The Fascinating Story of the Development of a Video Game

Graphic Design, Modeling and 3D illustration are an important part of the development of any video game. If you are interested in these aspects of game making you might want to learn about it from someone who has done it. This is the story of an early DOS video game that came out of a professional game design studio. It has been a while since DOS was the platform for gaming but this game has been recompiled so not only can you learn about the development of the artwork for a game you can also play the game and see for yourself.

It is in these early roots that much of todays game design world was created. There was a lot of wonderful experimentation through these years. Learn more about the game and it's development on the artists site here: Gambys

It is amazing how much work went into the development of an early game like this and the project took about two years to complete while the artist spent about 18 months working on all the animations, screens, and rendering.

All the 3D animations were rendered back then on a 3D Studio 2.0 still in DOS and using a 486 PC at 66MHZ if you can believe that. Each frame sometimes took more than four hours to render.
All the 2D sprites were done using the old Deluxe Paint software.

A lot of the work was begun by hand drawings. This is the way it was done for years and there is still some of this going on today. Hand drawings are often a good way to get a feel for the creation of characters, screens and levels. But, while it had to be done this way in the past, it doesn't have to be done this way now. So less and less is done by hand.

You can download this game and play it for free. It is in three RAR files that you extract and burn to a cd rom: Downloading and playing Gambys

If you are on a budget and are looking for some free or inexpensive tools to make your own video game here are what the artist of this game recommends:

• Pencil - Great software for drawing and rendering 2d images and animation
• Blender - Free software for rendering 3d images and models. Blender now has a complete suite of tools including tools for game creation
• Toon Boom Studio - Not free but simply amazing software. Toon Boom Studio is the best 2D animation software to learn and create animation with. Ideal for students and hobbyists looking for an easy-to-use animation program, excellent for teachers and educational institutions, Studio makes all animation techniques accessible to users, offering them the most creative and rewarding experience.
• Older versions of Toon Boom: The current version is 6.0 but you can get earlier versions for a very reasonable price on amazon:

Toon Boom Studio 5 Software