Gimp: Going Further With Pixel Art
Objectives and Overview
Now that you have created pixel art characters, you can prepare your designs for gameplay. In this lesson, you will learn how to make costumes for your sprites and also how to use Gimp to create backdrops and a splash page for your game.
Lesson Objectives
- Create a pixel art costume for a character
- Create a backdrop for your game
Creating Costumes
In Scratch games, characters change costumes when they move left and right and when they jump. Flipping an image in Gimp is simple. The example below demonstrates how to flip an image horizontally from the right view to a left view.
In the previous example, I don’t have to recreate my image in order to flip it. I clicked Image > Transform > Flip Horizontally. Make sure to save a .PNG file of both views. When we get to the game development module, we’ll learn how to incorporate costumes into gameplay and animation.
Creating Backdrops
In order to create a backdrop for a Scratch game, you need to set your image size to 480 x 360 px. A backdrop is an environment where you will place sprites in your Scratch game. Here are two backdrops from the Scratch game The Hobbit – 8 Bit.
Although the sprites within the environment are 8-bit or pixel sprites, the environment itself is not. You can use the same tools to create vector images or 2D point located shapes, rather than raster images like the pixel sprites we have been creating.
Creating a Splash Page
Below is a splash page from the previous game, The Hobbit – 8 Bit.
The splash page of a game, like a splash page of a website, is the first page that the user or player sees. Somewhere on the splash page, there should be a button that prompts the player to play or start game play. The splash page, like any backdrop in the game, should be 480 x 360 px.
Activity: Going Further
- Create 2 or 3 costumes for each of your sprites
- Create 2 or 3 backdrops for a Scratch game – these can be the backdrops described in the quest
- Create a splash page for a Scratch game