Hey there. I’m new to the site but not new to the concept of LPs, been enjoying them for… over 5 years probably? Been kinda curious about if I could pull off an LP or not, and I think I’ve found a game I could comfortably LP while also not getting overly annoyed at myself if I crash and burn on it.
However, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of Screenshot LP guides here. Excellent guide for video LPs, but not much help in my situation where its a game that very much lends itself more to screenshot than video (outside of an occasional battle video). I’m finding myself with some questions that I can hopefully get some answers for:
Big one obviously: where is it recommended to upload photos for a screenshot LP? Ideally I would think it needs to be a place where organization is easy after uploading, as well as the ability to resize if needed.
Formatting the LP topic itself. I know there’s normally a link to every LP post in the OP, not 100% sure on how to go about that with a screenshot LP, while with a video LP you can just add new video links to the OP
Character portrait images. What’s the best way of going about grabbing those without a background behind them?
What’s more ideal for trying to capture screenshots: capture them while actually playing the game (fastforwarding/rewinding/pausing as needed), or recording your footage and then watching the video and getting the screenshots that way. If the later, what’s the best way to grab the screenshots at a consistent size?
Is there anything else I don’t know but should know about screenshot LPs?
Thanks in advance. I’m working off of a Mac which I know complicates things a bit, but it has a way to record the emulator pretty easily so that’s not a concern.
You can upload images directly to LPZone, if you’re posting the LP here. Similarly, if you have a Something Awful account, you can use LPix, which is an image host specifically for screenshot LPs. Other than that, the recommendations I’ve seen suggest just using Imgur.
As for formatting, just link to the individual LP posts in the OP.
For portraits, you could search for concept art and crop the characters’ faces out of that, or you could see if someone’s ripped the character portraits on sites like The Spriters’ Resource.
I personally prefer to record footage and screengrab later. I’ve had a couple of situations where a message went by too fast and I missed a capture, so being able to go back to a recording to get the screen is a big help. And as long as you’re not doing anything weird like resizing the game window mid-recording, you shouldn’t have a problem with size consistency in your screenshots either way. If you’re playing a retro console game, most modern emulators will allow you to record footage directly, but if you’re playing a PC or modern console game, you should probably use OBS, assuming you don’t have a paid license for something else.
Much appreciated. I didn’t expect the Spriter’s Resource to have this game but I guess Medabots wasn’t quite as unpopular as I thought.
Sadly OpenEmu doesn’t have a built in recorder (which is pretty much its only downside, having 30 emulators built into one is great), I’ll have to compare OBS with another option I’ve been pointed towards.
I use BizHawk for emulation nowadays, except for a few consoles. It’s designed for the speedrunner community, so it has features like recording built-in to the emulator. It uses the same cores as RetroArch, as well.
Also, TSR has a lot of esoteric games on it. Some of their stuff are things like Japanese games that never even got fan-translated.