Lost Garden – This blog is awesome, and has a lot of great resources for game developers. This link is to his art page which has really good graphics, but I do recommend reading his blog.

Gfx-Lib Fuzed – offers a nice collection of royalty free game graphics consisting of mostly tiles and scenery you can use in level design on a platformer. Themes range from snowy, ancient, forests, and even candy.

TomTik – Offers a variety of game sprites ranging from terrain and scenery to characters and enemies. Good stuff for old school RPG’s.

Reiner’s Tilesets – A good-sized collection of free 3D-rendered tilesets, sprites, buttons, etc.

Video Game Art by Floyd Yancey – Quality art pack created by professional artist Floyd Yancey and made available to you free.

German RPG Icons – These icons are 16×16 (256 color), but very well done. It has neat German names next to each icon, which you can amuse yourself with by trying to pronounce.

Indie Game: The Movie is a feature documentary about video games, their creators and the craft. It examines independent game developers as a way to understand the medium and the theory behind video games. Throughout, the film focuses on the human side of the creative process, and the connections between game and game-maker.

Demo | Source Code

Frank Frazzetta was born in Brooklyn on Feb. 9, 1928, and, as a boy, studied painting at a local art school.

Frazetta began drawing for comic books of all stripes – westerns, mysteries, fantasies and others – when he was still a teenager. He was also a good enough baseball player to try out for the New York Giants.

The popularity of Frazetta’s work coincided with the rise of heavy metal in the early 1970s, and his otherworldly scenarios showed up on a number of album covers, including Molly Hatchet’s “Flirtin’ With Disaster” and Nazareth’s “Expect No Mercy.” Last year, Kirk Hammett, the lead guitarist for Metallica, bought Frazetta’s cover artwork for the paperback reissue of Robert E. Howard’s “Conan the Conqueror” for $1 million.

Frazetta married Eleanor Kelly, known as Ellie, in 1956. She served as his occasional model and as his business partner; in 2000, she started a small museum of her husband’s work on their property in East Stroudsburg, PA. She passed away last year.

Go ahead and tell me a little bit about yourself and your studio.

Sure thing. My name’s Craig Stern, and I’m an indie game designer. I started Sinister Design back in 2006 after the release of my first game. Basically, I work on RPGs, strategy games, and anything else that strikes my fancy. I actually started working on my first video game during the summer before I started law school. I knew that I wouldn’t have much time once school started, and I wanted to give myself a creative project to make good use of that time. I finished the game just a couple weeks shy of my first semester. But something strange happened once school started: even though I suddenly had way less free time, I still wanted to keep making games. So I did. Now I’m done with school, I’ve passed the bar, and technically I’m a licensed attorney, but here I am, still making games.

What games have influenced you, specifically your Telepath RPG series? The first game had a jRPG-esque combat system, the second game switched to a more tactical turn based system, the dialogue system is reminiscent of Bioware games, etc.

I’ve been influenced by tons of games throughout my life. Shining Force for the Sega Genesis was a huge influence on me growing up, and I really wanted to make a game kind of like that for my first game. Unfortunately, I don’t have a programming background, so that first game ended up having a RPG combat system simply because I couldn’t figure out how to program a more interesting strategy RPG-style combat system.

It’s amazing to think about now, but I actually created Telepath RPG: Chapter 1 without using a single function. I didn’t understand how they worked at the time. What I did instead was put lines of code on different frames, then switch between them using Actionscript commands like gotoAndPlay. The thought of ever making a game using that method again gives me the shivers.

The original Fallout also had a huge influence on me. The dialog tree system, the fact that you could interact with characters in the way you wanted to, and that your choices would impact how they felt about you and how they responded to you in the future, was mind-blowing to me. I loved it. I could never understand why no games took the great combat systems of Japanese strategy RPGs and married them to the freedom and genuine role-playing of Western RPGs like Fallout. My goal was to combine the two into something wonderful. Telepath RPG: Chapter 1 didn’t meet my goal, but I think Telepath RPG: Servants of God comes pretty close.

Great. You are the sole creator of your games, correct?

That’s almost accurate. Actually, there have been contributors on most of the games I’ve made. There were a couple of folks on Newgrounds, for example, who volunteered their artistic talents for the first two chapters of Telepath RPG. EvilX100 created most of the character sprites and much of the GUI on Chapter 1, and Chalis stepped up with some neat new sprites and animations for Chapter 2. I still did the lion’s share of the art work myself, but their contributions saved me a lot of time, and I’m still grateful for them.

Now, on Telepath RPG: Servants of God, I have one volunteer artist–Lauren Linden–sketching character portraits for me, as well as doing some lovely watercolor work for a few of the cut scenes. I’m also working with talented game artist Heriberto Valle Martinez on overhauling the game’s GUI. Other than artistic contributors, though, I am currently the sole creator of all Sinister Design games. I do all the writing, programming, design, and music. (Actually, there’s one exception to this: on Ham Sandwich RPG, Tyler Schmal of Continuous Play did all the sound work, including the lovely chiptune tracks.) It’s kind of exhausting, honestly. It makes development go so much faster when you can focus on one or two areas rather than doing absolutely everything yourself. In future games, I’m hoping to take on some more partners and lead a proper team.

When you begin development of a game, what area do you start with? For example, with the Telepath games, had you created the Cera Bella setting or was it constructed around the mechanics of the game?

It honestly depends on the game. It’s just a matter of what ideas I have going into it, and what area those ideas happen to reside in. With the Telepath games, I went in with a rather limited idea of the setting, and sort of built as I went. I come from a creative writing background, and I believe that as an author, it’s important for your understanding of story elements to arise organically. It doesn’t do to start off a game with hard-and-fast preconceptions, then try to shoehorn game elements to fit those preconceptions. That’s the sort of approach that leads to unconvincing plotlines, wooden dialog and flat characters.

For example, take character development. I learn more about my characters as development proceeds by thinking through the sort of conversations they would have with each other. I let the characters’ voices come through, and so I learn about them during the process of writing their dialog. That’s not something I can effectively plan ahead of time: the process is key. Cera Bella has been a lot like that: I learn about the world as I create it.

But that’s story. Game mechanics are a separate thing for me. Lately, I hear some indie game developers, like Alec Holowka, say that one of our goals as designers should be to intertwine game mechanics and story so that they’re mutually supporting. In Telepath, I’d like to think that I accomplish that to some extent by making dialog itself part of the game-play, though I suspect he means something more like what Jonathan Blow did in Braid.

How do you approach composing the music for the games? Do you have any sort of formal training in music?

No. I’m almost alarmingly dense when it comes to formal composition methods. I’ve taken introductory music theory classes something like three times, and every time, I forget what I learned within about a week. I can’t read music or play any instruments. What I do have going for me, though, is patience and a good imagination. I think up a melody and record myself humming it. Then I recreate it by ear in whatever sequencer I’m using and build on it. I experiment, it grows, I fill it out the song with more instruments, and when I think it’s reached its conclusion, voila: there’s the track.

Lately, I’m making more of an effort to play around with motifs in the game soundtrack. I want there to be little musical cues that remind the player of certain characters or events. It’s a shame I don’t have more time to focus solely on that sort of thing, but that’s the price you pay when you’re the sole designer, writer, programmer, and musician working on your game: you have to split your time. If I didn’t enjoy writing the music so much, I’d farm it out in a second. It just so happens that I love doing it.

What programs and game engine(s) are you generally using to develop your games?

I use Flash CS4 for the game development environment, and FlashDevelop for working with the code. The raster art, I create in Paint Shop Pro X2. I sequence my music in Cakewalk Sonar 6 Home Studio, and work on the sound effects in Audacity.

Tell us about your upcoming game, Telepath RPG: Servants of God.

Sure thing. Telepath RPG: Servants of God is a strategy RPG where you fight to restore democracy to your homeland after the government is overthrown by a group of religious zealots.

When the game begins, you are rescued from prison by the Peoples’ Resistance. You have the Gift, and they want you to fight for them. You spend the rest of the game exploring the continent, conversing with your companions, earning peoples’ trust, recruiting soldiers for the Resistance, fighting battles against the Cult, and ultimately winning back the city for democracy.

Telepath RPG: Servants of God is sort of my dream game. It embodies everything I love about RPGs: interesting characters, strong writing, player freedom, and turn-based strategic combat. Plus, it’s political. There’s a lot of writing about controversial topics, which I don’t think I could get away with if I weren’t indie.

What are your thoughts on the indie gaming scene and its future?

I love it. As an indie, I only have  myself to answer to. I don’t have to worry that my boss is going to look at my game and say, “Why is there all this text? And why are these  characters debating the existence of God? Go redo this with more space marines and less thinking.” I have no boss. I have no shareholders. I  answer to me. I can create an RPG where players are treated like adults. That’s creative freedom, and it’s what being an indie is all about.

In some ways, the indie scene is in wonderful shape. There are all kinds of great opportunities that didn’t exist a few years ago opening up, especially in terms of free or affordable game creation tools. Unity is free now, and Flash is increasingly being taken seriously as a game development platform. Even better, people outside our sheltered little indie communities are finally starting to pay attention to us and our games. But markets for actually selling our games aren’t necessarily opening up the way we thought they were.

Microsoft has forced most legitimate indie authors into the XBLIG ghetto, where games are unprompted and forced to sell for the price of a sandwich. Apple’s iPhone store remains a chaotic disaster. And Steam, even though its market share is now approaching monopoly levels, still isn’t letting in more than a few indie games each year.

I think hobbyist indies have a bright, shining future, no question about it. But I admit, I do worry about the ability of aspiring professionals to survive in this environment.

Please tell us about any other upcoming games or projects.

Maybe a rogue like with combat accomplished through card duels? Maybe a side-scrolling platformer-RPG hybrid? Who knows! Servants of God is still a ways off from release, so for now, I have the leisure of keeping my options open on future projects.

I hope you enjoy the site as well as my work

Thank You,
John Santiago Jr.