Short version of the features (full list on download page)

• Onion skinning to help with animating
• customizable palletes w/ full save/load/rip from image support
• more color picking tools than you’ll ever know what to do with
• fully integrated with system clipboard so you can freely select, copy,cut, paste, etc..with other image editors
• large undo/redo bufers, specific to each frame
• live animation preview
• fast control scheme (mouse + command keys, or hotkeys control every action, all hotkeys are listed in the edit menu)
• customizable UI, all toolbars can be reshaped, floated,  pushed behind tabs, hidden….etc

Still got a lot of bugs to work out, and missing features, but it’s at least stable and capable of image editing at this point. You can download it and try it here http://www.midnightfragfest.com/sprite-editor/

Edit: Windows download is now available, but somewhat untested, I would appreciate any feedback on how it runs.

I decided to work on art first, since the theme made me think about a lot of artistic references, I’ll work in the mechanics tomorrow.

I’m a full time game developer, and by developer I mean ONLY developer. I totally suck on the art side; I have the technical knowledge on Photoshop, Inkscape and Blender, but it stops there. When it comes down to creating something, oh please… run away.

I’m tired of only doing crap art. For that reason, I’ll stick on this LD and try to draw and/or model something minimally good for once.

And if there is still time by then, I may bake a game.

Hopefully you will find them as amusing as we do.

I can’t go on doing that. I’m bored; I’m restless; I feel my passion slipping away.

So here’s a promise. I will make something creative, whimsical, and arty for this weekend’s LD. I’m not going to do the same old thing over again.

I thought about this earlier today. While I was taking a nap, I had a bunch of ideas for really creative games that I could make and would be excited to make. So here I am, promising to you folks that I will fulfill whatever potential I have as a creative person.

I will avoid being pretentious. I will avoid being haughty, arrogant, and deliberately obscure. I will create work that expresses what I mean for it to express.

Not everyone will like my work. I know that. Not everyone wants to play through my whimsical daydreams. Some folks would rather blow s**t up than be involved in any sort of peaceful activity. Some folks won’t appreciate the weird, playful ideas that I have.

Some people will really like my work. Some people will enjoy having fresh ideas in games that express something meaningful rather than simply giving them entertainment. Some people will understand what I’m trying to show them, and will enjoy the silly things that I have to communicate.

I’m not trying to change the industry. That’s stupid. I’m trying to bring something fresh to games; I’m trying to use this medium for something that I can do well.

I’m not trying to be morally superior, though someone, somewhere might think that. I’m just frustrated with the traditional idea of what a game should be.

I’ve rambled a bit too much, perhaps. I hope that I’ve expressed myself well, though.

Peace, love, and a new way of thinking,

— Henry

Okay I have had an hour now and I have spent it trying to come up with an art style and game ideas. I have chucked a load of screenshots down into a google doc here: https://docs.google.com/drawings/edit?id=1W7ILlCI3mODPue3oW25gb0maryxfTIo7XZRv8XlXbHM&hl=en&authkey=CIO9wIcM I think I have a rough idea of what im going for.

I really like the World Of Goo art style, plus im hoping the shilloette like style will be much easier for my poor drawing ability

As for gameplay, “Enemies as Weapons” instantly reminded me of the flash game Boom Stick for some reason. So in that game you shoot enemies flying by overhead with your shotgun. You then run around and pick up ammo that drops from them. You then use that ammo to shoot more of them, simples!

The great thing about this idea is that I have done work in the past on LieroXNA and Worms 2 Mobile so hopefully I can use some of the experience I have gleamed from doing those games to make this one

With design out of the way now, I think im going to setup my environment and get cracking!

UPDATE: Experience my poor art in a game, thanks to JonathanW!

I get peeved about things for no good reason a lot. One of those things is crappy art in games. I’m not really a great artist so I don’t know how to make good art, but I do know what I don’t like about bad art, so I decided to complain about it in the form of this exciting tutorial! I figure knowing what to avoid is at least as important as knowing what to do, so here is my guide to making really bad art for your game!

Color

Picking the wrong colors is obviously an important part of crappy art. The wrong color scheme can make people stop playing your game, or even not download it at all just based on the screenshots. It’s good to know how you can encourage that behavior.

Avoid complementary color schemes like blue/yellow, green/red, orange/purple at all costs, as they provide a good contrast and balance of hue. The mockup above is not the best example of this, as it manages to find balance between the green of the grass/foliage and the brown (red) of the wood, as well as the yellow sun against the blue sky. An easy way to avoid picking complementary colors is to use a scheme with only hues that are closer together, like nothing but green and brown.

Make sure to neglect the other laws of color balance, too: brightness, saturation, and contrast. The mockup again fails to totally break balance in brightness, as it contrasts the bright sun and grass with dark wood tones and black outlines. However, notice that most of the colors are highly saturated, with the fluorescent radioactive grass taking up a significant portion of the viewing area, successfully creating a palette that is a total eyesore. Also, the bright red on bright blue text in the upper left creates a clash that can literally cause your monitor to ignite if left on screen for too long.

If you use shading, always use basic photoshop gradients rather than drawing shadows by hand. Gradients look especially cheap and cheesy when applied to complex shapes. Make sure the colors are flat without any highlights, which are areas of lighter color on the side of an object closer to the light source, which create a sense of believable lighting. Same with shadows.

Detail

If you have picked a simple set of matching colors, or perhaps a minimalistic palette of black and white, don’t worry, because there’s still a lot of ways to go wrong. Detail is the way colors are put together on a small scale. Artistic styles are made and broken in the subtleties of how things are represented in your art. Use the following tools to achieve a feel of poor stylistic choice: geometry (perfect rectangles/ellipses/lines), complex textures applied to simple shapes, large soft brushes or special brushes, ugly fonts.

Flawlessly rendered geometrical shapes are quick and easy to make, and give a sense of inorganic coldness and unrealism. Carelessly applied textures or photographic imagery in an unrealistic world (like the bell peppers in the mockup above) add unnecessary detail, deprive the imagination of the ability to “fill in the blanks”, and instantly cause stylistic clash in your game. Very soft and unusual brushes in a single color turn game elements into cheap photoshop scribbles, again creating detail that destroys the imaginitive nature of simpler art.

Make sure to use as many of these techniques in combination as possible. The bigger the variety of art styles on one screen, the more conflicted the game world becomes, and the easier it is to break immersion. If one game element has a black outline, use a blurry outline on the others! Make some things flat-colored stick drawings and others photorealistic, so that it becomes difficult to imagine them interacting with each other.

Composition

Let’s say that despite your efforts, you ended up with a decent color scheme AND a consistent art style. You still have one last chance to ruin the game experience. Composition is the arrangement of parts of objects, scenes, or levels on a larger scale. Draw all objects in poor arrangement and out of proportion, and you’re sure to create distasteful art out of the highest quality graphics.

Composition is the art of directing the gaze of the eye around the scene. Break the flow of a composition by crowding elements together and leaving unnecessarily large gaps of space. Notice how the “health” text is huddled annoyingly close to the edge of the screen, even though there’s plenty of open space available for it. The bell pepper next to the tree nearly touches it, and creates a pocket of blue sky that traps the gaze of the eye as it moves across the scene. The sun is crowding the tree, with open space to the left of them, again creating compositional imbalance. With enough lack of practice, you will be able to create many more of these annoying layouts and pockets of space than I was able to in the mockup above.

The shapes and sizes of objects are another place to create disarray. Notice how the trunk of the tree is too thick for the size of the foliage implied by the blurry blotch. The roof of the house is slightly too large, making it look top-heavy and leaning to the right. The sun rays, in particular on the top and right, generate a subtle aura of awkwardness with their sloppy restricted shape. The bell peppers may seem unrealistically large compared to the rest of the scene, but giant versions of small objects are not so uncommon in games. A more jarring size imbalance is the fact that the tree with a trunk the width of a door is no taller than a one-story house. Furthermore, the doorway does not seem capable of accomodating the stick man’s head.

Conclusion

Armed with clashing colors, conflicting styles, and careless composition, you are now able to make the worst art indie games have ever seen. If you like, make your own ugly eyesore and post it in the comments!

Thanks for reading! Questions and feedback are welcome.

Also recommended: Better Programmer Art, the classic tutorial on actually making art.

Or experimental lava / rock texture?

Got some basic graphics sorted now just need to write the actual game…

The blue army disembarking...

Just concept in art package at the moment but… I’ll be back (still 13:05.30 to go!)

Changed the dirt image a bit, gave it some friends: Walls and floors:

dirt.png

wall.png

floor.png

Now to get a level rendered and up on the screen!

The audio tool is a fantastic way to make cool sounding music all from within your browser. Make 10 short loops and randomly loop through them for a simple background track. The tone matrix tool is particularly awesome.

ColorLovers Palettes

Sticking to a palette will improve the appearance of programmer art tenfold. The palettes are only of 5 colours so try finding two matching palettes to get a good range.

If you know any other handy sites like these, post them so we can all use them

Notice the beautiful asset list: brainwave, eyes, hand, mouth, and nose. A more delightful art asset list I have not seen!

Better Programmer Art: Or how to fake it as a game artist.

I use a lot of examples from past LD48 games (mine and others), and most of this is stuff I’ve learned through doing these contests. Ironically, in the most recent contest I didn’t have time to replace the placeholder art so it pretty much ignores all of these tips. 

Hope this is helpful to the community. Enjoy!

Jovoc

I’m going to do a racing game, perhaps like Outrun or of the Night Driver/Enduro variety.  I’ve done a little mock up of the screen, just a sketch really.  I’m not sure I like the perspective, but the sprites will most likely be used.  Click to enlarge (sounds like a Viagra ad!?)

From here, I’ll probably colorize the art and then cut it up to make individual sprites.  I should probably just use bounding rectangles for now though, and get some actual game logic going…..but I have learned that if you don’t do your graphics right the first time, you’ll likely not have time to return to them later.  So take the extra minutes now so you don’t have to set everything back up to fix them.

I’m tired, but I want to get something going before I go to bed.  I’m being kept company by a neurotic kitty and a can of No Fear Energy Drink.  Oh, and my Gobstoppers!  Though I think I’m already candied out…  Listening to Iron & Wine right now cause it’s calm and quiet.  Tomorrow I’ll bust out some loudness.

(slightly tweaked)

Well, this started as a clever idea.

One of those drinking birds, with a pelican beak, drinking from a trophy. Alas, it really looked terrible, so I hacked it somewhat, creating this slightly more carnivorous scenario.

The idea was to use something iconic embossed on a medal.

(click for full size)

Made in Gimp with a tablet. First time I’ve used the smudge tool, went a bit crazy with it =)

It’s just a template, since I’m going to add hands as an overlay so I can create multiple images.

A character composed of blocks, that acquires new blocks as he moves. The controls I haven’t figured out entirely, but at the very least I think it’ll be based around the idea of picking a block on the character as a pivot point, and rotating him.  Probably constanly moving, walking in to walls, until told to turn around (or automatic after a few seconds).

As blocks are collected, they become part of him, evolving in to Tetris like shapes and beyond. The rotating mechanic is your ability to get to new heights, and cross gaps. Physics wise, I think it’ll be entirely axis aligned, since it’ll be far too easy to make shapes that couldn’t normally keep balance.  Legs would sprout wherever needed, purely for look cohesiveness.  Face always moves to the front middle of the shape.  Perhaps tails and other things sprout if a shape deems it.

My only concern at this point is trying to figure out, level design wise, why you wouldn’t want to always create a long piece.