash art around this inspiration.
Four or Five upper body portraits representing different personalities and positions and some unit flying out of the image sounds great. But where am I going to get artwork like that? I’m not that kind of artist. Well I can’t use images borrowed from the internet when I go live so I will eventually have to pay to have my own assets created but for now, just to get a prototype going, I will borrow from the internet! Looking around for Sci Fi portraits I came across ones created in Eve Online portrait generator. These look great and after a while I found something resembling “The Captain”, “The evil diplomat”, “The Good Pirate”, “ The Bad Pirate”, the “Corporate” and an extra.
Now I went looking for some cool looking ships and some kind of background. I’m thinking ships flying out of a black hole on one side and then a planet with cities or lights on the other. That would represent the game somewhat. So Again I found cool looking ships from Eve Online to use temporarily and some planet from google images that fit the look. Then Using Photoshop I put it all together with some appropriate text font and Viola, I got something going
I thought that was pretty good looking for scavenged images from google so I ran with that logo as inspiration while worked on the games website. After a while I felt I could make a much better looking version of those portraits if I made my own portraits in EvE Onlines portrait creator. I had played Eve Online years ago and knew all about it. My old account was long gone but I was able to get into the Portrait generator and create my own portraits. Now I had more control over the look/lighting etc., and came up with these.
Putting it together with the existing logo layout and I got something that looked pretty good. It’s a shame I can’t use any of it on the live site but it was very helpful in putting my idea on paper.
With that look I started working on how the website itself should look. Using the same kind of color schemes I came up with something that looks like this
Which turned into an actual website that was looking like this:
At this point the website was working and the game was almost ready for a Beta Test but I can’t use anything in that splash logo on the live site. Technically I think you CAN use other images like this as long as you are not making on money on your site. You are considered to be a “Fan site”. Just to be safe it was time to start having my own artwork done. Having the current logo helped immensely in getting something similar done. I found an artist on deviantart.com where I liked the look of his other portraits. I asked him to do a commission for me for the 5 portraits. I described what they were to look like and showed him the current logo as a guide. For $400 He came back with 5 hi res portraits which I put into my logo layout
I also had another artist who had AWESOME looking ship design do work for me also. For around $100 a unit I had already gotten back a couple of 3D models plus rendered ship images from him.
Putting that together my splash logo was about 90% legal, except for the planet.
But to be honest I wasn’t too happy with the look of the logo. I’m not an artist and for all the quality of the ships and custom portraits, the logo itself looked very bland. But then out of nowhere, the artist who made my portraits sent me his own vision for the splash logo! He said he had enjoyed working on them and the likes the game so who sent me this
Hey now! That splash art was looking pretty professional. It was as huge leap from what I had made and looked great. There was a problem however. The image wasn’t formatted at the right size for my website layout, I couldn’t make it work and when I asked the artist for the original Photoshop image where I can move around all the parts of the image, he didn’t have it any more. I didn’t want to remake the website just for this image. It also had the wrong color scheme with gold trim etc. I let it simmer for months until I told myself “Ya know, you’ve been doing Photoshop for years, you can put something together with some paid for stock images”. So I hunkered down and worked on new splash image using the last one as inspiration. I went to Shutterstock.com and got some paid images and vector graphics like $50 worth, even the planet and space backgrounds. I spent a few days putting together a 100% legal paid for and custom splash logo that looked so good it almost made me cry
I was very proud of myself for how it came out in the end. It almost looked like a “Real Game” I reworked the website a little but to allow it change width with the splash image and the website now looks as good as the logo
For a solo project I think it all came together looking pretty good. The logo and website had morphed over the course of a year. With a little help and some confidence It went from an inspirational box cover art from 1980s to a Splash Art that an Indie Dev can be proud of. The lesson learned was to stay on it, let it simmer and don’t be afraid to get some help. I hope other developers have the same good experience with it which I did =)
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BaronOfThGalaxy Posts: 47
3/10/2017
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It's funny how stuff got their backstory.
Also they ask $100 for each image?, I should become a drawer LOL
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