Sorry if this is the wrong place to post, to me this seemed like the most appropriate forum to post in.
I'm not very good at drawing, I'm trying to learn but it'll be years before I'm anywhere good enough to show off. I'm a broke teenager so I can't afford an artist. Do you make art for your game even though you aren't exactly talented?
I'm not good at all so usually I get someone more talented to help with the graphics.
However if you want to learn to draw without spending money on lessons etc, I would suggest searching YouTube for "how to draw" videos and finding someone whose artistic style you would like to learn and whose method of explanation suits your learning style.
Sure, go for it! Making a game will be a lot of practise and if you manage to make a few games, you'll be able to look back at your progress.
Create a text adventure :)
Alternatively, there are numerous free graphic resources on the internet that you could use.
Quote from: Radiant on Wed 14/02/2018 14:46:08
Create a text adventure :)
+1
Painting with words is much easier than with graphics...
Plus, you can always do your best and always try to be better.
If you like to draw, go for it, if not you can always try and find someone to do the art. Star small with a simple 1 room game and go from there (you can look for help in the recruitment section, just make sure to point out it's for a freeware game and no money will be involved).
Also art is subjective and you can use lots of styles to illustrate your game: pixel art, hand drawn (digitally or on paper), 3D modeling, even stick figures! ;)
Quote from: SpaceCadetDream on Wed 14/02/2018 14:24:56
Sorry if this is the wrong place to post, to me this seemed like the most appropriate forum to post in.
I'm not very good at drawing, I'm trying to learn but it'll be years before I'm anywhere good enough to show off. I'm a broke teenager so I can't afford an artist. Do you make art for your game even though you aren't exactly talented?
What is your shortcoming when it comes to drawing? Anatomy? Perspective? color and composition?
There are lot's of techniques you can use as shortcuts when drawing, for example, I drew a background in just a few minutes using the
mesh transform tool in firealpaca.
(you can download it for free here: http://firealpaca.com/ )
I started with drawing the simple shape of the room:
(https://i.imgur.com/5uc3Nc3.png)
and then I pasted in the texture of this wallpaper three times, one for each wall that had a wallpaper pattern on it:
(https://i.imgur.com/IamoHeQ.png)
I then used the
mesh transform tool to change the size of the wallpaper images so that they lined up with the room:
(https://i.imgur.com/XJ51cLr.png)
(I used the same technique with the floor texture)
Then you can just draw doors and furniture on top of the room background.
For outdoor environments, I drew this with my mouse in less than a minute:
(https://i.imgur.com/vF0wFZ4.png)
I used the cloud filter on the blue background, then I just drew some solid green on a layer on top of the sky and used a leaf-shaped pencil in a darker green from the default pencil selection on top of the green. I used the same pencil to draw some bushes behind the layer of green grass.
It might not be high art, but you can draw a passable background with no effort or much talent if you know how to use a good paint program. I prefer Photoshop, but you can download firealpaca or gimp (https://www.gimp.org/) for free. If you want free textures to use, check out this forum thread: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=54356.0
And remember, you don't have to be Leonardo Da Vinci, most people here make games because it's fun, your first game doesn't need to be perfect.
I suck at drawing and even more at colouring but decided last week to make a game in Sierra's AGI style graphics using the EGA palette. Not to say that you should do the same, as suggested a text-adventure is fine, so is just finding a style that suits you as Cassie pointed out. As the saying goes, don't bite off more than you can chew and don't be afraid to make literal copies of sprites / art in the beginning. It may feel like cheating but in tracing the work of others, you can discover techniques and tricks you didn't know about. You also see what effect single pixels can have (if you're working on that level).
My choice for AGI is motivated mainly by the fact that I'll be restricted to a palette that I'm very familiar with visually, playing all those great EGA games over and over. The sprites from those games are very simple but for me that's good. Later on, as I learn more, I plan to slowly increase the resolution of my graphics and move towards square pixels.
...or look at the competitons forum here and join a team for a MAGS game as everything but graphic artist.
Speaking of MAGS... I made this game about 5 months after I joined the board: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1834/ (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1834/)
Or this one done by cat: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1963/ (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1963/)
In other words, you can also use a camera to take pics of your backgrounds and characters and avoid drawing entirely. ;)
You could either:
(if you feel like learning 3d) download Blender, which is a nice and free 3d modeller :)
or (if you just want to have some graphics to start a game with) you could simply download photos from the internet, alter them in a minor way (unless they are public domain; then you don't even need to do that) and that is all. A free image-altering tool is Gimp :)
I find the best way to first learn how to draw, is copy others.
Find a comic which you like the art of, get a pencil and some paper, and copy one of the panels every single day. Within a year you'll become a somewhat competent artist, and those skills translate well into forms of art (including pixel art I've found).
From there you can try to focus your skills. Mess about in art programs, read and/or watch tutorials, try colouring in all of the original GB Pokemon sprites using the colours from the GBA Pokemon games. Whatever you do, after about another year, you should be good enough to make art for your games that you'll be proud of.
It worked for me. And I hate making art.
And you should see your skills come a long way within just a few months of simply copying via reference.
Quote from: Blondbraid on Wed 14/02/2018 17:09:16
Quote from: SpaceCadetDream on Wed 14/02/2018 14:24:56
Sorry if this is the wrong place to post, to me this seemed like the most appropriate forum to post in.
I'm not very good at drawing, I'm trying to learn but it'll be years before I'm anywhere good enough to show off. I'm a broke teenager so I can't afford an artist. Do you make art for your game even though you aren't exactly talented?
What is your shortcoming when it comes to drawing? Anatomy? Perspective? color and composition?
There are lot's of techniques you can use as shortcuts when drawing, for example, I drew a background in just a few minutes using the mesh transform tool in firealpaca.
(you can download it for free here: http://firealpaca.com/ )
I started with drawing the simple shape of the room:
(https://i.imgur.com/5uc3Nc3.png)
and then I pasted in the texture of this wallpaper three times, one for each wall that had a wallpaper pattern on it:
(https://i.imgur.com/IamoHeQ.png)
I then used the mesh transform tool to change the size of the wallpaper images so that they lined up with the room:
(https://i.imgur.com/XJ51cLr.png)
(I used the same technique with the floor texture)
Then you can just draw doors and furniture on top of the room background.
For outdoor environments, I drew this with my mouse in less than a minute:
(https://i.imgur.com/vF0wFZ4.png)
I used the cloud filter on the blue background, then I just drew some solid green on a layer on top of the sky and used a leaf-shaped pencil in a darker green from the default pencil selection on top of the green. I used the same pencil to draw some bushes behind the layer of green grass.
It might not be high art, but you can draw a passable background with no effort or much talent if you know how to use a good paint program. I prefer Photoshop, but you can download firealpaca or gimp (https://www.gimp.org/) for free. If you want free textures to use, check out this forum thread: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=54356.0
And remember, you don't have to be Leonardo Da Vinci, most people here make games because it's fun, your first game doesn't need to be perfect.
T
Thanks for the reply, I struggle drawing anatomy and perpesptive, and those are both essential to drawing.
Quote from: Danvzare on Thu 15/02/2018 13:13:51
I find the best way to first learn how to draw, is copy others.
Find a comic which you like the art of, get a pencil and some paper, and copy one of the panels every single day. Within a year you'll become a somewhat competent artist, and those skills translate well into forms of art (including pixel art I've found).
From there you can try to focus your skills. Mess about in art programs, read and/or watch tutorials, try colouring in all of the original GB Pokemon sprites using the colours from the GBA Pokemon games. Whatever you do, after about another year, you should be good enough to make art for your games that you'll be proud of.
It worked for me. And I hate making art.
And you should see your skills come a long way within just a few months of simply copying via reference.
Yes, I do trace but stopped since I spoke at an artist who told me that I wouldn't learn that way. But I think I'll try tracing some anatomy again. Thanks
Learning to draw is certainly important and useful.
However, if your main purpose in learning is to draw for game backgrounds and sprites, I feel you can take a larger number of shortcuts. The important thing is to come up with a streamlined process that you can repeat consistently with consistent (not necessarily super-quality) results.
With that in mind, perhaps a nice middle-way is to take/find photographs of stuff you can incorporate into your game, and then draw over them on your computer.
Painting over photographs for sprites (https://web.archive.org/web/20130221023349/http://www.kafkaskoffee.com/tutorials/phototochartut.shtml)
Sustainable Background design (http://babar.uoou.info/tutorial/4/sustainable-background-design.html)
Instagame Backgrounds (https://web.archive.org/web/20120316071116/http://kafkaskoffee.com/tutorials/igbackgrounds.shtml)
Quote from: Babar on Thu 15/02/2018 20:34:19
However, if your main purpose in learning is to draw for game backgrounds and sprites, I feel you can take a larger number of shortcuts. The important thing is to come up with a streamlined process that you can repeat consistently with consistent (not necessarily super-quality) results.
Hey, this actually reminds me how I was practicing drawing backgrounds for adventure game. I decided to leave attempts to draw perfectly precise lines or being realistic and just painted basic outlines with brush, then kept correcting and repainting it over and over, doing quick strokes using only two colors (like - outline color on left mouse button, background color on right mouse button) as if I were working with clay: first you mash it up roughly, then "cut" to reach final shape. The trick there was to kind of turn your head off, stop worrying and enjoy the process of brushing color on canvas :).
I was continiously drawing similar shapes over and over, like bridges, roads, houses etc, in few weeks I was able to reproduce rather consistent style. Making full image could still take quite a while, but results were pretty. Like this: 1 (https://i.imgur.com/dUHR4nn.png), 2 (https://i.imgur.com/RFTxul7.png), 3 (https://i.imgur.com/pPmxQmL.png). Sometimes looking at the final picture you've just drawn can make you wonder if you actually did that, because it may seem too complicated for you. But all of that was drawn like said: first paint crude outline, then many iterations of repainting shapes with front/background color until you're happy.
Then I used same technique to draw colored pictures: I'd draw a rough sketch using only black & white brush on a transparent layer put over white background layer (for convenience). Then I add a layer (or few separate layers, each for its part of image) right under the transparent sketch, and paint "behind" it, trying to match the outlines. Then - hide the sketch layer and finish the colored version on its own.
Quote from: SpaceCadetDream on Thu 15/02/2018 19:28:57
Yes, I do trace but stopped since I spoke at an artist who told me that I wouldn't learn that way. But I think I'll try tracing some anatomy again. Thanks
No no no no no no no no, do not trace. Never ever EVER trace. Never ever!
Reference!Always
reference!
Look at the picture and copy via
reference!
That's how you learn.
You don't learn from tracing. (Unless you want to become good at rotoscoping, which can be helpful for animation.)
If you have 30 mins to spare and can find me on the AGS IRC, I can give you a short, hands on tutorial.
Quote from: Danvzare on Fri 16/02/2018 12:57:33
Quote from: SpaceCadetDream on Thu 15/02/2018 19:28:57
Yes, I do trace but stopped since I spoke at an artist who told me that I wouldn't learn that way. But I think I'll try tracing some anatomy again. Thanks
No no no no no no no no, do not trace. Never ever EVER trace. Never ever!
Reference!
Always reference!
Look at the picture and copy via reference!
That's how you learn.
You don't learn from tracing. (Unless you want to become good at rotoscoping, which can be helpful for animation.)
Okay I won't trace, its funny because I've spoken to other artist who encourage tracing long as it's done "right" Guess everyone has a different opinion. idk, I have roto before but I don't really care for it much I rather have more stylized characters roto is a bit too realistic for me. Thanks for reply :)
Quote from: Babar on Thu 15/02/2018 20:34:19
Learning to draw is certainly important and useful.
However, if your main purpose in learning is to draw for game backgrounds and sprites, I feel you can take a larger number of shortcuts. The important thing is to come up with a streamlined process that you can repeat consistently with consistent (not necessarily super-quality) results.
With that in mind, perhaps a nice middle-way is to take/find photographs of stuff you can incorporate into your game, and then draw over them on your computer.
Painting over photographs for sprites (https://web.archive.org/web/20130221023349/http://www.kafkaskoffee.com/tutorials/phototochartut.shtml)
Sustainable Background design (http://babar.uoou.info/tutorial/4/sustainable-background-design.html)
Instagame Backgrounds (https://web.archive.org/web/20120316071116/http://kafkaskoffee.com/tutorials/igbackgrounds.shtml)
Yeah, I'm just trying to draw for games and get some semi decent work out, thanks for reply