Monday, March 1, 2010

Ideastorming for Better Wesnoth Campaign Building: Artwork

The community of the Battle of Wesnoth is big and the forums have numerous topics and various subthemes. From my interest towards the graphical solutions and artwork I have searched for the ways the community works in this field. In the forums people post their artwork both in progress and finished and wait for critique towards it. There is a thorough post by development team on how to critique. I started from that and firstly would like to point out the skill set needed for being a good Wesnoth (and probably overall) designer:
(a) conceptual/stylistic judgement and design skills;
(b) a technical understanding of how to model aspects of reality eg. knowledge of human proportion, realistic lighting and perspective; and
(c) the ability to translate the concept and understanding into an artwork. eg. skill at drawing & ability to work a paint program.
The problematics of design derived from insufficiency in one of the above mentioned fields are illustrated and divided into levels. Understand your level of proficiency and notice hwo you should or should not critique.

It sounds a bit harsh and funny the way the author states: "Who should critique?: Someone with superior skill in the pertinent area (or subarea) only. Anyone else is incapable of providing useful advice." I guess it might happen that useful advice comes from anyone, but probably the author speaks of experience and it should be followed.

From all the points listed in the post about how to critique and how to take the critique, when to do it and when to drop it, I think it is very important to give out exact info on what do you think at which stage your work is, mention the problems you see yourself and ask upfront what would you like others to comment on precisely. This all helps make the communication more clear, faster and more practical.

As a coclusion. It seems to me the community is growing and evolving. There are lots of people putting their effort to the development and the community is working its ways to create the guidelines to go to a higher level of organisation in the campaign building process.

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