This post is one of a series that shows how to take the basic Platform Starter Kit from the XNA Games Studio and turn it into a more full featured game by taking advantage of the many tutorials and game examples published on the XNA Creators Club.
Building a game for real – rather than just playing around for demos – I’m really surprised just how easy XNA makes. But I’m even more surprised just how hard it is create the other key elements of a game, namely graphics and music. Leaving Music to one side, most of us can draw to some degree. I used to draw and paint a lot before computer programming got me hooked in my youth. So I am very surprised and disappointed at how poorly I’m been able to move forward creating new animated characters and background graphics for my version of the Platformer game.
To some degree I’ve solved my animation issues. I discovered as I searched for a tool to help me that I had indeed purchased a copy of Smith Micro’s Anime Studio. This is an animation tool that sells for about $25. Although I’d purchased it, I hadn’t installed it – so I got to that right away.
Anime enables you to create characters that have a connected bone structure. By manipulating the bones your character is easily animated. For speed, I played with the built in Aya and Winsor characters supplied – but you there are a number of different characters you can purchase cheaply from the Content Paradise.
By using the layer capability of Anime I put the current animation images in at the bottom. I then added a character such as Aya. It was then easy to manipulate the character to match the original game animation frame. The animations in the game are actually very good by the way. I’m just replacing them to make the game more my own.
However, I couldn’t find a way to export just the created frame from Anime. So I used the frame Render option (ctrl-R) to produce a rendered frame and then I used the Windows Vista Snipping Tool to copy the image element I wanted.
Pasting this image over the top of the appropriate image in a copy of the original animation image in Paint.Net. Very quickly you end up with a new animation file. I plan to spend a bit more time playing with the Anime to see if I can improve my technique and the quality of image from it. I’ll also look at building my own character at some point.
Building the level backgrounds was more an issue of missing creativity. I have a whole variety of drawing tools both hardware and software. My Wacom Bamboo is a joy to use, so are some old Tablet PCs I still keep just for drawing. I use ArtRage 2.5 (the Starter Edition is a free download, but again the full product only costs $25) to digitally paint. Its range of tools are well implemented and you can use a tracing image too with some direct assistance on colours by ArtRage.
Basically I was trying to draw up a three layer background: back, middle and fore grounds. Each as a separate layer that I could pull out and chop up later to give the Platformer game the three sections of image it was expecting for each layer. Each layer is 1280 x 720 in size. The total original image being 3840 x 720.
Here is the assembled background elements from the original game. The trees are the foreground, builds and more distance trees the middle ground and the sky and mountains the background. In the scrolling extension to the game each of these three layers move at a different rate to give that parallax scrolling experience.
By drawing an image the same dimensions as the combined image, and across the three layers it should have been easy to produce new back grounds. The issue I guess for me was competing against this original image’s quality. Still I persevere.
In addition to the background images I also need several others. These include the advertising images required by the Xbox Live Community Game submission and in application menu screen and splash screen images.
In total, I need 3 specific sized images for Community Games – including a box shot. And five other images as backgrounds to the menu screen, options screen, pause screen and loading splash screen.
So enough writing I need to get back drawing!