Game Art for the Artistically Challenged (Part 2)

Hello again, this is Ken Vadella blogging for Five Lakes Studio, LLC (FLS).

In my last article on the subject of Game Art I discussed the FLS strategy for acquiring artwork for our iOS projects. A reader of this posting (plicatibu) provided, what looks to be, a very valuable website for hiring artists to produce custom artwork at reasonable prices - thanks plicatibu. The site is called oDesk and though we have not tried to use it as of yet we plan to give it a shot in the near future. Check it out.

This month I would like to discuss the editing tools we use to turn our art findings into usable game components. Let me start with a small sidebar discussing how we choose tools for our efforts. The following list summarizes our evaluation technique. The list is in order of importance.

Costs
We don't want to spend an arm and a leg for image editing tools.

Features

A text editor with a limited feature set isn't very useful to us. Here are some of the items we look for in our image editing tools:

• File Format Support - PNG, JPG, etc.
• Layers - No layers, no tool. It's really that simple for us. We love layers for image editing and find it nearly impossible to live without this feature.
• History - No undo/redo, why bother. See above.
• Effects - Blurs, distortion, noise, embossing, etc.

Simplicity

What is simple to some is difficult for others. Tod and I are not new to image editing but we are also far from experts; this is not a task that we do everyday so we look for easy to use tools.

Availability

A product that runs on multiple platforms is a plus but not a show-stopper. We have access to many brands of computers that run many different operating systems. If a tool meets our other criteria then we won't rule it out just because it doesn't work on a Mac OS.

The Gold Standard

For us Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the gold standard of image editing but it does not fit the shoe string budget of a startup company like FLS. Don't get me wrong, if we didn't have alternatives we would pay the money and acquire copies of CS5. But, we do have alternatives that suit our needs very well and cost significantly less money to acquire.

The List

Without further ado, let's move to that list. These are the tools that we use for our image editing tasks. This list is arranged in order of preference as it relates to FLS.

Paint.NET

My preferred application for image editing. This may be sacrilegious to some because it does not run on a Mac OS. But, as I mentioned above, we have access to many brands of computers running many different operating systems and this tool has a lot of positive attributes:

• It's very easy to use.
• It performs well.
• It's very stable - we can't remember the last time it crashed.
• It fits all of the criteria cited above with the exception of Availability.
• It is 100% free. Yes, free.

Pixelmator

Tod's preferred editor and for those on Mac OS. It exhibits many of the positives cited above for Paint.NET. Some other positive things that can be said about Pixelmator include:

• Reasonable pricing. It's not free but you won't need to do much more than skip a restaurant dinner with your significant other to save enough money to buy a copy.
• It performs well - it's fast; really fast.
• It reads native Adobe Photoshop files relatively well - Paint.NET does not do this.

But it comes with some minuses as well:

• It lacks basic drawing tools. This seems like a major oversight. I have heard that newer versions of Pixelmator will support drawing tools.
• It lacks that ease of use inherent to Paint.NET. It's not difficult to use, but it isn't as easy to use as Paint.NET.

Still, it is a wonderful editor for the money.

pixlr

Pixlr is an oddity in this list. It's not a product that you put on your machine and run. Rather, it runs in the context of a web browser. It works surprisingly well and is very full-featured. But, the whole edit-in-browser experience feels, somehow, too crammed for space and for this reason we tend to use it less than the other editors mentioned above. Still, it's free, cross-platform and powerful. What more could you really ask for?

The GIMP

You can say many positive things about GIMP:

• It is very powerful.
• It's free. Yes, free.
• It's cross-platofrm.

It's everything that Paint.NET is and more. And yet, we don't use it that often. We use it less than any other editor in this article. Why? Because it's lacking in simplicity and user-friendliness. At least, we feel this way about it. Maybe we are just not that bright. Give it a try though, you might find otherwise.

Snagit
We also use Snagit to take screenshots and do basic image editing to help communicate with our customers and each other.  Snagit gets heavily used for support, it's so much easier and clearer sending a picture then a bunch of text.  Snagit does a great job of taking screenshots of the iOS simulator, saving and tagging them, and allowing awesome markup.  It is affordable and works on both Mac and PC.  I should say that Tod works at TechSmith the makers of Snagit.

Final Comments

That's it for this Blog entry. I hope you find one or more of these editors to your liking.

In a future Blog entry I will discuss some additional tools that we use to make our art assets even better. I'd also be interested in what image editors you use in your development efforts. It never hurts to evaluate new products recommended by others.

Thanks for reading.

Ken

PS (7/28/2016): One thing that was missing from this review was some web based photo editors.

One of the folks over at Canva asked that give them a shout out.  They have a basic free photo editor at https://photo-editor.canva.com and their full product is at https://www.canva.com.  Ken and I haven't used it yet in a real project yet, but it might be worth checking out.  Leave some feedback and let us know if you tried it out and if you liked it or not.

- Tod