Tools of the Trade: Part 2 – Graphics

As an indie developer you probably do not have a team of graphic artists at your disposal. This leads to some very difficult questions, especially if you are attempting to develop a game or graphics heavy application.

In a lot of cases that leaves you doing the art. I am not a terrible artist but I would still prefer to hire a professional. Being my budget equals “not very damn much” that’s not much of an option so for my first game I am attempting to do the tilemaps and sprites by hand. I am currently using place holder sprites downloaded from the Game Content Resources as I am drawing my sprites and building out the game engine. Be careful of the license on the images if you download anything. Should go without saying but still. You don’t ever want to get into that kind of battle with anyone. Some cheap alternatives are:

• Game Content Resources. This wiki hosts a lot of good links and Creative Commons licensed material for use in your games.
• This site has a ton of sprite resources. http://gamemaking.indiangames.net/index_files/FreeSpritesforGames.htm
• http://www.freedigitalphotos.net for free and nearly free digital photography.
• http://vector.tutsplus.com. Some cool vector art and a ton of tutorials. Neat site.

You can use free stuff for certain but if you actually want to have stand out graphics you will either need to pay someone to do them or do them yourself or possibly modify some of the free stuff to make it more unique (subject to licensing of course!). To do that you will need some tools.

Sprites. In game terms these are your lead actors. There are a lot of expensive tools you could have in your toolkit such as Adobe Creative Suite 5 or CorelDraw and PhotoPaint. One free alternative I have been playing with lately is called Pencil. It is a traditional 2D animation tool that is Open Source. I have only just begun to dig into it but there are a lot of tutorials. It has support for bitmap and vector layers, export to multiple formats such as swf and it runs on Mac, Windows, Linux. It looks pretty awesome.

Another tool, Mac only I have tried in the past to do pixel art sprites was a free program called Pixen. It is free. It is simple and it is pretty powerful. It has layers and onion skinning. It has just enough for you to create sprite sheets. I actually had some problems with this software in terms of reliability. I found it crashed a lot on my Intel Macbook Pro and without warning. I am hoping for an update soon. I am currently running version 3.0

For good ol’ image crunching on the Mac we have a couple good freeware options. I use the Gimp all the time. It has all the options I would ever need and it is also free. For vector images there is Inkscape. This is a free open source SVG editor. It does a good job. Make sure you have 4gb of RAM for this one though.

There are lots of resources out there. You can literally create a game or app on a budget of next to nothing. While that is true prepare to work your butt off. Not only will you be working on code and engineering problems but you will also be the art director and the artist.

* Be kind. If you really enjoy using one of these Open Source projects consider forwarding them a small donation.