Rules of Thumb... nails, Or more of a "guide" at least.

Having replaced 430 odd thumbnails from MFGG's main site it suggests that perhaps people in general are a bit confused about how actually make a quality thumbnail for their sprites/games, and so, I've written this tutorial...

Size

MFGG's system allows thumbnails from 50x50 pixels to 100x100 pixels to be submitted... otherwise you can't submit. But whereas 50x50 pixels may be allowed, because the system supports thumbnails twice their size, they just look ugly when uploaded and will probably be replaced later on. Because of this, I, and many others reccomend 100x100 pixels, or at least very close to this. Should be easy to achieve as long as you've got an image editor that'll let you do this, and if you can't get the size use one of the ones already uploaded as a template. Nicer without borders as well, especially the thick, black ones.

Thumbnails are "PREVIEWS", keep them that way

It is required that ALL thumbnails have a "preview" of the sheet they're representing. Whether that be a sprite or two or a section of the sheet, as long as it actually does the job of previewing the sheet it's all good. This doesn't mean images of Mario from other sources for example, and certainly not random images from god-knows where. I've seen animated gifs unrelated to anything and resized art from a real Mario game - it'll just be replaced if it doesn't do this basic job.

Animated Gifs

We let a few slip through by accident before, but regardless of what way you look at it, animated .gifs make the pages look tacky and ugly, and just aren't needed to get the point across. Even the greatest animations of all time won't get through anymore.

Download counts

There seems to be a fad going on where everyone attaches statistics to their submissions, which is again pointless since TCSMS does it for you anyway. We really don't need to know when your sheet gets 1000 downloads - ALL the sheets get 1000 downloads eventually. MFGG gets hundreds of visitors a day, and at least one is bound to visit your submission, so there really isn't a need to update your submission every time you reach a new download count. We also don't want to see these things pasted across the thumbnail so that it completely covers what it's previewing. These will probably be reverted back to their old thumbnails anyway and just clog up the moderation queue further.

Humour

I know saying "No humour" sounds a bit harsh, but seriously there's no need for it in the thumbnails at all. We don't want MFGG to look like a deposit for unfunny comics, so leave them out. If you need to attach some random speech bubbles to characters please go and do that with your own sprite comics, they aren't needed here.

Text
The best thing to do as far as text is concerned is just to leave it out altogether (Unless the sheet is a font or contains text in sprite form). You don't need to label at sheet as TCSMS does that for you. You don't need to attach a "Preview" text to it because all thumbnails are previews. Certainly don't just make thumbnails with "Click here" and nothing else - Maybe I don't want to click to view a sheet I may not end up wanting.

Image Quality

Thumbnails should really be of a high quality .png or .gif, just like the sprite sheets. No JPEG-quality images please, and no .gifs that have been reduced in quality due to MSpaint's compression. Portable Network Graphics (PNGs) are the best, and if your image editor can't make them... get a better image editor.

Transparency

Not much of an issue, but again probably better avoided. Not because transparency doesn't look good, but because transparent gifs may end up like in the above paragraph (Compressed to 256 colours) and transparent PNGs won't show up in a lot of browsers.

Fan Characters
Please leave them out. Thumbnails are previews of the sprite sheet or game, NOT what your little furry character looks like. We really don't need characters like "Monic the hyper dragon pikachu ledgehog" dominating a sheet instead of the custom goomba that should be there.

Games
I haven't mentioned the games much since it's not as much of a problem, however some things have to be address. The "Thumbnail" is the 100x100 pixel max image that you can see when viewing the games page, the "Preview" is the 320x200 pixel max image that houses the screenshot. You can set it so that the thumbnail is generated from the preview, but it's always best not to if your screenshot is huge, since lets face it, cropping a 320x200 image to fit in a 100x100 space can hide a lot of detail. Although it's not neccessary to have to make a thumbnail as well, it's always nicer.

Display

If you're stuck with how to make your thumbnail look good, consider one of the following:

• The classic "I compiled loads of sprites from my sheet/lib into one image and got a good result" approach - These are the quickest, most effective ways of making thumbnails. In a lot of cases you can probably just take a part of the sheet itself and crop it to a 100x100 image. It looks more insteresting than leaving most of the thumbnail blank.
• The "I wonder what this would look like in game" approach - Mini mockups give a good idea of what your sheet's content would look like in game (Which is what's made on MFGG btw). Probably the nicest looking of the bunch as well, and that's not just because it's my sheet .
• The "One image on a background" approach. - Simplest way of making a thunbnail. Take a sprite or two from the sheet, double or quadruple it's size and stick it in the centre. That does the job nicely too.

Tips

• Remember that it you're resizing things, try and get it at exactly 200% otherwise it'll look odd, and keep it as less blurred as possible.
• Make use of the space as much as possible. This doesn't neccessarily mean cram it full of random sprites, but at the same time it doesn't mean hide your sprite in a corner. Double it's size if you can.
• Try not to just update your sheet for a new thumbnail. Yeah it's nice, but the queue gets huge very quickly. Especially don't do this if your thumbnail is worse than the old one, because it'll just mean the whole update is pointless.

Stick to this, and in so doing save me and the rest of the staff from having to fix every thumbnail that comes through.

I hope I've addressed everything needed. Feel free to point out anything I may have missed please.

This is stricter than the rules that goes for the sheet.

Nice job :]
I'm sure this will reduce the amount of horrid Thumbnails now.

If your game calls for a fan character, but it's an actual "Mario" game, what would be the rule on that one? Just wondering.

It's a part of the game, obviously that would allow it.
Although all game thumbnails are screenshots.

That's because thumbnails tend to be of worse quality than the sheets.

There's a very likely chance that games starring fan characters wouldn't be accepted anyway, unless of course it were something like Super Mario Storm where MFGG members made important cameos. I guess if that were the case they'd be allowed in, but only if say, they didn't dominate the whole thing.

This post has been edited by Black Squirrel on Mar 20 2007, 10:48 AM

Now we can move down the chain and start addressing things like descriptions.

and credit tags in the sheets that are ten times larger than the sheet itself and have crap humor in them

Myself, i'm not going to be terribly harsh on animated thumbnails. I like them if they fully showcase a good walking sprite or something.

I agree with him, some are worthy of being animated

That would probably be a good idea, although would take days to complete because every submission will have to be checked (Something I really wouldn't want to do on my own).

Not sure whether it would be worth targeting the poorly-done game thumbnails/previews as well.

Better previews will encourage more downloads.

I'd say another good effect is making a white border around the thumbnail (not black, for MFGG's classic skin basically makes black outlining invisible) and maybe even adding a small squre of black just within the white border. Looks very professional, as does a photo with a white or black border.