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Quick art question

Quigs

Magister
Joined
Sep 16, 2003
Messages
1,392
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Jersey
Checked out the artwork for the game, it looks ALOT like the old ultizurk games, down even to the UI, any influence there?
 

Wolf Mittag

Wolf Mittag Software Development
Developer
Joined
Dec 18, 2003
Messages
331
Location
Shanghai
Artwork: If you're referring to Ultima, they "invented" this sort of twisted bird's-eye-perspective, didn't they? Insofar as Teudogar follows the same approach, there's certainly a similarity. And yes, both games use inventory windows that can be moved freely.

But as soon as you compare details (e.g. http://www.teudogar.com/teud-u7.jpg), you'll realize that that's where the similarities end: Shapes, outlines, textures and pixel patterns are alltogether different. There's definitely been no theft, and, to the best of my knowledge, not even "borrowing".

Teudogar's graphics have been created independently from scratch by a German graphics artist called Arne Niemuth, who's been paid pretty well for his work, and yes, I do possess all legal rights and title to them.
 

Wolf Mittag

Wolf Mittag Software Development
Developer
Joined
Dec 18, 2003
Messages
331
Location
Shanghai
Quigs: Sorry if my reply sounded a bit cross, but well, that damn artwork has indeed cost me a lot of money, and it's been a really heavy load of work for Arne: I've witnessed him painting thousands of graphics tiles, modifying them on my request, re-modifying them yet again, adding improvements, experimenting with different versions etc, until we both felt they looked just exactly right - and all of this in literally thousands of cases. There's definitly gone a lot of effort into these graphics (even if they may not look stunningly good by today's standards), and that may be the reason why I always tend to get a bit more upset than necessary whenever I see them criticized...
 

Quigs

Magister
Joined
Sep 16, 2003
Messages
1,392
Location
Jersey
hehe, sorry, my short question may have come out accusatory, was actually hoping for some similarity.

Did some digging around, cant find the name of the guy who did the artwork for the series, even took me a while to find some screenshots. Ultizurk was an old shareware rpg series that kept me entertained on long visits to my aunt with a computer back in the earliy ninties. Then the series just dropped off the face of the earth. The screenshot I found is of some guy trying to finish a 4th game, so obviously the graphics arent as detalied, but still, looks like you got better quality.


http://members.aol.com/lotcyclops/uzsmp1.jpg
 

Wolf Mittag

Wolf Mittag Software Development
Developer
Joined
Dec 18, 2003
Messages
331
Location
Shanghai
Hello Quigs, I see. :) I'm sorry. As you can tell from my reaction, I'd never heard of this game. In my opinion, from what I can see in that screenshot, their walls, grass, trees etc look good taken for themselves. However, they seem to lack a couple of hundreds of extra variation tiles, i.e., they too frequently place the very same, unvaried graphics tile next to each other several times in a row, instead of using different, variated versions for each occurrence (like Ultima or Teudogar do).

Nonetheless, you're right that their graphics would have provided a perfect basis to start from. If I were to start all over again, I'd really rather try to buy a complete set of graphics from a game like that, and then build on that, improving or adding what's necessary etc, instead of having everything painted from scratch, which is really a pretty stupid approach...
 

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