Fancy graphics without any skills

Guys, i have a great game idea. And code isn’t a problem. But the real problem is graphics. I need graphics like in “Cut the Rope” or in “Plants vs Zombies”. But I have absolutelly no skills. So in which program do i need draw my graphics (PhotoShop, Flash, etc.) and must it be vector or raster? And give me some tips I must know.

P.S.: I use libgdx.

The tool you’re looking for is a quality artist.

Kev

kevglass is right.
There is no tutorial that will give you the skills of design good graphics.
Try to learn a lot about the tool you using and practise is the key to a good artist :wink:

It completely depends on what you’re drawing. a lot of cartoony artists use vector graphics since it can be rescaled easily. Personally, I use raster graphics for everything (even my cartoony work).

Regardless, can’t just “grab the right tools” and make it happen, you need experience, skill and those evil words no one likes to admit; “natural talent”. I suggest picking up GIMP, Paint.NET or a trial of Photoshop and play around with it, see what you can do. Art, in a lot of cases, is actually a lot harder and more time consuming than the programming itself if you don’t have the aptitude for it.

What Kev said is basically correct; The tool you need is a skilled artist.

Yes, good artist is a great tool. But I have no money to pay him. And I don’t think anyone will work free.

Suddenly it becomes apparent just how valuable programmers are in games production.

Cas :slight_smile:

Totally Related Art Segment

Programmers are valuable to games development. It is just that without a good artist, that programmers would be reduced to ASCII. Artists have the same problem, without a programmer, we can’t do anything except for card games. I mean, it isn’t like these two professions are mutually exculsive. It is just that when they are combined they make a really good product.

To answer the question, if you want good art, you either have to find it or find someone who can do it for you. Lessons can only get you so far, and the time spent learning to draw will push development time forward light years. For simple pixel art you may get away with it, but anything more than that just bite the bullet and pay for that art(ist). :point:

buyPencilAndPaper();

while (true) {
   draw();
}

An inherit problem of game development.

What JVallius said is pretty much true, Photoshop is where I started in digital art, I went to a cheap tech college in my area to get access to it. I went on to Maya and 3D art though, but I assume that you’re right concerning Flash for 2D art (at least for building 2D animation stuff). Nothing’s gonna be a “quick fix” for the artistic side, same as programming.

It takes practice, unfortunately years of it.

Best get started, or be super enthusiastic and convince a good artist that you’re gonna make bank!

You know how when you start thinking “hey, I’ll just multithread this code and get 4x the performance with 4 cores?” and it turns out you only gain about 25%? But then when you discover you can get the CPU and GPU to split workloads cleverly and you end up with 200%? Having separate artists and programmers is a bit like that. One person focused on one task is far better than two people who try to do both. It’s always better to specialise, at least in terms of delivery time. Of course, I wish I had the time to just monkey about in Photoshop till I got good at it but I’ve already wastedspent my life coding instead. When I retire I’ll get back into art :slight_smile:

Cas :slight_smile:

I do strongly recommend InkScape, I’ve never seen it discussed on these forums, but it is an invaluable tool for creating nice, vector art. That said, it can also export to raster once you’ve created your art. I’ve found that it makes it extremely easy to make typical app style art, with lots of tutorials on it around the web.

Inkscape is awesome tool! I always prefer it over Illustrator, mostly because of Illustrator’s cumbersome vs. Inkscape’s simple but powerful UI.