Recently I created an effect for my game, Visual Out, that I’m pretty happy with. I had some wire assets that were static images, that I wanted to animate when the player touched them.
Paint of Persia is an interesting pixel art rotoscoping pixel art tool I came across recently, and it looked interesting. Animating is one of my least favorite tasks, and while I don’t particularly like rotoscoped styles, I can appreciate it.
There are a wide variety of uses for a tool like this, ranging from simply wanting a game with a rotoscoped style, to wanting to draw over reference easier.
Keep reading for my thoughts on Paint of Persia!
I’m a pixel artist and a game developer, but I hate making tilemaps. To me, it’s just tedium – making the same image over and over with little tweaks for corners and edges. And SO many combinations of corners and edges.
So when I heard there was a tool that would automatically create an entire tilemap from as little as just three images, I knew I had to try it.
All you need is a single tileable texture, a “cap and bottom” image, and a “sides” image. If you want a background included in your tilemap, that’s a very simple forth image. AutoTileGen then does all the tedious work for you!
When I use my Surface Pro for art, I can’t or don’t always want to flip my keyboard out. Maybe I don’t have room, maybe I’m drawing on my lap, or maybe I just don’t want a keyboard in the way of my screen while I draw. This leaves me unable to use keyboard shortcuts, and while some programs (like Photoshop CC) have gesture controls for common shortcuts, most programs don’t.
I’ve been searching for a macro program, where I can program buttons on my touch screen to perform keyboard shortcuts. After a few months of searching, I found a program called Tablet Pro that does just that, and it’s completely customizable. Here’s my review:
While I typically work on pixel art and animations using Graphics Gale (mentioned in my Favorite Gamedev Tools post) , I like trying out new tools. Pickle caught my eye when I saw its terrain mode – a live-updating tilemap editor that displays all possible combinations of tiles at once. I knew I had to try it out, so I downloaded the 7-day trial and gave it a whirl!
