It has been a long time since the last blog post, the absence of a tablet to test on has been the major sore point.
Things I have learned: How to do game art as a software developer!
6 Months ago, I was the cliché game developer who had no art skills and was afraid of having to buy art or pay an artist! Today, I feel relatively confident with my skills- I have made all the art for Frosted Factory myself! Today I'll talk about my full end-to-end process for making game art (at least in the style of art for my game). I do all my art in GIMP because I'm cheap!
Today I'm making an egg topping for my ice cream game (yes, egg on ice cream... the game is a bit silly), the directions are below the following image.
Google for the image I want to draw to make to give me ideas about what are the essential parts to draw (white and yellow egg with wavy white outside).
Make a new GIMP image (File->new). Make sure you have the toolbox and the layers windows open. We'll need both of them along with the canvas.
3a) Delete the starting/default layer with the white background.
3b) Add 2 layers.
3c) Select the first layer so that we can draw on it.
3d) Using the Paths tool, draw the outline of the thing we want to draw (the egg white). (When you're done, connect the 2 last dots using control+click on the first dot)
3e) The path we drew in the above doesn't have nice rounded edges. To fix this, click on path->edit under tool options. Now, on each point in our path, drag the Y/Z editable points so that they form a straight line. This ensures that the curves are not choppy. Play around with moving the points around and editing their curves.
4a) Once you're happy with your curve, select "stroke path" on the tool options pane.
4b) You don't need to do anything special with the path options- but you can play with this if you like.
4c) Yay! We stroked a path!
5a) Right above the stroke path button, click "selection from path". Now that we have selected an area, we want to fill it in on a different layer.
5b) Select the second layer you made at the beginning.
5c) Click on the color picker, choose something nearly white (I feel like it's best to save real white for shiny flashes and stuff).
5d) Click the bucket fill tool.
5e) Click on the area you have selected. We have an egg white!
6c) Your image should have 4 layers now.
7a) While the yoke's outline is still selected, select the blend/gradient tool. Select a lighter yellow color. Change the gradient to "FG to Transparent".
7b) Click and drag from approximately W to X, this will fill the selected area with a nice gradient and make the image look polished.
8a) Do some shadowing with the air brush tool. While the yoke was still selected, I did a little shadowing on the bottom part of the yoke. Then went to "select"->"None". Then I proceeded with some shadow in the egg white to give it the illusion of texture. If your image is darker, you can use the air brush tool to make parts lighter as well.
Done!
You may want to do image->canvas size, to get rid of unused space.
When you're finished, file->export (default options are fine)->ok
Beginning to end, this is how I make my sprites!
Todos:
Setup the android store purchase for the game (it's a freemium game, with 1 purchase to unlock more levels)
Investigate getting a free trailer done.
Get better acquainted with the analytics I'm using
Get twitter and facebook group updated with the game description text and images
Enter all the details in the google play store for the dev account and frosted factory- I started this, but it's long.
Generate a bunch of levels for the game (I have a script that can do this- I just need to leave my computer for a few days to generate them)
Figure out good keywords for the play store.
Last time's goals:
Make several social media posts, and NOT just advertising frosted factory. [Failed miserably]
Acquire 3 new followers. [Success!]
Knock off more todos! [Success!]
Next week's goals
Make several social media posts, and NOT just advertising frosted factory.
Acquire 5 new followers.
Get ads and purchases fully hammered out.