Ben E Lou
12-21-2013, 10:10 AM
http://www.solecismic.com/contest/index.php
INTRODUCTION
This is an idea I've been thinking about for years. It turned into a nagging feeling one day this summer when I was working on the Calendar for Front Office Football Seven. I knew what I wanted to create graphically, and I looked at what I had created and thought to myself: this isn't good. So I placed the nagging feeling somewhere in my warehouse of things to address and went back to work on improving the game-play experience.
The feeling grew stronger as beta testers had a similar reaction to the Calendar. I managed to turn the graphic from truly painful and ugly to somewhat less painful and, well, still ugly. The Calendar is something that I think is necessary to guide players through the season. It's also, from a programmatic standpoint, an ideal place for dressed-up graphics.
Unfortunately, I have no artistic training and it isn't a talent of mine. I'm best with functional, simple graphics. When I try to draw, what I see in my mind doesn't translate to my hands.
Good art is hard to find, though. You can find someone to work on a project (many sites out there connect you to artists), but the results aren't always what you want. I was lucky, early on, to connect with a trained artist who was enthusiastic about games. She is very expensive, though, and the type of detailed instruction required for her to work on the game at this point would break the budget. She did, however, work with me on my initial vision for Front Office Football - the desk with the embedded football stadium.
The stadium was dark when you opened the program, then lit up when you began a new career. This is the image that I think defines my work. It takes me back to when I was a kid making up my own dice-paper games. My desk was and remains the surface on which my imagination creates an entire universe. This image is Solecismic Software.
People often call my games spreadsheet-like. I take that as a compliment, because the root of these imaginary worlds is statistics-based. I chose football because it's the most complex sport to simulate. In order to create a realistic football world, you have to model more than 100 statistics - the basis of which is the constant interaction of 22 players who have vastly different skill sets.
When Front Office Football first came out in 1998, the game-play alone tested the memory limits of computers. Having enough RAM to keep the simulation reasonably fast was all that mattered. We were in the transition phase from board games to computer games, and customers didn't care much about appearance.
Electronic Arts published the next two versions, and added much more polished graphics. But what they also did is greatly cut the amount of information I could display on one page. I felt that took away from the original experience - the ability to lose myself in an entire screen of numbers. I wanted to look at enough statistical information at once to get a true sense of the meaning of those numbers. So when Electronic Arts realized a niche market like career sports simulations wasn't terribly lucrative, I decided to go back to displays that fit more numbers.
I'm going to keep those displays, which is why the game requires at least a 1024x768 screen (with text displayed at 100%). There's still more room for graphics than in the past. And on higher-resolution screens, there's a lot more detail than in the past. What was fine in 1998 isn't fine today. My customers in 1998 had grown up with DOS games and 8-bit color, at best. Newer customers don't have that frame of reference.
If I want to continue to capture people who love the numbers in football, I need a more modern interface.
THE CONTEST PART
I would like to replace some of the bitmaps I use in Front Office Football. Over the years, I've received at least a dozen offers to work on this project free of cost. I've always felt that accepting those offers would be taking advantage of these customers - especially if I didn't feel I could use those graphics and it didn't lead to a longer arrangement.
But there's a lot of talent out there, and this could improve the game considerably. Who better to do that work than customers who love the game and truly get what I'm trying to do with Front Office Football?
I'm holding a contest to replace a set of the Front Office Football graphics. I'll accept submissions to replace any or all of these bitmaps. The winning eligible entry or entries will divide $400 in potential prize money.
To be eligible, bitmaps must be original work, and the artist must be willing and able to sign the ownership rights to the work over to Solecismic Software. This means trademarks must be respected (no NFL team logos or names, for example) and copyrights must be respected (no use of anyone else's photographs or underlying work product).
The contest ends on December 31.
The list of bitmaps designated for potential replacement can be found here (http://www.solecismic.com/contest/bitmaps.php), along with guidelines for use.
To submit an entry, email the files (zipped up into a package) to fof7contest at solecismic.com.
Thanks for your consideration. I look forward to seeing the results.
INTRODUCTION
This is an idea I've been thinking about for years. It turned into a nagging feeling one day this summer when I was working on the Calendar for Front Office Football Seven. I knew what I wanted to create graphically, and I looked at what I had created and thought to myself: this isn't good. So I placed the nagging feeling somewhere in my warehouse of things to address and went back to work on improving the game-play experience.
The feeling grew stronger as beta testers had a similar reaction to the Calendar. I managed to turn the graphic from truly painful and ugly to somewhat less painful and, well, still ugly. The Calendar is something that I think is necessary to guide players through the season. It's also, from a programmatic standpoint, an ideal place for dressed-up graphics.
Unfortunately, I have no artistic training and it isn't a talent of mine. I'm best with functional, simple graphics. When I try to draw, what I see in my mind doesn't translate to my hands.
Good art is hard to find, though. You can find someone to work on a project (many sites out there connect you to artists), but the results aren't always what you want. I was lucky, early on, to connect with a trained artist who was enthusiastic about games. She is very expensive, though, and the type of detailed instruction required for her to work on the game at this point would break the budget. She did, however, work with me on my initial vision for Front Office Football - the desk with the embedded football stadium.
The stadium was dark when you opened the program, then lit up when you began a new career. This is the image that I think defines my work. It takes me back to when I was a kid making up my own dice-paper games. My desk was and remains the surface on which my imagination creates an entire universe. This image is Solecismic Software.
People often call my games spreadsheet-like. I take that as a compliment, because the root of these imaginary worlds is statistics-based. I chose football because it's the most complex sport to simulate. In order to create a realistic football world, you have to model more than 100 statistics - the basis of which is the constant interaction of 22 players who have vastly different skill sets.
When Front Office Football first came out in 1998, the game-play alone tested the memory limits of computers. Having enough RAM to keep the simulation reasonably fast was all that mattered. We were in the transition phase from board games to computer games, and customers didn't care much about appearance.
Electronic Arts published the next two versions, and added much more polished graphics. But what they also did is greatly cut the amount of information I could display on one page. I felt that took away from the original experience - the ability to lose myself in an entire screen of numbers. I wanted to look at enough statistical information at once to get a true sense of the meaning of those numbers. So when Electronic Arts realized a niche market like career sports simulations wasn't terribly lucrative, I decided to go back to displays that fit more numbers.
I'm going to keep those displays, which is why the game requires at least a 1024x768 screen (with text displayed at 100%). There's still more room for graphics than in the past. And on higher-resolution screens, there's a lot more detail than in the past. What was fine in 1998 isn't fine today. My customers in 1998 had grown up with DOS games and 8-bit color, at best. Newer customers don't have that frame of reference.
If I want to continue to capture people who love the numbers in football, I need a more modern interface.
THE CONTEST PART
I would like to replace some of the bitmaps I use in Front Office Football. Over the years, I've received at least a dozen offers to work on this project free of cost. I've always felt that accepting those offers would be taking advantage of these customers - especially if I didn't feel I could use those graphics and it didn't lead to a longer arrangement.
But there's a lot of talent out there, and this could improve the game considerably. Who better to do that work than customers who love the game and truly get what I'm trying to do with Front Office Football?
I'm holding a contest to replace a set of the Front Office Football graphics. I'll accept submissions to replace any or all of these bitmaps. The winning eligible entry or entries will divide $400 in potential prize money.
To be eligible, bitmaps must be original work, and the artist must be willing and able to sign the ownership rights to the work over to Solecismic Software. This means trademarks must be respected (no NFL team logos or names, for example) and copyrights must be respected (no use of anyone else's photographs or underlying work product).
The contest ends on December 31.
The list of bitmaps designated for potential replacement can be found here (http://www.solecismic.com/contest/bitmaps.php), along with guidelines for use.
To submit an entry, email the files (zipped up into a package) to fof7contest at solecismic.com.
Thanks for your consideration. I look forward to seeing the results.