Making and Adding your own Graphics, Art and Models

Once you have got a good handle on how to use the software for game making you are going to want to create your own art work, textures, pictures, models, characters and other stuff to put in the game. This is a bit of a higher level skill but totally within your grasp. It is a natural extension of growing and getting better at video game making. This lesson is an overview of how you do these things and what software you use.

The three levels of artwork for your game

There are three basic levels of artwork that you will be adding to your game: Textures, simple models and complex models.

Textures: These are the basic colors and looks of your game. Think of them as wallpaper for everything.

This is a brick texture, it would be great for the stone walls in a castle or dungeon.

And this dirt like texture would be great for a floor in a dungeon.

Here is a water texture. You can actually make this water shimmer and glow.

These are just three samples of textures. There are millions of textures and in reality there is no limit to the textures you can create, they can be lava, rock, water, wood, grass - anything at all. These textures and how you choose and use them will have a big impact on how your game looks.

So how would you work with these textures?

Well, textures have to be created and prepared for use in a video game and you would use software to do this. the textures have to be a certain size, a certain resolution and in a certain format. The professional game designers use Photoshop. I use Paint Shop Pro.

If your intention is to make games for fun and learn a bit about it you should be able to use almost any paint program to do some good texture creation and management. If you want to really do some good stuff and get good at game making I recommend you get Paint Shop Pro. If your intention is to be a professional then you should try to get Photoshop because you will learn how to use it and this will give you a big advantage when it comes time to find a job!

Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI

Let's learn a little bit about Models in your game