Here comes the third part of the Game Developement using free tools! here comes the createive part, grafics and sounds!
7. GRAPHICS
I believe that graphics are one of the most important things in almost any software, the look and feel of a game or an app says a lot about it, when building gloobus preview I wanted it to be really sexy, and I think the same when doing games.
There are a lot of great games out there, but a lot of them have very poor graphics, and this leads to the users not downloading the app, or even don’t read the description, so my advice here, if you are going to develop a game USE GOOD GRAPHICS
I’ve been lucky that since I was a child, I liked drawing and painting (you can see my gallery at jordihp.deviantart.com) I love it and its a really funny part when creating a game, even I’m not the best drawer or animator out there, I’m a normal one… I pretty happy on how my games graphics went, and when people sees them says: You did that? This makes me really happy too 😀
So going for the tools, for all the graphics I used Inkscape. When I first used it i din’t like, I came from Photoshop and inkscape was really diferent, I never used a vectorial drawing app, so I didn’t understand a lot of time, but, after reading some tutorials on interent, I started to feel confident using it and i felt that I could create good things with it, and you can see that all the graphics from “Escape from Husband” and “Kill the zombies” are done using inkscape!!
What I love the most of inkscape is that is vectorial, so the graphics can be as bigger as I want without losing any resolution on it, so I can do the HD wihout having to redaw anything 😀
I don’t know why, but I love much more Inkscape than Adobe Illustrator, I use Illustrator at my work and I can’t get used to it, inkscape is much more easy and functional to use, so if you are gonna use a vectorial software I recomend you to try out inkscape, I’m sure you will love it as much as I do!
8. MUSIC
Here comes one of the hardest things for me, and the one I couln’t completely do with free tools, so I hope you can tell me a good solution here.
Since I was 16yo I started playing the guitar, and having a punk rock band, so thanks to that I know a bit about music and composing, so how do I compose the music? I sit down on my sofa with my guitar on my hands, and the magic comes!!
The tool that I use to digitalize the music is TuxGuitar!
Tux guitar is really good for learning to play the guitar, it uses midi and you can write your songs there, using the notes or just using the tablatures (this is faster for me) and I can translate what I play with the guitar directly to the computer.
I usually have 6 tracks, Bass, Drums, Solo, Ambiance, Piano, Other (flute, guitar depending on the song), sometimes I can have more, and sometimes less, depending on the mood of the game/song.
As I said it creates a midi, and a midi is really poor for a game, it sounds like 80’s games, wich is good for some kind of games, but not for the games I did. For playing midi a synthetizer is needed, and each computer/os has its own leading to that the song was diferent in windows, mac os, linux, android… and of course, that is not what I wanted, I wanted that my songs played the same on any android device, and with the mood I wanted, so the next step was to create an mp3 with a good syntethizer. This is the only part I couln’t do with a free tool.. i had to use Garageband so have a good drums, bass, piano sounds…… so if any of you know a free tool for doing this step I would be really thankful with him!!
So thats all for today, I’ll publish the part 4 in a few days talking about the marketing plan, I hope you enjoyed it!
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Realment un bon dibuixant !!! De mans i peus sobretot !!! 😛
Carai!! Gracies!!
I tant eh, tinc un domini amb les mans i peus que no vegis jajaj
Fantástico trabajo! Acabo de instalar gloobus preview y funciona de maravilla. Alguna noticia acerca de Marlin? Screenshots? 🙂
Mucha suerte
Hola Pedro!
Perfecto que te funcione de maravilla, pues hace tiempo que no se nada de marlin, sin embargo no te preocupes que voy a hablar con el desarrollador a ver como esta, y hago un post al respet
un saludo!
Ya instalé Marlin, y funciona increíble con gloobus preview. Mi pregunta era acerca de gloobus flow, o cover flow.. no estoy seguro del nombre. Seguís desarrollándolo?
Muchas gracias y que os vaya muy bien con vuestros proyectos
Hola Pedro, muchas gracias por tu comentario, pues acerca de gloobus-flow, ahora mismo esta un poco aturado, pues estamos poniendo nuestros esfuerzos en otros proyectos, sin embargo puede que en un tiempo volvamos a ello para conseguir una buena experiencia en ubuntu, a ver si se aclaran ya con gnome3 y gnome shell y vemos exactamente donde debemos ir
Un saludo
Perdón, me confundí, me refería a flow
Cool know-how! I have been browsing for things such as this for quite a while currently. With thanks!
Thanks! I’ll be posting more things about it, and more deep in game development, after the release of kill the zombies I’ll post how we did the game!
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ok, make it in inkscape, plan all of your frames, export it out, and rasterize it in GIMP. For a 2d game, that’s standard work. You take all the possible motions of a character and load them into a sprite. You could also give your character joints and bones, to make them that much more flexible. You’re absolutely right, I know it’s possible to do it that way. 🙂 But Flash makes the whole process much easier, because you only design keyframes and Flash automatically fills the frames between them to make the animation smooth. I wonder why there’s no open source program that does it? Having a timeline editor also helps a lot to keep track of the animation while making it.
Hey!
you’re right, flash was a really good tool that made the development really fast and easy, but since the apple war against it, it went down so much, there is an open source software called Synfing (http://www.synfig.org/cms/) that lets you do exactly that, but I couldn’t make it work, well, I had to learn to use it and it has a large learning curve, so I came back to the traditional method exporting the frames manually