DIY Cover art - your own spin on games

[REPO Man]

Per a mod's request, I'm moving all future talk of DIY cover art here, covering both custom artwork and covers based on fake games.

My fake covers gallery on Imgur

My custom covers gallery on Imgur

[marurun]

I thought you already had a thread for this stuff. That's why I commented the way I did. But if you didn't you should. If that's something you regularly work on, sharing it in a centralized thread makes sense. That way you can update it whenever you add new covers.

EDIT: flippin forum confusing me today. Yes, this thread is perfect for this. Use this thread. This is the place for this stuff.

[Raging Justice]

I wish someone made DIY cover art for some of these retro collections on the switch, where the cover art tells you that you're getting a trio of games when there's actually only one on the cartridge. Like the Devil May Cry Triple Pack needs a more honest cover that ONLY shows the first DMC game since it's the only one on the cart. Instead of this big fat lie being displayed on my shelf:



I'd rather something that looked llke this:

[REPO Man]

The Switch release of Borderlands Legendary Collection did the same damn thing, except they had some wording on the cover but it can be hard to notice. Thankfully the Bioshock collection for Switch includes all three games on the cart... is what I would say if a huge chunk of the games weren't left off the cart and therefore necessitating a hefty download for each game.

The irony is that I only bought those releases for the same reason I buy a Switch game physically, and that's because having most of the game on the game card helped to save space on the microSD card. Of course if the game is below 1gb in size I'm more likely to just stick with the digital version.

[Raging Justice]

The Switch release of Borderlands Legendary Collection did the same damn thing, except they had some wording on the cover but it can be hard to notice. Thankfully the Bioshock collection for Switch includes all three games on the cart... is what I would say if a huge chunk of the games weren't left off the cart and therefore necessitating a hefty download for each game.

The irony is that I only bought those releases for the same reason I buy a Switch game physically, and that's because having most of the game on the game card helped to save space on the microSD card. Of course if the game is below 1gb in size I'm more likely to just stick with the digital version.

The funny thing is, I don't even get mad about this sort of thing. That's because I look at it from the perspective of what I'm getting rather than what I'm not getting. I can buy a used copy of the Batman: Arkham Collection on the Switch for less than what it originally sold for and be quite happy to have a physical copy of Arkham Asylum, arguably the most important entry in the franchise, that I got at a reasonable price for what I'm getting. I can live without having Arkham City and Arkham Knight on the cart, It's cool just to have ANY of those games physically on the Switch and Asylum is arguably the best choice. Going back to my previous example of the Devil May Cry collection, the first one is really the only one I care about anyway (since the sequels all suck) and it's the one that's on the cart.

However, It's just that little OCD part of my brain that hates seeing a game on my shelf advertising three games when I know it only really contains one of them.

[Ziggy]

So as some of you might know, I really love covers. I just posted a thread about discovering the game The Dig for the first time. I got it on GoG, so digital with no physical cover. Big box copies on eBay are expensive, and there's no cover for it on The Cover Project. There isn't even any good quality scans of the box. So I decided to make my own.

I think the problem is original USA release had a reflective box, making it hard to get a good scan of.

Here's what the covers look like...

Front:


Back:


And I guess it's one of those boxes that have a gate fold flap for the front cover that you can open. So here's the inside cover...

Left:


Right:


CD:


Here's the back cover to a UK variant:


And I also found a high res advert, which I guess was a 2-pager for gaming magazines.


And I was able to find this high res front cover art, but I'm not even sure what it is. It strangely has four people on it, while the original cover has only 3...

I was able to use the above stuff to make some DVD case covers (I have been planning to do this for a lot of GoG DOS games that I own).



Above is a mix of the USA front cover and something similar to the UK back cover. Only a DVD case isn't as big as a big box PC game, so I decided to leave out the test "featuring" so I could fit the system requirements.

If the font "You've saved the Earth" isn't an exact match, it's extremely close, so I was happy about that. Finding fonts sometimes can be very annoying.

I've been having fun with Photoshop's new AI features. Previously, it was tedious and time consuming to remove objects or text from images. Now you can just lasso something, and use the generative fill feature to remove it. It works extremely well, at least for artwork such as this, and when it's not perfect you can always touch it up manually. So I took that high res poster that had four people on it, and used generative fill to remove the fourth person so it matches the original USA cover.

Because generative fill is so awesome and easy to use, I decided to make a variant cover using the advertisement. It was a high enough res, but what I did was frame it on the DVD template so the front cover is centered, but left enough space at the top and bottom for text. Then I used the generative fill function to expand the image. And voilà, instant cover! Now I'm not sure which one I like better!



Here's the disc...



I noticed that the text at the top isn't centered, so I'll have to fix that.

I have these empty DVD cases that are clear, so you can see artwork on the inside when the case is open. So what I want to try and do is recreate the USA big box version. I'll use the front and back cover of the big box for the front and box outside covers of the DVD case. Then for the inside of the DVD case, I'll use the artwork from the flap of the big box.

(Work in progress)



I came across a cutscene in the game that I recognized from the big box artwork, so I took a screen shot of it. I again used the generative fill function to expand the image to fit the DVD template. Only since it was a DOS game, it was a little too pixely looking. So I just used a filter to blur it a little. Now I think it looks like it's intended to be in-game graphics, without looking too horrible.

[Ziggy]

I've noticed that there's no cover for The Ultimate DOOM on thecoverproject.net, so I decided to make one.

I've never seen the retail big box in person, but here's what it looks like as far as I know...



So I tried to make a DVD cover version of it...



The text "The Ultimate" on the spine is probably so small that it would be illegible, so I made an alternate version...



These aren't full res. I'll probably do little tweaks for a while, then I'll eventually upload it to TCP. Feedback welcomed.

[Ziggy]

I'm nearly finished with some DOOM and Ultimate DOOM covers. I uploaded these at their full res, but I'm not sure what imgur does to them (if anything). I'll eventually upload them to The Cover Project, I'm just giving it some time to see what minor tweaks I might think of. Or if someone points out an error or typo or something.




This one tries to replicate the original mail order registered version of DOOM...






This one is mostly replicating the box art from an Australian big box release of the game...






The disc...






This one tries to mostly replicate the original DOS big box version of The Ultimate DOOM...



And the same, but with the custom headered spine...






Here is the Windows 95 big box version of The Ultimate DOOM...






And here's a custom cover that I did for The Ultimate DOOM...

[Ziggy]

I think I improved the text a bit for the back cover of the Australian version...



I had to make the text a little narrow to get everything to fit nicely, 85%, which to me has a certain cheap bootleg appearance to it. But I think overall it looks better than the really generic font used in the original one I posted above.

I straight up copied the text from the Australian box, but I had to take a lot out from the "features" paragraph to get it to fit at all. I think I may just have to face the fact that it's too much text for this design to fit on a DVD cover. I don't want to shrink anything else (like the screen shots) to make more room for text, that would through everything off. So I may try and put different (briefer) text on there.

[REPO Man]

Per a mod's request, I'm moving all future talk of DIY cover art here, covering both custom artwork and covers based on fake games.

My fake covers gallery on Imgur

My custom covers gallery on Imgur

What the hell? Both of my galleries disappeared! I didn't delete them and my much older media shelf gallery is still up with a -4 for no real reason other than the fact that folks are haters.