USBLGX Banner Assembly Tutorial
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I'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:

  1. Retrieving necessary graphical assets
  2. Processing and sizing graphics
  3. Retrieving backing music
  4. Processing and trimming backing music
  5. Preparing and submitting the banner(s)

Stuff you'll need:



Chapter 1: Retrieving necessary graphical assets

Given 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 graphics

I'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!

Note on Image Uploads: The submission form accepts common formats like PNG, JPG, WebP, AVIF, or BMP as uploads and URLs (also supports clipboard pasting image data) and it handles the conversion for you. Now, onto the specifics of image assets and how the submit form handles them!

Banner Background: : Icon Background: Icon Logo (Optional): If you'd rather use on-site tools, there's a manual image editor for Banner Background and Icon Background. It crops, scales, and carves an input image. Every image slot also has a Paste Image or Image URL button, so you can skip downloading entirely if the asset is already on your clipboard or via a URL.

And with that, that's all the graphical assets accounted for.

Chapter 3: Retrieving backing music

There'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 (or you can just use the site's YouTube routine, which internally runs yt-dlp/quickjs/ffmpeg- this actually works pretty well if you're willing to sacrifice control). I prefer to use yt-dlp with Deno locally, myself. 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 music

Now that you've gotten your audio, you'll need to do some work on it.*

Note on Audio Uploads: The form accepts WAV, MP3, M4A, FLAC, OGG, or Opus files via upload or URL (even transcoding YouTube URLs) and it handles the conversion for you.

*Automated fixes or a manual editor are available on the upload form that cover most of the below cases. The manual editor allows for deeper configuration, and looping is now supported by the chain wholesale. Imported data is also checked for existing loop info (WAV and OGG metadata). You can paste a YouTube URL, which hashes out to a yt-dlp/deno pair on this server- due to restrictions, it only gets you a little over 25s of audio to work with, so depending on your needs... it's not the best method, and it's not wholly client-side by necessity.

Back to the main squeeze: 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:
  1. Trim the audio to the part desired (25s max), using a spectrogram to lock on to the beats
  2. Normalize the audio to 100% or 0 dBFS
  3. Apply a fadeout taking up about a third of the total trimmed runtime, starting at the beginning of a measure for polish
  4. Strip metadata, since it's unneeded
  5. Resample to 32kHz to reduce size, but keep the stereo (don't be a masochist)
  6. Export as WAV
Anyway, the main things I'd say not to do are:

Chapter 5: Preparing and submitting the banner(s)

With all followed, you should have data for each of these: And optionally: With all this data gathered, you're ready to fill out the form.
Go on over to the submissions page and start submitting!

Extra features to note: Thanks for following this guide. If you need extra help, feel free to contact me.