GeoFruck

Hi all, I am somewhat of a new poster to this forum, but have been reading it for quite a while now. Please cut me some slack, because I can be somewhat of a bull in a china shop

I am working on a game project, by myself, with extremely limited programming knowledge. However, I have used GIMP for quite a while, and have recently started playing with blender, so I decided that asset creation would be a good place to start. I've done a tile set, and laid out a landscape, which I will attach below. I have no idea how great it is, but that leads me to my question. When creating tile sets, buildings (covering 3x4 tiles) small people, etc. how large should you make these, pixelwise? For the image here, I made them as 40x40px, then rotated them, and then scaled them to 60x30. Now that I am moving to buildings and such, I just wonder what a good range is for the mobile devices. I would obviously like to find a happy medium between detail and conserving resources.

 LS2.png   370.1K   16 downloads

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Hi all, I am a new member to gamedev, long time reader, first time poster. I have been working on a city building simulator, which will be a hybrid of many of the good games I've played over the years. I have developed a foundation for the housing structure, store mechanics, resource collection, etc. Then moved over to the graphics side, using GIMP, and come up with a decent tileset. Now I am currently working on the art for the buildings.

Just to make you aware, I am not a programmer, yet. The extent of my programming experience consists of Apple basic and Pascal, and after being exposed to these I decided that programming was not for me. I went in to electronics instead. I may end up having to learn programming at some point (with python currently leading as a topic of interest), but for now I am squeaking by working with programs.

GIMP seems to be a suitable graphics program, which I have had some experience with over the years and know enough to be dangerous. I have also recently found blender, which seems to be a more than capable 3D modeling suite, although I think it's overkill for an isometric city game. Blender does have a game engine built into it now, for a few revs it seems, which is a nice plus, but I have also looked at contruct classic and construct 2. Again, the constructs seem to be more suitable for my needs, although blender is just really freakin' cool.

So, one of my questions is regarding the use of open source and free or low-cost lisence game engines vs. more "professional" suites like unity. Do you really get that much more bang for your buck? There are a multitude of engines available, and it is somewhat daunting as a novice to even know what is worth it. I have looked at game maker, but it seemed a little dated feeling when compared to construct, which is why I'm leaning that way. If you would like to suggest any good engines that I have missed, what I'm looking for is something that would be under $1000 for a commercial license, good support, documentation, tutorials, etc., and I do also like the latest and greatest.

Another thing that I am currently looking at is the graphics, writing, sound, etc. Without currently having much money to spend on the project, I don't see many other options except becoming a graphics artist, writer, etc. I mean how feasible is it to think that someone may be interested in joining me in this project, and how much convincing do people need to realize that I'm not just some shmoe thinking it would be cool to make a game? So far, I've just been moving forward with the "show as much as you can" mentality, so I have been also trying to document my progress on a few wikis. Of course, doing it all by myself, I've found that it is a lot of work to keep up with everything.

So, every now and again, I just fallback and actually play some games, reach out to communities like I am doing here, and try to relieve some of the pressure that can build up.

I would appreciate any feedback and opinions that you are willing to provide, and I look forward to seeing how I may fit into this community.

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