Art Skills

You don't have to be an artist to write games. However, it does help. If you're not an artist, perhaps you have a friend who is. Either way, you have to know a bit about how computers draw pictures. As mentioned earlier, computers display images on their screens as bitmaps. They can also store bitmaps in files on disks. You produce bitmap files with a paint program, like the one that comes with Windows. The Windows Paint program is OK for starting out with. However, if you're serious about writing games, I encourage you to eventually invest in a professional paint program.

Note

Paint programs produce files that are in a variety of bitmap format. These include formats such as Windows bitmap (BMP), Tagged Image File format (TIF), Windows Metafile (WMF), JPEG (JPG), GIF, and many others. The LlamaWords2D game engine supports BMP, JPG, and GIF.

At game companies, game programmers use what they call "placeholder art" to indicate what artwork they need in a game and where it goes. Usually, the placeholder art that programmers create must be the same size as the final art. Other than that, it doesn't have to look much like the final art at all. An artist replaces the placeholder art with something that looks more professional.

If you're writing games on your own, you have to draw all the artwork yourself. This includes all the characters, monsters, guns, balls, hockey sticks, or whatever else you want players to see. The skills you need are the same skills needed by all artists. You can acquire them by taking classes at your local community college or high school. Many art supply stores also have listings of art classes. It's wise to focus specifically on classes that involve producing art on computers.

Even 2D games usually use art that looks 3D. There are two common ways to produce 3D art. The first is to just draw it as a 2D picture that looks like it's 3D. Painters and other artists do this all the time. The other common way to produce 3D art for 2D games is to use a 3D modeling program to produce 3D objects and then render them to 2D. When you render a 3D object, you essentially take a 2D picture of it. If you want to get into 3D art, I suggest you take a look at a free program called Persistence of Vision (POV) Raytracer. You'll find it on the Web at www.povray.org.

Note

I've provided a copy of the POV Raytracer software on the CD in the folder \Tools\POV.