USBLGX Banner Assembly TutorialI'm going to go into more detail than you may need, depending on your knowledge and skill level.You obviously don't have to follow everything by the book, this is just supposed to be a documentation of how I do things. Chapters:
Stuff you'll need:
Chapter 1: Retrieving necessary graphical assetsGiven the age of these games, it might be hard to source high quality assets, or assets that fit the aspect ratios you need to work with reasonably. Sometimes, sacrifices will need to be made.SteamGridDB and LaunchBox Games Database are great resources for finding high-quality game artwork. Still, you should vet whatever you download. Not everything is created equal since these databases are built by the community. Sometimes, a good run of Google Images might be your best bet, especially for obscure or promotional art that might be a good fit for banner aspects. Since Google has retired the "View Image" functionality a while ago, you may want to get a script or extension to restore this functionality. ImgPeek is one such extension that will work for Chrome or Edge. All-in-all, even if you can't find the highest quality assets, there are ways to improve things afterward that I will get into in the next chapter. Chapter 2: Processing and sizing graphicsI'm first going to detail stuff that applies to all images, then drill down to the specific images a banner is composed of.Before getting into your image editor of choice, you may want to consider submitting before the computerized gods and trying out something like Upscayl. It's a simple Electron GUI for various AI upscaling algorithms, with a slider to compare before and after. It can even clean up artifacts. Try out the different models for different content, even commercially-restricted models should be fine, as these are not commercial works. It works fine on my meager GTX 980- there are online services for this kind of thing if your system can't run it locally, however. Sometimes, downloaded assets may have details you don't want. Some good ol' elbow grease might be the only thing to do. Clone stamps, smudging etc. Some editors have a content-aware fill available (there is a plugin for paint.net with the same name, and Resynthesizer is another for GIMP). These algos are best for simple things like objects in the sky, to be fair. Newer Photoshop builds have something called Generative Fill, which is an AI-assisted version of a content-aware fill- it can be better at this kind of thing, but it's making detail that doesn't exist, which has both purity and ethics concerns (not that AI upscaling doesn't). There IS another alternative if you are not put off by this, but it doesn't work as good as I'd hoped. Microsoft Photos has a generative erase built-in now. Even on my Win10 LTSC. It sometimes does things better than content-aware fill, sometimes worse. Give it a try if it's available! One thing I've noticed now that I've worked on more banners is that sometimes, you just can't find an asset that's in a good aspect for your needs. In this case, you might want to look into seam carving (liquid rescale). This is a content-aware resizing method that can help you change the aspect ratio of an image with less distortion than a traditional resize. It's available in various image editors via plugins. It can also be done in ImageMagick, if that's more to your liking. Just remember, the less distortion you need to do, the better. Even seam carving isn't magic! Now onto specifics. Let's start with gameBackground.png:
Chapter 3: Retrieving backing musicThere's plenty of angles here. Anything from ripping YouTube videos, to going on Khinsider, or using the official soundtrack that I'm sure you definitely own legally.A title screen theme or other strongly associated theme is a great choice for this. If you want to keep it short and sweet, there might be a suitable short jingle as well. Depending on the source you use, you may want to discern for errors. Sometimes people make mistakes or have bad rips! You can sometimes download FLAC from Khinsider, which is preferable to mp3. If you want to rip from YouTube, there are various tools for this. I prefer to use yt-dlp with Deno, but there are online tools as well. You can also set up your audio editor to record just what you need (not going into detail as this is a can of worms), but make sure the video's been buffered in at a decent quality before doing this. Chapter 4: Processing and trimming backing musicNow that you've gotten your audio, you'll need to do some work on it. You'll have it easiest if you go the LinkToTheAsh route and just use a short jingle that doesn't need trimming or fading, but not every game has a fitting one of these.Here's what I do (you don't gotta follow it exact, but I'd say the normalize is pretty important):
Chapter 5: Preparing and submitting the banner(s)With all followed, you should have these files:
Go on over to the submissions page and follow the directions. P.S.: It would be awful nice of you to provide a _config.txt alongside the above mentioned files for e-mail multi-submissions. Download an example here. You can also download a template zip with all the files mentioned in this tutorial, as well as some extra goodies to help with submissions. Thanks for following this guide. If you need extra help, feel free to contact me. |