Question Ressources for drawing for video games?

Hello,

I'm a developper and i am working with an artist on game. She draws by hand and usually does illustrations, and neither of us knows much about how to apply it for video games. For instance, we don't know if it's worth investing in a higher quality scanner. One common issue we have if that when drawing the character it doesn't look good at all in game size. Are there any good ressources out there on the subject?

Thanks

 

Aspect ratio is a big deal. If you shrink height by half you must also shrink width by half.
Maybe get the artist to draw on a tablet.

 

While it will certainly be advantageous to learn how to use a drawing program. (Krita is one of my faves) It may be a good option to scan a black and white drawing and doing colors digitally. You can do this either by scanning, or just taking a photo.

1. Create fairly clean black and white artwork, ink or pencil is fine.
2. Import it into the drawing application of your choice, and convert it to black and white.
3. Make a selection from color (most apps have their own version of this) then create a new layer and fill the selection with the outline color of your choice.

Now that you have your outline on its own layer you can paint behind it.

Another option would be to take a pencil drawing and import it into a vector drawing program, and use it to "trace" your original drawing. This is a manual process but it's much easier than trying to draw in a vector program.

Using a digital format is going to give you much better control over the appearance of your game assets.

 

scanning drawings on paper for usage in games is a pointless endeavour

you will need to post process it anyway and the end result will always be worse than if you had drawn it digitally

there are many programs you can use for drawing, like photoshop, gimp, sai, etc. If you want to invest dont bother with a scanner, buy a wacom tablet and have your artist start drawing digitally.

Drawing on paper for digital end products is a thing of the past, unless you are a god tier professional ( for example japanese manga artists ), drawing digitally will always yield the best results ( no scanning artifacts, perfect for corrections, perfect for coloring, no troubles with scaling, drawing on transparent background which is essential for games, the list goes on )

 

Problem is she's the kind of hardcore-old school gall who doesn't wan't to hear about digital drawing, altough i hope to slowly shift her opinion at some point. She wants to go for a kind of pencil-drawn look, she draws with a black pen and scans it.

The environments look good fine enough but animating a 2d character for a platformer is a mess.

I tried to redraw it over in procreate, it was better but i'm no graphic designer.

She isn't even close to having enough money for some descent digital drawing material anyway. I proposed to offer her a better scanner such as https://www.amazon.com/Epson-Perfec...ds=Epson+Perfection+V39&qid=1612474529&sr=8-1 but she belives it will make no diffrence, i'm not sure if she's right or not.

Anyway, my question wasn't that much opinion based, i would be happy with pretty much any quality learning material. As a developper i'm used to having tons of online ressources on whatever i'm learning, but i can't seem to find much when it comes to video game 2d graphics.

 

there are nice tablets cheaper than that scanner

even in the past people didnt create art for games by drawing on paper, its not even a matter of old school, if she wants to make a game she cant draw on paper. There are tons of ways to simulate the pencil drawn look by using custom brushes that will actually get you usable art.

if you are doing the project together you should split the costs and each pay 45$ for a wacom tablet

if you are set in stone on doing it though, then youll need to go learn how to use photoshop to clean up scanning artifacts, remove scanning artifacts and then retouch, repaint, redraw, rescale art. Youll have to do the animations yourself, its a given that you can animate frames on paper without a proper animation station ( those tables with a backlight you used to see professionals use back in the day )