How many pictures is too many?

I need to have a cover image created for my upcoming Hosted Game, so today I went into the Professional Services forum and browsed through the artists offering up their talents. There are plenty on Fiverr and Upwork too, some of whom will work for astonishingly low prices.

So I thought up how I want my cover image to look, and I’m sending that off to a few artists.

And then I thought, hey, my game has a character list linked off the stats screen. It sure would be cool to include pictures on the entries for the most important characters. Or even all of them!

And then I thought, hey, there are some weird robots in my game, and I’m listing them in a glossary. Everyone likes looking at weird robots!

And then I thought, it sure would give the player a special feeling if they made it to the end of the game and were rewarded with a beautiful drawing of that scene. And I have eight endings!

So, this could easily get out of control, and I’m sure I won’t go that far for budgetary reasons, but are there any limits on the number of images a Hosted Game can have? Either technical, or a rule imposed by COG?

Thanks!

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I don’t think so. One of my games, Captive of Fortune, had like 10 images, and two of my other ones had almost as many. Each image substantially increases the app size compared to most CoGs, which are very small because they’re mostly comprised of text, but I do think illustrations add some nice flavor to the story.

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Just make sure you scale the images down to a reasonable size if you’re going to use a lot of them as many people play games on their phones and have limited space.

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And use .png instead of .jpg

It’s like 2MB vs. 200KB

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I’m astonishingly bad at visualizing things, so I love it when pictures are included. The more the merrier!

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I’m sure I’ve sure I’ve seen WIPs with with cover pictures for each chapter, and portraits for each major character.
What you are talking about doesn’t seem like more than that, but none of these game are published yet, of course.

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If in doubt, you could add a setting that the player can choose for images to be displayed or not. I added images for items in my WIP so far and people thought it was cool; no complaints yet that there were too many images (I did add an option to turn them off however).

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I don’t think so. I mean, I guess if you had thousands then that could be problematic, since it would take up a lot of space on mobile devices, but other than that, I think you could probably have an image for every character, robot and important event, and it’d still be fine. :blush:

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I have 5 interior image in CCH2 and there have been no problems.

And yeah ending pics would be awesome, IMO, but the problem is that you can never really depict the main character, because most games allow so much reader control over the appearance, so you’d have to focus on side characters in the image.

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It’s dumb question pearphs (mine, not your topic, is a good question), but i thinking about it: "it’s possible to you make your own images for your game? Because i’m good with images, and this could be a cheap option i think :sweat_smile::thinking:

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@anon45897839 Yes, it doesn’t matter who makes the images as long as you have the legal rights to them. If you’re an artist, then making your own images is almost certainly the best option. I am not an artist, so I’m gonna have to fork out some BUCKS.

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@Eric_Moser Good point. I don’t have a ton of appearance customization, but I do have gender and that’s likely enough to make it difficult. Depends on the art style, I guess.

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While still related to the topic, here are some great free drawing applications:


Vector

  1. Inkscape
  2. Vectr (this one is new, haven’t tried it)

Bitmap

  1. FireAlpaca
  2. GIMP

If you’re into 3d model

  1. Blender
  2. SketchUp Make 2017 (2018 version is a browser-app. Requires connection)
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For non-artists, I would also add Canva, which can be very helpful for people who can’t draw at all (like me). Drag and drop graphics layouts, and I’ve hacked together some pretty decent things with it before.

And Pixabay, which is a repository of images that are 100% free for any use, even commercial.

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Thank you for the info and the tips, very helpfull. And good luck/work with your project :wink::+1:t2:

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