Well where to start... I am 100% new to game development unless you count heavly tool assisted development like RPG maker etc. What I am good at is hand drawing stuff and I have flash. I want to start as simple as possible and I know the very very basics of flash. I have a scanner and had an idea to make an entirly animated totally hand drawn flash game. I dont even know where to start I know nothing about this. I started drawing characters etc. I would like it to be 2D fighter / platformer. Anything you guys can tell me or point me in the right direction to get started? Thanks so much
Completely new to this... couldn't be more of a beginner.
Hello, welcome to the forums.
First, just search around this site a little bit, as this question has already been answered many times.
If you want to use flash, you are going to want to learn Actionscript.
If you don't like flash and actionscript, there are a few other alternatives. You may want to learn another language such as C++, C#, Java, Javascript, or Python.
Or you may want to use an engine such as Unity.
You are going to find that a 2D platformer is not as simple as it seems, and you may have to work at learning the platform of your choice for a few months before you are proficient enough to make a full game from start to finish.
Author
What should I focous on for the art aspect of it? Is it actully viable to hand draw and scan in images animating every frame my self? is a tablet for drawing to the pc the way to go? or is their another alternitive alltogether I should be looking into?
Thanks for the feedback
What should I focous on for the art aspect of it? Is it actully viable to hand draw and scan in images animating every frame my self? is a tablet for drawing to the pc the way to go? or is their another alternitive alltogether I should be looking into?
Thanks for the feedback
I'm not an artist, hell I can't even hold a pencil in a sexy fashion. Though I believe it is possible to scan in your hand drawn images I would rather recommend drawing everything on a tablet for the PC. Scanning can be...problematic. When drawing to the computer from the start you can do so much more and will have a very good quality from the start as well.
Furthermore I suggest that you start by mapping out the entire game before making anything else. Start up a document or a project planning board and start defining every aspect of your game. This includes the technical aspects such as targeted platform, programming tools, graphical tools, audio tools etc. If you just jump in and starts drawing or coding without knowing what you actually want to do you might have to redo everything you've done at some point. Knowing what game you are going to make will make it clear of what kind of knowledge you will need, what language you will write it in and what kind of graphical performance you can have, among other things.
During this defining phase of the game I would also recommend mood-mapping of graphics, gameplay elements and audio. The process of mood-mapping is to go out on the web and search for graphics, gameplay elements, and audio that represents the kind of feel and content style you want in your own game. That way it will be a lot easier to define the style in your game and at the same time make sure that the different assets, such as audio and graphics, mix well together. You could also play a few platformer fighter games and analyze them; Why was this platformer good/bad? Did I enjoy it? Why? What concepts can I take from this game and apply to my own? Can I make this concept even more fun by adding or removing something from it?
This is quite a thorough process that takes time and I believe a lot of hobby developers neglect it completely. I haven't made too many games, but I love this approach since it will give a nice overview and you already "create" your game on paper which is a rewarding accomplishment in itself. It will also make the development process a lot more maintainable once you start implementing the game.
Good luck, I hope I was of assistance!
I found something here for hand-drawn vs tablet:
https://www.fgl.com/view_thread.php?thread_id=15274
It looks like either way you want that tablet, either for directly creating things on PC, or simply for tracing what you've already sketched
Author
Does anyone have any input at all about the types of tools I realisticly will need for a project like this. Actionscript seems very basic and I think I can grasp it, but keeping in mind I want this game to be all my own art will that make a huge unplayable flash file? Will I run into limitations? Also Idk what resolution to draw In. I have been starting with 1680x1050, but when I scale it down to the flash canvas it looks awful. I know nothing about gimp or photoshop. I literally can only draw with my hand haha. I cant even color well. Where do I start learning these skills specificly in a format targeted at game development. Would hate to learn graphic design for a month only to learn all that only applied to still images. Like to animate stuff will I need to break character body parts into diffrent pieces. Oherwise how will I animate for example blinking. I dont want it tied to frames in the walk cycle etc. Again totall beginner here.
Hi Kozar. I am new to game creation also. I went at it head first, and whereas I thought it would take me forever, it only took a few weeks. I have been making a bunch of test levels so far and some re-usable game scripts. I mostly make 3d games and the list of skills required to do it alone is sorta long:
Story Telling (If your game requires it)
3d modeling, animation, uv unwrapping, rigging, texturing, lighting
Programming
Understanding of Game Mechanics
And I have learned to do all of this myself (it gets frustrating). I have had a lot of help and I ran with whatever someone gave me and researched it heavily.
The software I use to do this:
Maratis3D (game engine)
Blender (3d modeling software)
Wings3D (3d modeling software)
Trimble Sketchup (3d modeling software)
Quidam (3d character creation software)
Makehuman (3d character creation software)
Garageband for Ipad (Music creation software)
Gimp (digital art software like Photoshop)
Adobe Illustrator (2d vector illustration software)
InkScape (2d vector illustration software)
Poser 8 (3d character animation software)
Sculptris (3d sculpting software)
bvh play (bvh viewing software)
bvh hacker (bvh editing software)
Audacity (music/sound editing software)
For 2D games you could use these:
Game Maker Studio (2d game engine)
InkScape (make your characters in 2d vector graphics)
Audacity (sound)
Gimp (for painting 2d characters or backgrounds)
Timble Sketchup (quickly model buildings and objects in 3d to view in 2d)
Most of these things on this list are free. Hope this helps. If you need specific tutorials, I know of a bunch. Hope this helps.
Does anyone have any input at all about the types of tools I realisticly will need for a project like this. Actionscript seems very basic and I think I can grasp it, but keeping in mind I want this game to be all my own art will that make a huge unplayable flash file? Will I run into limitations? Also Idk what resolution to draw In. I have been starting with 1680x1050, but when I scale it down to the flash canvas it looks awful. I know nothing about gimp or photoshop. I literally can only draw with my hand haha. I cant even color well. Where do I start learning these skills specificly in a format targeted at game development. Would hate to learn graphic design for a month only to learn all that only applied to still images. Like to animate stuff will I need to break character body parts into diffrent pieces. Oherwise how will I animate for example blinking. I dont want it tied to frames in the walk cycle etc. Again totall beginner here.
will that make a huge unplayable flash file? - you can load images/levels at runtime so you may keep your assets separate for both browser plugin and AIR
Will I run into limitations? - not really, if so, open a new topic and ask for a work-around.
Idk what resolution to draw In - maximum. you can scale down your images later, scaling up is madness (if you use raster).
when I scale it down to the flash canvas it looks awful - you need in depth knowledge of the rendering process, you have build in filters and anti-aliasing, caching and whatnot. since you asked this question i assume you have none of that, check the curriculum.
I literally can only draw with my hand haha - the best fuckin way to draw, the best concept artists out there rarely lay their hands on a mouse
curriculum (probably very incomplete, expect to branch off):
raster images - what they are, how they work
compresion - the difference of indexed color and mpg in esence PNG versus JPG (keep in mind that stuff you see on your monitor is essentially uncompressed raw data)
basic programming - loops, functions, variables,...
OOP - AS3 is a purely OOP language (at least they intended to be) you need to learn the paradigm. yes, you need to, it is not that intuitive but it's awesome
working with assets - loading, unloading, embedding,...
sprite maps - these are cool and fast as hell, most of your animations will be in this format (i guess)
medium level programming in AS3 - specifically but not only, asynchronous stuff, events, DisplayObject and all it's tricks and subclasses, ByteArray, BitmapData, filters and pixel shaders (Pixel Bender shader)
best practices - oriented on speed with bitmaps and programming in general
finite state machine - for deeper understanding of very fast stuff (it is faster to have billions of balls with 2 states of visible and invisible then to have 3000 balls which positioning and drawing implies more complicated calculation in contrast to the pure logical operations of the other - obviously you wont use this for graphics but for control and various abstractions) and learning to compromise between memory and performance
continuous exploration of AVM2 - focus on the garbage collector, it will eventually give you some trouble
usage of APIs you may need, starling is a good start however you may be limited by it in certain situations
it should take you about 2years. if you fast learner then probably 6 months
notes:
- tweening has a serious overhead, you may want to dump it altogether but i do advise to benchmark it first
- keyframeprogramming is bad, very bad. you do not want 1 line of code inside any of your "symbols", in fact you do not want symbols at all.
- use a better IDE for writing the code, the flash IDE is basic as notepad
- the learning curve is arguably the most fun part you'll have
keep in mind that games are one of the, if not the most complex software ever written in the history of man kind and it does require a high level of logical intelligence every step of the way. sometimes even the simplest mechanism can give you some major headache.
You should try Game Maker Studio:
http://www.yoyogames.com/studio
You also should use vector drawings made with either Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape or Adobe Flash. That way you can scale up or down your drawings without loosing quality. I know that in GameMaker Studio the smallest you would make any object is about 16x16 pixels. It really depends on the size of the space you are working in (The size the screen of the device that will eventually run your game). Adobe Flash is the best software for making 2d animations. There is something called Synfig I remembered that does it too for free. But I didn't like it. It may be better now.
Vector drawings also allow you to separate the body parts so that you can animate the blinking. And you can just scale it up or down without loosing quality.
What you would do for 2d games you would have to make a sprite sheet for each animated object.
There is a term you will come across in 2d animation called onion-skinning
Just discovered a software called Vectorian Giiotto. Testing it now. Has flash animation.
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