Cartoon-Style

Before you make your first stroke, you have to think about the look you will go for. After many discussions we decided that a cartoon style was the best choice. But there was one problem: I never ever did something like that in my life.  Until now I have been doing realistic oil paintings and charcoal drawings (here you can see some of them).

First of all, I tried to figure out how cartoon characters should look like. It’s baffling how you always watched cartoons but so little of them you can picture. Few questions lingered my mind when I started drawing:
1. Should everything have a black outline?
2. Must it be a black outline or can it be in any other color?
3. How thick should the lines be?
4. Can shades and gradient coexist?

This site was pretty helpful for my researches, it contains tons of tutorials and step-by-steps for cartoons, mangas and also some realistic drawings.

So here are my thoughts about those questions:

1. We don't have to outline everything, to outline the object contours and texture boundaries is absolutely enough! (see my alien-example)

2. The outline is in many cases NOT black! Its color should harmonically correspond to the object color (so in my alien-example it is dark green)

3. The stroke width does not have to be the same everywhere. It looks much better if it varies depending on the importance of the outlined detail: large strokes for outer contour, thinner ones for texture borders insight of the object (e.g. by clothes)
4. It is very hard to represent depth without using gradient! So I decided to use it.
5. NEVER forget the shadows under your objects, otherwise they appear to be flying...

To be continued....

Game Graphics - First Steps

Having a fully functioning code for producing a videogame isn’t enough. Graphics, animations and sound effects should also appeal to the audience.
I should mention that by the time we started our project I was a bit naive by thinking that it won’t be that hard to do the graphics. Now I see: I WAS WRONG! Creating really good graphics does take a lot of time.

Search for the right software

I already gained some experience with Adobe Illustrator through my university student job but using it for our game wasn’t an option because of budgetary reasons. But a free solution was found very quickly: Inkscape is a really powerful if you need some vector graphics.

First Steps

After a few tutorials, which felt really boring doing, I decided to learn it on the fly.
But still here are a few links for starters:

Inkscape Manual: not complete yet, but still very useful!
Inkscape Effect Overview: makes it easy to search filters you are looking for.

Flash, iOS and money thoughts: Part III

The Search for Softwares

During the time of my research I stumbled upon Adobe Flex (www.adobe.com/products/flex.html). Although it looked really nice for creating applications for several mobile platforms, I wasn’t really sure about making games with it. Then I caught my eye on Adobe’s Flash Builder which seems to be a really efficient tool for creating Flash applications or games but then again I wanted to be cost-efficient. So I searched for if there were any free development tools available and thank god I found one: FlashDevelop.

FlashDevelop (www.flashdevelop.org) is a great tool to work with. Especially the IntelliSense feature is so comfortable. Be warned tough that this Development tool is only appropriate for Programmers. If you are a designer and have no experience at all with programming then stay away from it or you can just start learning actionscript 3. I won’t delve into details about actionscript 3s features so if you want to know about it click on gskinner.com/talks/50reasonsAS3)

As I wrote before, I hadn’t had any contact with the flash world so I was little bit afraid of actionscript 3. I never looked into it so I thought it’s one more language to learn. But after my first couple tutorials, which just flew by, I felt relaxed because now I knew that there is nothing to be afraid of and that I can do this. 


Read more:

Flash, iOS and money thoughts: Part I
Flash, iOS and money thoughts: Part II

Flash, iOS and money thoughts: Part II

The Inspirations

There is a friend of mine who played a lot of browser games. From time to time he will ask me to try something out and I as a “real” gamer would refuse and laughing at his face because I never saw those as real games without ever trying one out (yeah I was that ignorant).

So in my time of desperation that friend came up to me and said: “why don’t you make a flash game?”. He advised me to play some flash games to get a feel how they worked. I remember that evening where he sent me a list of games and I played through them all. It was a revelation after I saw how much fun these games actually were (well not all but most of them) and they were easy to produce… so I thought.

I vaguely remember if it was an interview or a tweet from Markus Alexej "Notch" Persson (http://notch.tumblr.com/ ) where he said something like “If you want to do something then just start doing it”. I must say that it gave me real big push in a way. My mind was now set on the idea that I will make my flash game. But suddenly there was a tingling in the back of my head. I don’t have a license of Adobe Flash and I sure didn’t have the money to afford one. So how would I make a flash game???


Read more:

Flash, iOS and money thoughts: Part I
Flash, iOS and money thoughts: Part III

Flash, iOS and money thoughts: Part I

The Thinking Process

When I woke up one morning, I had no idea that the day will turn out to be something different than the usual “waking up-university-pc-sleep”-cycle. My brain was again doing that thing which it rarely does: thinking.

First, you have to know a little bit about my background. I come from a little German town near Frankfurt. I like to hang out with my friends, watching movies and “occasionally” playing games on PC and PS3 for 100s of hours (depending on my university schedule).

So my brain was acting up again with rare ideas, where most of them probably won’t make it to the real world and one of them was about making games. I have wanted to do something for a long time but it’s always hard to have the motivation to start a project and keeping up with it. My best options were something to do with C# and XNA because I had already done some practical university work a semester long in that area.

I am not shy to say that money is a factor in this thought process. Everybody dreams of being rich. Well my dream is to do something which I enjoy and make a living out of it. But I am rational enough to know that in this industry (like any other) it’s hard to entry and stay. So I decided what my goal should be: creating something good enough that people enjoy playing that can be showed off at any job interview, being cost-efficient and expecting no income (but still secretly hoping for a lot of cash).

The first thing which came to mind was to make an iOS game but I neither knew anything about object-c nor did I own a Mac and I certainly couldn’t afford it. My thoughts went to XBOX Live Indie games. But I wasn’t willing to go all out and spend a lot of time on XNA and didn’t get anything in return other than experience. So what should I do?


Read more:
Flash, iOS and money thoughts: Part II
Flash, iOS and money thoughts: Part III