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How To Cheat At Graphics
We're completely rubbish at drawing and have been winging it for years, using a variety of cheap tricks.
When it comes to graphics there is no simple right and wrong. You can get away with anything if you stick to your guns and claim, "it looks like that because it's my personal style."
Hand Drawn
Scribble stuff on bits of paper and change the title so that it all looks like part of a masterplan. We did this in Notepad Invaders.
Texty
Don't do any pictures at all - just use text. It helps if you make it whizz around a bit. Hello Click the colour.
8Bit Computing
Reduce a load of stock photos down to two colours and pretend it's a tribute to retro gaming. That would be Diarrhea Dan.
Speaking Of Stock Photos...
Photomontage is your friend. Frankly it's been the mainstay of B3ta - and myself and Joel Veitch used it for a quiz we made for The Barbican.
Get Someone Arty
Get involved with a creative community and ask someone to do them for you. This is what we're going to do. His name is Amygdala, he's from our very own B3ta - and he said "Yes, I'll help" when we asked. The fool.Psycho Fireman GFX
We're hand drawing the graphics for Psycho Fireman - as Amygdala is more comfortable drawing with a pen than a mouse. "Drawing with a mouse is like having sex using a potato," he claims.
The plan is to scan then colour them in, using the amazing power of what we call "digital ink".
Code
Behind the scenes we've written some code, but this is deeply technical (and hard and dull) stuff so here are some more generalist pointers:
- Google Is Your Friend
Whatever problem you can think of, somebody has already solved it and Google will find you a code snippet on some arbitrary website that can fix your issues. - Use What You're Used To
Flash has changed its coding language from Actionscript 2 to Actionscript 3. It's completely different, and we thank the spaghetti monster that you can set Flash to understand old Actionscript 2 code. - Don't Optimise As You Code
Solve the problems first and worry about optimisation (if needed) later.
Anyway, here's a screenshot of the work in progress, which obviously will look MUCH BETTERER NEXT WEEK, when we've stuck all the lovely graphics in it.
Hand Drawn
Scribble stuff on bits of paper and change the title so that it all looks like part of a masterplan. We did this in Notepad Invaders.
Texty
Don't do any pictures at all - just use text. It helps if you make it whizz around a bit. Hello Click the colour.
8Bit Computing
Reduce a load of stock photos down to two colours and pretend it's a tribute to retro gaming. That would be Diarrhea Dan.
Speaking Of Stock Photos...
Photomontage is your friend. Frankly it's been the mainstay of B3ta - and myself and Joel Veitch used it for a quiz we made for The Barbican.
Get Someone Arty
Get involved with a creative community and ask someone to do them for you. This is what we're going to do. His name is Amygdala, he's from our very own B3ta - and he said "Yes, I'll help" when we asked. The fool.Psycho Fireman GFX
We're hand drawing the graphics for Psycho Fireman - as Amygdala is more comfortable drawing with a pen than a mouse. "Drawing with a mouse is like having sex using a potato," he claims.
The plan is to scan then colour them in, using the amazing power of what we call "digital ink".
Code
Behind the scenes we've written some code, but this is deeply technical (and hard and dull) stuff so here are some more generalist pointers:
- Google Is Your Friend
Whatever problem you can think of, somebody has already solved it and Google will find you a code snippet on some arbitrary website that can fix your issues. - Use What You're Used To
Flash has changed its coding language from Actionscript 2 to Actionscript 3. It's completely different, and we thank the spaghetti monster that you can set Flash to understand old Actionscript 2 code. - Don't Optimise As You Code
Solve the problems first and worry about optimisation (if needed) later.
Anyway, here's a screenshot of the work in progress, which obviously will look MUCH BETTERER NEXT WEEK, when we've stuck all the lovely graphics in it.
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