DAY 6 & 7

TODAY’S GOAL:

Choose Art & Sound

Gather Your Assets.

Congratulations.  You’ve made it to the end of week 1 and now it’s time to focus on getting your art and sound for your game.  Now this part can be overwhelming, but we’re going to help you so it’s not.

There are three different ways you can get more art and sound for your game:  You can hire an artist, you can purchase it already made, you can create it yourself.   Each of these options has it’s advantages and disadvantages.

Below we’ll tackle each option and and provide more details for you to decide the best route to take.

Today’s Steps:

STEP 1

STEP 2

STEP 3

Learn About Creating Art

Even if you don’t have a creative bone in your body, you might be surprised how easy it is to make art for your games.  The trick is to make simple art.  We’re going to break simple art down into two sections:  Minimal Art & Pixel Art.

Minimal Art

When creating minimal art, you want to typically stick with shapes.  Shapes are easy to manipulate vector images and can easily be exported to PNG files which Buildbox accepts.  Trey used simple shapes like circles, squares and octagons in Phases, but you can create even more dynamic games with more advanced shapes, while still keeping it very minimal at it’s core.

The great thing about using shapes is it’s simple and most every popular art program has vector shapes built in.

Pixel Art

This one is surprisingly easy to do, and that’s a big reason why you see so many indie games made with pixel art.  For backgrounds try using Super Pixel Time.  This web app allows you to upload any image and convert it into pixels.  It’s fast, free and does a surprisingly good job.

If you’re ready to branch out on your own and create pixel art, try this basic 3 part tutorial for getting started and this tutorial for making tiled pixel items (like a brick wall) that you can use in Buildbox.

Learn About Buying Art

Buying art can be surprisingly cheap.  We’ve purchased great characters and art sets for under $5 on multiple occasions and if you look long enough you can find some pretty amazing deals out there.  If you struggle with the basic core usage of design software like Photoshop, then this might be for you.  When searching on image sites, try keywords like “game art”, “pixel art”, “sprites”, “platformers”, “game objects” or just “games”.

Here are some sites we use for purchasing both art and sound:

Art Sites:
  • Graphic River – Great art site with decent prices
  • Shutterstock – If you buy a lot of art, they have a subscription plan.
  • Fotolia – One of the largest sites out there for stock images
  • iStockPhoto – Another large and notable stock image site
  • Scirra Store – Graphic store for Construct
  • Game Buffet – New site dedicated to game graphics
  • Open Game Art – Site featuring free game art that is open source
  • Atelier Store – Few pixel art items here sold in sets
Sound Sites:
  • Audio Jungle – High quality sound effects and music.
  • SoundSnap – Massive database of commercial sound effects and music uploaded by users.
  • FreeSound.org – Free sound database (not all offered/verified commercial)
  • Public Domain Sound – Public domain sound database (not all offered/verified commercial)

Learn About Hiring Artist

Your final option for creating art is to simply hire an artist.  While this might seem like a daunting task at first, it’s actually a pretty straight forward process.

In this video (that is from our official Buildbox business training course), you’ll hear from Trey on how he hires artist from outsource sites like Odesk, Elance and Freelancer.

Please note:  While this option is the best for professional studios who don’t have internal artist on their time, when just starting out you might want to stick with creating your own art or purchasing pre-made art because of the time constraints with the 30 Day Game Challenge.  If you hire an artist who takes 20 days to create his art, it will limit the amount of time that you have with Buildbox to create your game, though some artist do work under quick deadlines.

What’s Coming Next…

This wraps up the first week.  Now you should have a strong idea of what type of game you’re going to make.  If you don’t know the gameplay type, theme and style of your game, then refer to the previous lessons for help.  Also remember, it’s important to make decisions so you can move forward, even if you don’t keep them in the final product.  Many customers and 30 Day Game Challenge students change their mind completely solely based on a pre-made art package they find available, and this is totally fine.

In a few days we’ll kick off Week 2 of the challenge where we’ll discuss the intricacies of actually making your game.  You’ll learn core elements of fun gameplay, how difficult to make your game, and how to create power-ups, effects and more.

30 Day Game Challenge Lessons:

Week 1 – Game Ideas &  Basic Training

Week 2 – Creating Your Game

  • Coming Soon

Week 3 – Monetization & Setup

  • Coming Soon

Week 4 – The Launch

  • Coming Soon

friends4Know someone who might like to do the challenge with you?
Send them over to the challenge page so they can download Buildbox too:
www.buildbox.com/challenge/