Learning to make Game Art

Of all the games I’ve made (or tried to make) there’s been one common issue - Art. Whether it’s in game sprites, 3d models, background art or marketing collateral I have to either beg, borrow or buy (note not steal) it. When I’m writing a commercial game it’s not too bad to pay for graphics but it still leaves us with the problem of updates and fixes to the art. That just adds up to slow down and administration - two things I hate.

So in the interest of being self sufficient I’m trying to learn enough to be able to create art for my games at a quality high enough to mean I don’t have to replace them. That doesn’t mean they won’t get replaced just that my hand isn’t forced. Anyway justification over, on to the art…

Sprites - I love retro SNES/NES style sprites. I’m generally moving in that direction in my games. Where to start? I found Tsugumo’s Tutorial really useful, specifically this page. It shows you in nice easy steps how to create a simple character sprite. Mine wasn’t very good tho - at least I wasn’t happy with it. I knew what to do but I just couldn’t get it to look right. So, how about basing it off something else. I’ve been using Oryx’s sprites for my games Legends of Yore, so I went for the warrior and tried to use it as a basis:

Pretty happy how that came out and now I had some basis to work on everything became easier. How about some animation? I need walk and attack to start with, this took a lot longer and a lot more iterations:

 

I was pretty astounded at how these came out. Once the basic character was in place it was trial and error to get to something reasonable quality that I could use. Trial and error took an awfully long time but it was very rewarding once done. Not sure how long I could stick at it! Next I tried some more characters and seemed to be easier now I had a style to work against, here’s what I came up with:

         

Pretty content with how they came back. However, as always I asked for feedback and some of the wonderful pixel artists on TIG Source came back with more tips and some examples on lighting - so I’m about to look at these next:

Marketing Art - this is one thing I’ve definitely learnt through trying to sell games, there’s an awful lot of art that you need to be able to advertise, publicise and distribute your game. This includes banners and promo images, not to mention all the art you’re going to need to satisfy the App Store, Android Market, Blackberry App World and Steam.

This type of art needs to be bigger, more refined and fill larger areas. On the bright side it shouldn’t need animation - so I’m thinking just some set pieces would be great. I love the manga art style so I picked myself up a how to draw manga book and a set of ProMarkers. The book is fantastic it gives you a set of examples to work against and also some details about how to create your own characters and styles. My first attempt came out like this:

This was ok, until my girlfriend (an artist) did a much much better one. I had trouble with precision inking, too much messy edges on the black. Got a better inking pen and tried again, here’s the stages:

Much much happier with this one, though it was as with the ghost it was a follow along from the book. Next step? Try creating something myself:

Well as proud I was of it, the colouring sucks and the character just looks really really stoned. Right, I have a lot to learn and I’ll probably bore the hell out of your blogging about it. Anyway, next steps are to ink a character, scan it in and colour it using Inkscape rather than with pens. Hopefully this will get me some better results.

In summary, art is really really hard but if you spend long enough trying, get enough sources of information and ask for help you can get somewhere. Hopefully I’ll eventually get good enough, I’m pretty pleased with progress so far.