I’ve been making wallpapers of gaming characters for the last month or so, i’m still toying around with how the general set up of each shot should be rendered.
I’ll be adding more on a regular basis as well…
The website can be found here…
http://hgutl.com
Any constructive criticisms would be much appreciated, enjoy.
The idea and the site design are perfect, but the overall mood of many wallpapers is
not fiting you choosen paradigm ‘how games used to look’ . The general composition
of a thematic background, a reflecting floor and the lined up characters is good, but
the visual ‘gap’ between the background/floor and the characters is to big. A more
rasterized image and smaller color palette(8bit) would do a much better job in my
opinion. Also the watermark is very intrusive (big) and prevents me from actually
using one of them as my wallpaper.
However, the site feels quite polished and it has been really fun for me to browse
through game history and brought up some old memories. And just to stress it again,
the idea is brilliant.
I know my comment is kind of harsh & fundamental, but i hope you will understand it as
constructive :wip:, because i really like the idea.
C crits is why i’m here, all opinions are welcome!
When you say logo do you mean the DHa or HGUTL stamp? (or both?)
I have tried a few things to get to where i am now, but its all still a WIP. I have constructed an elaborate xpresso script (with quite some help) to position each games set of sprites. All the sprites (so far) are stacked in the same file & can easily be turned back on, re-positioned or altered etc.
As I’m still not sure what i’m going to do with them, it’s all very much up in the air!
If i offer these as prints. I might offer, any game, on a choice of, any background. That way i would find out peoples favourite backdrop very quickly. But i’m not there just yet…
I agree with the look of certain backdrops not fitting, i’ll try the pixelated backdrops. THough i did decide against it previously as it detracted from the game characters themselves and l as they weren’t true to the games backdrops…
More soon…
Two obvious thing I noticed immediately:
a) No Ultima IV/V avatar/characters.
b) No NetHack characters :arteest:
Otherwise it’s a great concept and hope to see more of these retros from you.
i was refering to the nes-pad + hgtul logo in the lower left corner, as seen here :
http://hgutl.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/worms.jpg
ok, it might be difficult to tell what works and what doesn’t, without trying it for
yourself.
Great idea, but I would get rid of MIP mapping, it is blurring the characters too much.
Pixelated should be crisp! 
Cheers mate, i did try a few set-ups when i started out, but i don’t remember which. I’ll give it a try and see…
For the rest i have just added a new wallpaper and thought i’d try out the pixelated, more retro looking versions of the backdrops…
I thought i’d post some versions here and put it to the vote…
http://www.doghouseanimations.com/tmnt-a.jpg
http://www.doghouseanimations.com/tmnt-b.jpg
http://www.doghouseanimations.com/tmnt-c.jpg
So A, B or C, what do you think?
Strange, mapping is turned off, it’s on “nope”. I checked the AA as well. With both off, still no clean lines!? Any ideas?
Looks like it comes from the source files. The Worms one for example is very blurry, whereas the turtle ones are a lot sharper.
No that was me. I changed the technique and will update the older ones soon. But the AA on the edges is still a mystery…
The only way i can render the characters without the AA is by turning the AA off completely. I’ll post an example later as see what you think…
uh,
i am a bit late, but like shot B the most. you almost nailed it there IMHO. my only
critic would be still the very intrusive logo.
the slight mapping distortion in the corners is not an issue imho (but you should
increase the blurry samples for the floor IMHO).
I know you don’t like my logo, but seeing as i do these for free i would like to build some awareness of the website to promote itself. In the future i will make the logo smaller and maybe more transparent on the images, but not yet.
As for the pixels, i’m not sure. Are there any more opinions out there, pixelated or hi-res?
Some of the older ones will be updated soon as the new ones are better quality renders…
Here are few more of the newest additions for your perusal…
http://hgutl.com/alex-kidd/
http://hgutl.com/punisher/
http://hgutl.com/alien-3/
http://hgutl.com/sunset-ridders/
oh my god, memories. best one is my little sister holding the game gear as far away as
possible from her body, because this game scared her so badly. but she didn’t stop playing,
because videogames used to be pretty much fun 
Always happy to bring back good memories mate.
Here are another 3 wallpapers i have added recently…
http://hgutl.com/rampage/
http://hgutl.com/thunderbirds/
http://hgutl.com/mortal-kombat/
My latest ones…
http://hgutl.com/dungeon-master/
http://hgutl.com/megaman-x/
http://hgutl.com/ivanhoe/
http://hgutl.com/barbarian-the-ultimate-warrior-death-sword/
hey,
keep up the good work, alone the amount of wallpapers is amzing, i really enjoy the
updates and browsing the new images. it would be cool if you could add a search function
and/or some way to mark new images in the tag cloud.
i would also love to see more adventures and rpgs. day of the tentacle, sam and max and
monkey island would be charming
