Backgrounds

[Estaog]

Here are some backgrounds from my new game Quest for cinema!



The hallway



The starting screen (Was made to look like the title was engraved in a stone)



The bedroom



The office (where you work)

I thout they where quite good for my firsts.

[Belthazor]

Well... only the fourth one is quite good...
In your first background, it looks like the room is going out of the screen... I think it's because of the wall colors...
In the third background, the door is too small for anything supposed to be in that room... The window looks like a picture...
Work on them some more, add some shadows and highlights.

[Estaog]

Yes il fix the door, but now i go sleep bye bye.

[Andail]

Usually perspective doesn't have to be a hundred percent accurate to make a good background...
but matey, your pictures are simply too darn wrong!

Also the colours are far too bright, replace them with more natural, soft colours

[InCreator]

Oh my god. Okay, It's not bad for the start.

But It's quite far from enough to appear in any game that expects people to play it.

If your game relies at least a bit on graphics, you better make text-
only game, because otherwise, you're just wasting time.
Here's quick edit and explanations below and then suggestions, don't feel offended, otherwise It's ME wasting time. Everyone starts from bg's like yours. At least most of people. Just don't rush on releasing a game and take a time to learn.



Now what I did:
1. First, pulled yellow lines from floor to locate center point to rely on later. This is actually wrong. But it works sometimes and as I said, edit was quick.
1a. Now, from this point, pulled green lines towards the edges of room. This gave me proper upper edges of doors.
1b. Redrawed doors.
1c. The phrase you should seek from tutorials is "Vanishing point system". Learn to use it properly, and you'll never have perspective problems. If you think you're far enough, try to fix wall where it meets ceiling (on this picture I edited) by yourself, I didn't do that.

2. These varied of colors are weird. Usually, opposite walls are one colour and other two are in another color.
2a. Fixed this and made wall colors less contrasty, MS Paint's default palette is strange and ugly, plus n00b sign number one.
2b. I forgot to change color of first door. My bad.

Okay, now what you should do:

1) From AGSForums main page click "Tutorials" under Resources Menu. Try some of them, if you find one that fits your style and mouse better, try to complete tutorial 5-15 times. Practicing is annoying sometimes and difficult at the first, but soon you will be rewarded by skill of drawing whatever you want pretty easily, so It's worth it.

2) Pick a random 3D-game. Like Doom. Or Half-life. Start the game and wander around a bit. Then Just stop and start looking at the walls. The angles of doors, and so on. When advancing in your drawing skills, you start to rate games automatically like this, It's something I'd call "examining with an eye of an artist" or something like that... It just comes itself after some time and some (hundred? ) backgrounds.
The advantage of wasting time like this is that whether you try or not, your brain memorizes the angles and later, a feeling how things should be develops in you. I'm not sure everyone feels like that, but - I really don't use vanishing point system much, often I just feel how this or that wall should go. And I don't miss much when rechecking with VPS.

3) If you're MSPainting, try to change for a better program. Adobe Photoshop is really bad choice beginners, because It's faAaAar too complicated. I'd suggest
Artgem!, Project Dogwaffle, The Gimp or any other you may find from these list threads here talking about software.

This will be a good start. Good luck.

[Phemar]

Paint isn't that bad, not unless you only use it.

I use paint to do all my BG's, but then import into Gimp to darken colors, do layer stuff etc. But Paint works the majority for me.

BOT: Nice Beegees for a start. They're better than my first ones let me tell you that.

[Gilbert]

M$Pain is certainly one of the crapiest graphic programme in the world, but then using a killer application won't help if your skill doesn't improve.

Actually even using M$Pain alone to create all the graphics is okay, provided you can use it well, for example, I once discovered things like this, and it's drawn completely with M$Pain.

[Estaog]

I actually drew those in flash mx proffesional, and then idited them in paint (reasolution problems). Il see those toturials and edit that background. Dothe others have something wrong too (expect the door)?

[Estaog]

Here are some edits:



Edits:
Pulled out the wooden block.
Fixed doors
Changed wall colours
Made the carpet dirty



Edits:
Made door bigger

Thanks

[InCreator]

MSPaint ain't that bad, but I think that any kind of serious bg drawing needs:

- Layers
- Magic Wand selector
- Brighten/Darken processor for brush
- Airbrush, with possibility to use clipboard data as brush shape

Well, that's actually only things I use to make a bg.Work before editing with these things can be make with ANY program, it's just basic and quick pull-lines-fill-shapes work.

MSPaint's eraser and selector tools are quite powerful and comfortable, which makes it the best/fastest sprite/animation editing tool I know. So that's where I use MSPaint.

Still Tanker, start doing tutorials. Editing your existing bg's is ALSO waste of time, when you have completed few tutorials and got things going, I doubt you'll ever want to edit THESE bg's and start from scratch to put your new skills into use.

Amen.