I have written a number of games now, but feel that I fall down on my main menus. I usually use photoshop to create 2d text and buttons. To me the end result is very amateurish compared to other games out there.
Can anyone give me some tips to improve my main menus? My last game was written in OPEN GL ES - is there any easy way to e.g make the buttons 3D?
Martin, you know what the true solution is? Hire a desginer which will cost you as little as a couple hundred bucks. Just go to getafreelancer.com (or whatever web site is current today) and post saying you want to pay $200 to have a nice fun game menu designed.
You'll get about 40 responses immediately and most of them will do some sort of sample for you, to see if you like the approach. Pay using PayPal, and wait a few days to get the files.
(The fact of whether or not it is 3D is irrelevant: you just want it to be "really good". Another way to look at it: if you are not an artist/designer in 3D, your own art/designs in 3D will look equally bad. I am a hopeless guitarist and if I try to play the organ, I am equally hopeless!)
A good designer will make it happen for you, and you'll never look back.
Hope it helps!
PS an important tip with designers: to get the best result give very simple instructions. No detail. For example, "I want a Christmas look" or "I want a sci-fi look". And just let your designer run. Do NOT try to tell a designer your ideas on design, or detail issues such as where things should be. Try for the "five word rule" - do not use more than five words telling a designer what you want! (eg, "I want a fun look" or "It's for small children".) Also, do not pay too much! Hope it helps!
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Now I am learning game development with Unity Engine .. but the problem is .. I'm a programmer .. I have zero experience in art and how to create game assets .. I have these huge ideas and I really want to make games .. so I took a course to learn how to draw and design but it doesn't work for me .. there are a lot of assets and characters to buy .. but they are different from each other .. so I came up with this idea of buying the assets and change them into pixel form .. to make them similar .. so I can build a game with them ..
the question now .. Is there any way in Photoshop or any other programs to convert those assets to pixel art?
All this About 2D Game Assets .. and 2D Games
Welcome to Stack Overflow.
The simple answer is no. There is no mystical algorithm that can take a game asset - photo or 3d model and simply turn it into a bitmap sprite.
In the example below, there is a photo of a lady dressed as Chun Li on the left. The right shows a version of the same photo, reduced in size and color (true color down to 16 colours). Notice the sprite version is missing an eye. That's the kind of detail that will be lost by any automated process. The detail in the dress and hands is also lacking.
I've worked as a pixel artist for many years and I understand your frustration. That's why I've answered your question) Many coders simply can't work without any art assets - because it looks crude or at best just doesn't look right. The best thing to do is work on the functionality of your code. Put in place some place-holder sprites (Purchase them from stock sites or similar). When the code is at a suitable point, seek out a pixel artist who'll help you fulfill your vision. That way you've already got a working version of your game, yur bitmap artist will just improve it's look many times over. I hope this helps. Good luck.
Not really. I too am an indie game developer and suck at art. However now I have an Artist on my team. But when I didn't I did a few different things:
OpenGameArt.org
I love this place. People post art you can download and use. Lots of the work is also Free to use in commercial projects. Sometimes they even include the PSD file if you want to edit a little bit.
Simple games require simple art. A big part of the games I make are for mobile. In this I can make amazing games, and simple graphics. Like a colorful cube, or similar basic art.
People. I don't know if you're in school or are part of some community of sorts but often times there are many people who are good at these things but don't share it. Ask round and see if any one might wanna help on the side. Plus, more than one person means more that one brain.
I am brand new to Unity, but I was wondering if there is a way to create terrain by somehow capturing a piece of Google Earth, and somehow exporting it to the engine's terrain editor? If there isn't a direct way of doing this, could someone suggest the best way to go about copying a portion of Google Earth (or something similar) to build a terrain?
Thanks to #Josh1billion the answer seems to be terrain.party, here is a youtube link that expands on it
For completion, a pricy tool that does most of the work for you:
Real World Terrain: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/real-world-terrain-8752
It has good reviews.
If you are serious about it, keep in mind that AAA titles build worlds still manualy from reference pictures.
Hey dreamer (or) If you want to change industry:
Good base data from goverment (swiss only) costs between few 100k up to 2M, while free to students.
Heigh educated knowledge of AI, software engineering and some math required. Hudge manpower needed. Buildings are the biggest problem.
I'm working with a PLC program that runs over a hundred subroutines in parallel, and each one affects the flow of the others. Countless labels and GOTOs, function calls, etc. My office desk is covered with little stickynotes to help me visualize and track the flow through the program, but it's starting to get too complex to manage that way. Has anyone ever heard of any sort of graphical flowchart-ish program to help organize stuff like that? What I'm picturing is a little text box that I can fill full of pseudocode, then link to other textboxes. Unless I'm actually working in them, the boxes stay collapsed, and you only see a title or something to show what it is. All the links connected to my "open" box are red, or bold, and all other links are dim gray, or maybe not even shown.
Does anything like this exist? I've heard that MATLAB uses something similar to what I'm picturing, but what I want is just a generic sort of "fill in your own info" program; not language-specific. I'd be tempted to make one on my own, but I'm way too busy with WORK-work to start creating NOT-AT-WORK-work for myself.
You can try Dia or yEd. Both are available for linux, I know that yEd is also for Windows. Those are diagramming tools, maybe you'll find them useful.
Graphviz http://graphviz.org/ would be a good tool to achieve this.
It allows you to write your graph descriptions as simple text and it generates and lays out the graph. It can handle pretty large and complicated flows. Here is a simple example to give you an idea of the syntax:
digraph g {
NodeA -> NodeB;
}
I am posting the question again with more clarity.
I am trying to develop a component similar to the UI for timeline component in "Timeli" app.Ia m not sure how to start or which iOS controls to use for this .The requirement is to show the years in a horizontal table view.Pinching on the tableview should expand that particular cell and at some particular point the cell should break into the different months in that year.If the user further try to expand a particular cell by pinching then that cell should break into the different days .Reverse should also work.It would be great if anyone can help me with some tips or suggestions to star developing this.
I don't know that particular app, but I can give some general advice: browse through the open source components at Cocoa Controls; find one that is similar to what you want to create; download the source code and study it.
Even if you can't find exactly what you want, you might learn some techniques that will help you figure out how to build the control you want to build.
If you want more specific help, you're going to have to make an attempt, and then ask a specific question where you explain what you're doing and what's not working. Generic "how do I build this?" questions don't usually work too well here, because nobody knows where you are starting from.
Has anyone had experience with MySource Matrix as a content management system? If so, thoughts/opinions/comments?
Thanks in advance.
Absolutely excellent. It takes little while to get used to how it does things with its asset structure, but it is really flexible and powerful. Simple edit interfaces are great too.
Make sure you give it enough hardware. If you want dynamic content without caching you need heaps of grunt to make it hum.
Hands down the best CMS I have ever used. We use it on the Pacific Union College website, as well as many side projects. I am still amazed at all it has to offer compared to other products that are not free.
Give it a good look, and take some time to get past the learning curve, but once you do, it will be more than worth it. :)
I've recently been trying to use it in an organization where many non power users are generating content. - it has many interface bugs and odd behavior, so that many simple tasks (i.e. loading images) often have to be done by an power user (i.e. me).
When you are editing the HTML of page content white space is not preserved. If you where to format the HTML in the WYSIWYG editor, save you changes, and then come back the whitespace you've added will be removed - actually when you switch the WYSIWYG editor into HTML mode it doesn't show you the exact HTML, and does some silly things - like pressing enter inserts non breaking spaces - but doesn't show them until you save and re-enter HTML mode.
it is a number of little details like this which make it generally frustrating to use and disliked by everyone here.