sunandshadow

An art bible is a reference document where you record art-related decisions you make, so that later you can check and see what you decided and keep things consistent.  Common things in an art bible are color palettes, a humanoid proportion reference for the chosen style, character blueprints aka turnarounds, ditto for monsters, collections of reference images or sketches defining architectural style or clothing fashions or vehicles or weapons, etc., a master list of animations needed, a master list of icons needed, a master list of all third-party art assets you are going to use and their licenses, GUI concept art, font concept art if you are making any original fonts, and all other concept art.

Even with my "gamer hat" on, this survey confuses me a lot.

"Recognition from the host" - who is the host?  Is that like the game owners/developers of a game I play?  Or someone who starts a thread about game development that I reply helpfully to?  Or what?  (I do not play any player-hosted games/private servers.)

An overall difficulty is that some games and/or their communities are much more directly competitive than others, and I adapt to that - my default behavior is to always help and share ideas, but I certainly won't help my opponent in a tournament or other situation where we are competing for a prize.  Or if I have a monopoly on some moneymaking strategy in an online game, I won't give away the secret of my success to people who would start competing with me.

Section 4 is a bit baffling, because the instructions talk about performing activities, but the actual questions are not activities.  So it's like you're asking, "How often do you the knowledge and ideas to create new contents for your game?"  That sentence no verb.  Also, is my game the one I am playing in the above questions, or a different one I'd like to create?  In most cases it isn't even possible to create contents for the games I play, though a few games accept user-created content.  I'm way more likely to create content for an in-development game I am not a player of than for a professional game I am a player of.

Community membership period - is this an average for a specific game, the longest for a single game, or the length that I've been a member of any/all game communities?

I should probably make a tutorial article about this... except I'm not actually all that good at animation.  Especially isometric.  Best isometric sprite I've done so far is this, with its awkward movement and perspective.

But basically, first you need to decide the size and angle of the tiles the units stand on.  Then you need a reference image of a person or animal facing each of the two directions.  Then you need to know the art style: whether you are using lineart or not, the proportions, and the color palette.  Then you use Inkscape or Illustrator or Flash to do a rough drawing of the unit, with each moving part as a separate group of shapes.  For example in Dofus a cloak is made is a few segments so it can undulate.  Hairstyles are the same way, assuming they are for avatars or multiple units instead of only one kind of unit.  You can draw a box around the unit to help keep different frames synchronized if you are exporting them to png, gif, or some sprite sheet format.  Alternatively you save a whole animation as an flv or something like that.  And you make a list of the different animations you need for the unit - bouncing in place, walking or marching, some standard actions like swinging a weapon or tool.  Getting an avatar base to do all this is the hard part; clothing that avatar afterwards is comparatively easy.

You didn't list any of my threads. Although to be fair I can't remember how many I had here as opposed to MMORPG.com. But I had extensive thoughts on how to make good crafting and how to integrate it into the entire game. Crafting is honestly pretty hard. Too many people try to shove crafting into a game that isn't meant to have it. That's probably the biggest problem.

I was going by thread titles, so if yours didn't have "craft" in the name I may have skipped over them.  Also I was trying to get only ones with more than one page of posts.

I did see this one, I would have linked it if it had had more posts:

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/614959-crafting-and-magic-and-skills/

Dofus, and presumably Wakfu, are actually 2D vector art, not 3D.  Certainly you could accomplish the same thing with 3D.  But the way vector art equipment is made for an isometric game is that one versions of the equipment is drawn (over an example character) for each of the two diagonal sprite directions (away/up and toward/down).  Then either a sprite sheet workflow can be used or a bone animation workflow can be used.  Dofus, as a Flash game, used bone animation afaik.  In either case the image of the gear is positioned correctly on top of the example character for each animation frame of key frame.  If necessary the lines of the vector image can easily be tweaked a little to fit a particular frame or movement.  But it is not re-drawn.  Then, the positioning that has been established for the example character is compared to other characters (rather, an example of each race, gender, and class), to see if it still works.  If a change is necessary, a second copy of the gear animation is made for that race or gender or class or whatever.  Once the positioning and animation for a type of clothing, e.g. a cloak, has been established for all character types, it can usually be copied for all new cloaks.  Similarly, once a tassel has been animated it can be used in a variety of places, like on top of a helmet or on shoulders of armor or as part of an animated background involving tasseled furniture or tents.