Creating Art Assets

    In my game, I am implementing a simple pixel art style. Over the half term break, I made some rough art work to generate ideas, and found that I would struggle to create all of the art assets in the style I initially wanted over course of production due to limited time.

    I decided to create some very basic pixel art that I felt was still adequate for my game, and these are some examples of what I came up with.

Enemy

Player

Bullet

Shotgun

Building Roof

Revolver

     I used a web based sprite creation tool called Piskel to create these assets, a simple tool that allows you to create pixel art. I used this program because I don't always have access to Adobe Illustrator, for example when I am at home, and so I wanted to find a tool I can use to create art assets even when not at college. I exported the images in GIF formats, due to the small file size, the transparency of the image backgrounds, and the lower quality of GIF images that is usually a drawback of that particular format won't have much of an effect due to my pixel art style.

    Piskel allows you to export files in any format very easily, and once you have exported a GIF, it's just a simple case of naming it (eg. "building_roof.gif") and moving it into my art assets folder. In Gamemaker it is very simple to import images, and it will even split animated GIFs up into their different frames.

    All of my game files, including art assets, are backed up to my USB drive, my home computer, and my Google Drive. I am also creating weekly version updates of my game on GitHub.