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A little bit of help? (Forums : 2D Graphics : A little bit of help?) Locked
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Oct 4 2015 Anchor

So my friend and I are starting development on an indie game. It is going to be a 64 bit sidescroller type. We are using game maker studio, and he is doing the coding, and actually piecing it together. I am doing music, sprites, and animation. Music I have covered, but sprites and animation are another thing. I have experimented with pixel art in Paint.net but I was wondering if there are any better resources for it. And what I should use for animation. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

BrianRhineheart
BrianRhineheart Free Help
Oct 5 2015 Anchor

You may want to learn 3D after all. You can export your 3D animation as a sprite sheet to use in 2D games.

I'd recommend Blender 3D for your project.

Oct 8 2015 Anchor

Also you can get Unity 5, you can get a limited version for free, But if you really want that 3D feel you will need a 3D engine. Don't get me wrong Game Maker is a great engine for 2D, but if you wanted to make a 3D game with it, its going to be very code heavy.

Oct 8 2015 Anchor

For pixerl art i dont know, but for a 2D animation, Spine seems to be a good call.

Oct 8 2015 Anchor

Oh wait, forgot that unity can also do 2D.

Checked out Spine, seems like a cool engine, don't know how well it would handle pixels and traditional sprite based animations, but it seems like a good option for limb(?) based movement.

Oct 9 2015 Anchor

I'm making a top-down 2D game with the free version of Unity 5 and I use GIMP for the artwork, which is also free. I'm not much of an artist but I've been using GIMP for years and have yet to find anything it can't do with regards to game building. I took a quick look at Paint.net and it looks pretty similar so if you're familiar with it you might stick with it for a while to see if it has any limitations you can't get around. Graphic image programs seem to be pretty similar, so if you do have to switch to something else in the future it probably won't be too difficult to make the transition, and the time you spent learning Paint.net won't be wasted.

I haven't used GameMaker studio but I took a quick look at a couple of their tutorials on sprite sheets and animation. It looks like GameMaker handles animation pretty well, so you may not need anything else, especially if your animations aren't too complicated. Spine looks great and I'm going to check it out myself when I get time, but from what I understand you can't save your projects or export animations with the trial version. The basic edition is only $69 so it might be a good deal, though.

Good luck with your game.

Nov 13 2015 Anchor

An excellent starting 3D engine that's free and easy to use is Panda3D. It's created in C++ but target Python as the scripting language (which makes for faster programming). You can also script in C if you like. API docs are available at the website. Be advised... You have to know all about optimization if you're going to use Panda3D effectively! The engine can be fast if you optimize correctly. On the other hand, if you're sloppy with development, you lose precious frame rate fast.

There are different options for importing graphics into Panda3D. The easiest way to go is using Blender 2.42 (older version) and the Chicken Exporter, which is a Blender add on for some older versions of Blender, which exports 3D graphics to .egg format (which is native to P3D). You can even tag collision barriers in Blender before exporting to make the game engine recognize those barriers are for collision only, thus optimizing them and applying the detection.

Panda3D supports Skeletal Animation, which you can define in Blender and export as an .egg format.

You can pretty much make any kind of game with P3D, even an MMORPG type (although I wouldn't try anything that BIG with it early). The engine supports shaders for those of you who know CG. It also has built in auto shader options. You can use a program like PyToExe and PyToApp for compiling a Windows, Mac and Linux version of your final game....all free stuff. In fact, do NOT use P3D's compiling options for finals...they simply suck.

This setup might be a good choice for those not looking to develop for hand-helds right away.

Edited by: mrjohnson78

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