Hey Roll20 family,
it's great to be a part of the community! My names Chris, while most people
call me Doc, and I just became an asset creator here. My main focus is going to
be on tokens, maps and handouts, with the possibility of converting a couple of
my games into modules (I'm getting into talks on that one right now). History (TL;DR
version): I've been a GM/Home brewer about 20 years, artist/illustrator for 15, and
game developer for 3.
So besides the brief
introduction, I'm really interested in picking your brains about what kind of
assets you like, why, and toss a few ideas around (this is going to be a long post BTW). Round one: Maps. So for the first round, I
want to talk about maps! I'm seeing a few kinds of maps on the asset store,
and I'm curious if there's another type people want to see. I made some quick examples, and I'll list my personal pros and cons. Style 1: Top down. My pros: This style is really easy to navigate, and combat's pretty straight forward visually speaking. This view is pretty simple for breaking up into tiles, making them great for modular mixing and matching. My cons: I like walls, which I'm not getting here. Playing with depth is fairly simple, but height is another story (see what I did there:). Style 2: Top down with perspective. My pros: You get some walls back for art, and it can look pretty cool on smaller closed off assets. My cons: So perspective here throws a couple of monkey wrenches in. The image above uses a different type of vanishing point, so modular maps get harder to build, practically requiring assets be rebuilt based on where they are on the perspective line. While this style can look cooler, and provide more surfaces for art, doing thing's like throwing perspective on the table might mess with some GM's combat mojo when it comes to unit placement. Style 3: Top down semi-plano. My pros: Most dungeons/interiors are built like this image, so in this case I get all my walls. Assets that can go on the walls look way cooler all of a sudden, and can be rotated freely for use on any wall. Most other assets can be built top down style, making them less confusing during combat. As an added bonus, tiling becomes easy again, and you can play with height effects a little better. My cons: Because this perspective has less to do with actual perception, and more to do with math and geometry, you end up having to lay stuff out differently. Check out the table. Where other maps allow you to squeeze by on the left, now you would have move that assets over, which really means you would have to make the whole area bigger. Style 4: Semi plano. My pros: I mostly like this style because it adds more dimension to floor assets, like the table. While I wouldn't go with this for dungeons, this would be my go to for over world stuff (Think old school Legend of Zelda, dungeons were very style 3, but the over world was like this). At the "top" of the game world, you would have to have a piece of art for the horizon to finish it off, which I think would look cool. My cons: So this style lends itself to playing with height better, but gets kind of messy for anything below ground level. You would still have the same spacing issues. Probably the biggest con, designing you accents becomes a many folded process. wall items need to be built twice, once for north facing items, and then again for everything else. "Floor" assets are worse off, needing to be built four ways, as they couldn't rotate. So for my interests, I like styles 3 and 4. While 4 is horrendous work flow wise, it makes for some cool maps. 3 seems pretty standard, and is also a favorite of mine as far as looks go. My goal though, is to design stuff you in the community will like and use, so let me know what you want! Side scrolling maps, 3/4 view hex map tiles, whatever. Since I've suckered you into reading this far, what kind of art styles do you like? Water colored over world maps? Cell shaded dungeons? Round two: tokens. So these are my thoughts: Quarter view seems to be the best choice for tokens when you take into consideration usability, and a better choice for the artist as far as "canvas" room. Top down looks to me like the quickest design choice, but not the best when it comes to making cool looking stuff. The POV is really limited here. Profile tokens are pretty much jacked the second you try to rotate them. This especially sucks because these would probably be the coolest, most usable art. Bust and head shots seem like the go to for important NPC's, and possibly PC's. These seem like they fall apart the second you consider bigger, non humanoid monsters (I'm thinking dragon, tarrasque), because they wont depict scale right (Unless you go with a big a** border). Now all of this is my personal opinion, only thrown out there so you all get a sense for where my head is at. The important part is what do you like? Does it seem like one of these is becoming more standardized (I'm thinking quarter view), and messing with other formats is a waste of time? Do you want a little of everything? Or combinations of things? Am I completely wrong, and what you really want is side profile characters in giant mekton? Round 3: My random thoughts about things that might be cool. So this is just me spit balling, with either questions, or things I think might be cool (some of which probably already exist): What's your favorite art style? Watercolor, acrylics, comic book style ink and color, anime, manga? While I'm not going to pretend to be great at all of these, I got a little range. What assets are you interested in? From what I can see maps and tokens are the jam, but what about handout stuff like magical item and weapon art? Icon sets for the GM layer? If the art was cool enough, packs for major NPC's you could slap your story on top of? How often are you using decks? Do you thing there is an interesting thing that could be designed for that? Dice decks? Random story/encounter generators? When it comes to these assets, do you prefer to see only items based on preexisting stuff? Or would you be interested in new designs you could make your own? Same as above, but for things like stylized world maps, or possibly even landing pages for games? ARE YOU OLD ENOUGH TO LAUGH AT THIS ! What's your thoughts on system neutral setting material (Though I think this might be better off in a modules conversation)? Would you like/care/want to see this stuff at least partially produced on twitch? Probably not stuff like the coloring phase and formatting ( unless you too owe a debt to the foul and ancient imp known as boredom ), but the stuff like conceptualizing, sketching, and critiquing? Don't get me wrong, I'm not done, I just think you may have had close to enough :) So schedule wise I will be dealing with some convention stuff until about the 8th, after which I will start getting my boogie on. Until then I will be roughing stuff out, setting up templates, and hopefully talking with you all here! Thanks for taking the time to read this, if you've made it this far, I have cleared with every Roll20 GM that you get to re-roll all ones next game you are the coolest person ever. "Every gamer knows the feud between Star Wars and Star Trek is pointless. In both universes, the one with the most pips wins"
