This month we talked about art and art production in gamedev! Here are many of the tools and resources I mentioned during the talk…
I mentioned a bit about the history of game art. Some of the very first game artists were electrical engineers that worked, not on consoles or computers (as we think of them now at least), but oscilloscopes! Here’s the story of one of those oscilloscope games:
Pixel Art Resources:
- Pedro Medeiros is one of the most amazing pixel artists I’m aware of. He is the artist behind TowerFall and Celeste. His Patreon is filled with gif tutorials that are extremely helpful for learning. He’s also on twitter.
- Spriters Resource: ripped spritesheets from thousands of games, great reference
- Some amazing recent games for pixel art inspiration:
Tools:
- Aseprite is a reasonably-priced sprite tool that I see pixel artists mention regularly
- GraphicsGale has been around for quite awhile and seems especially popular with Japanese artists
- ClipStudio: excellent, reasonably-priced drawing and painting app with fantastic brushes and brush smoothing. This was originally built by/for Japanese Manga artists and was once called MangaStudio.
- Krita: relatively-new, free and open-sourced art program with very robust brushes and smoothing
- Lazy Nezumi: powerful brush smoothing for Windows
- Spriter: Sprite-rigging tool, reasonably priced with a free option
- Spine: Pro-tier sprite rigging tool. More stable and fully-featured but more expensive too
- Tiled: The defacto standard in tile-based level creation. Supports both orthographic and isometric with tons of flexible features
