Sketch using the planned resolution ?

[RoscoLabri]

Hello all,

I've been interested in Adventure Games for yonks, I remember borrowing a game by the nameÃ,  of "The Secret of Monkey Island" and playing it on my old amiga 500 using about 10 disks.

Anyways, let me cut to the chase.

I'm very interested in sketching a couple of things to use as a background, as I plan to at some point use AGS to build myself a game. The thing is, I'm not sure what size my sketches should be.

After reading about Bill Tillers art for CMI, I now know that he used 640 x 480 pixels, and that he always sketched things out first.

So my question is, should I just draw on some paper, scan it in to my PC and adapt the size, or should I print out a couple of black outlines for a 640 x 480 template, and sketch inside that (I did read somewhere that some people considered drawing even bigger, then scaled it down for more detail ie 1280 x 960).

Oh, 1 last thing. If my planned Resolution was to be 640 x 480, does that include the GUI (I think thats what its called, you know, the Pick Up, Push, Pull etc) and if so, should I be drawing slightly smaller then the 640 x 480 ?


Thanks in advance for any comments.

p.s I couldn't work out where to post this, so hopefully I'm in the right place. Apologies if I'm not.

[Mikko]

My advise would be to draw the sketch with about the same level of detail that you believe the final bg will have. For that though I'd first suggest to sketch something in PC first to see what can be fit into a 640x480 area.

Printing a box with borders would not be that much of a use, since you don't really see the limits from there (no pixels restricting detailing). This is due to changing printing and scanning resolutions.

About GUI, it is placed over your bg, so the space it takes is away from this 640x480.

[ildu]

Well, this all depends on what exactly you want to do.

If you're going for a painted and cartoony look similar to CMI, you should definately sketch it beforehand. Bill Tiller draws some 8 thumbnails of each background, chooses the best one, scans it in, enlarges it and prints it out as at A4 or A3 size. After that he draws the final outlines on a thin paper transparent to the enlarged thumbnail and scans the outlines into the computer. For CMI this was essential, since the backgrounds had an existing hand-drawn outline in the final versions. This is different in Bill Tiller's current project, A Vampyre Story, where the outline isn't present in the final version. Anyways, he paints over the outlines in Photoshop at high resolution with a tablet. I don't know what resolution he uses, but I tend to use a size 3 or 4 times larger than the final resolution. Also, for this type of art, a drawing tablet is essential. You can be a renegade hero on the run from the art cops and try it with a mouse, but it's very very unlikely that you'll get good results.

As for lower-res games like SMI, you should sketch but it's not as important as in high-res and you can do it without sketching. Also, using higher resolution to paint it isn't needed. Pixelly art (different from pixel art ) usually suffers if it isn't drawn in the final resolution. But I'm not so much into low-res, so I'm not the best guy to ask.

Before starting to sketch, I would advise to determine your final resolution and either print out outlines of the size or just use your ruler to draw a rectangle of the right size. You naturally need to define what resolution you'll use and what parts of that size you fill in with GUIs. As for sketching on paper or digitally, it's totally up to you. Now that I've completely accustomed to my tablet and have become ajoined from the hip with it, I hardly draw anything on paper anymore. I do all my sketching on the computer nowadays, but I used to do a lot of hand-drawn paper and pencil sketches on A4- and A3-size papers.

As far as style goes, it's all up to you. Some people like to keep the sketches very very simple and paint most of the detail on the computer. Others obsess about every detail being down before starting to paint. For CMI and A Vampyre Story, Bill Tiller drew the outer outlines of each separately distinguishable object with a thick outline and the details within that object with a thinner outline. He then painted most of the detail in and shadowed it accordingly.

And as a final note, it's difficult to get a hand-drawn-looking outline if you're drawing on a tablet. Nothing beats scanned linework, if you want that rough look to it (like CMI), but I advise a more free approach and not have outlines at all (like A Vampyre Story), where you're free from all the confinements and restrictions of sketching the final linework.

I'm not even gonna discuss painting, coloring and shadowing, since that's a whole other ballgame .

[Ali]

Oh, 1 last thing. If my planned Resolution was to be 640 x 480, does that include the GUI (I think thats what its called, you know, the Pick Up, Push, Pull etc) and if so, should I be drawing slightly smaller then the 640 x 480 ?

If the Graphical Usier Interface (GUI) is going to be visible all the time, as in Monkey Island, you should draw your background smaller. There's no point drawing something no one will see.

I'd suggest, and this is a matter of taste, that you consider making your backgrounds with an aspect ratio of something like 640x400 even if you have pop-up GUIs. The reason I'd say that is that a wider image is better suited to showing a character in context. Less-square aspect ratios also compel you to be more creative in terms of composition without actually being more difficult to work with.

[RoscoLabri]

I think I'll need to experiment with a graphics tablet having never used one before, and then decide upon the way I go, either sketching + scan, or straight from the tablet or maybe a mix n match.

I just need some inspiration from a couple of films I'm going to watch tomorrow then hopefully I'll be posting here again real soon with some pics.

Thanks again all, this website is filled to the brim with helpful information and people.

[cpage]

If you are stillinterested here is what I do.
I open up my tablet program (I use Painter) and get a huge piece of paper that I would never need to use it all.
Then I start sketching, as i go i look at what parts I really need in the background and I sketch outside of it aswell.
I then crop the image based on where my detail ends. I then slowly resize with another image as a guide at 640x400 and when i get all the important stuff underneath the guide i crop around it.