Game Development - Guides, Tools, Etc.

Chris H.'s Ultima / ACS-style game development system!

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Garth's Equipment Shop
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Game Development - Guides, Tools, Etc.

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GAME DEVELOPMENT GUIDES

Newsletters from the original ACS Fan Club - Tons of useful ideas and some of the old ACS game design tips you will find in these ancient scrolls still apply in ACK!

Starting out on Game Programming While this article was written to newby programmers it has an important message that applies to all game designers. "Remember the story of Daedalus and his son Icarus."

Crafting A Vintage CRPG - This one is a series of web logs kept by Adam Haase "which will detail my project to develop a true CRPG (Computer Role-Playing Game) for the TI-99/4a home computer system." I especially enjoyed his Inspiration article with all the vintage rpgs he draws inspiration from.

A structured approach to creating a CRPG, or Things to do before you load up your RPG creation software.

Creating a Game Design Document

Designing Video Games (For Dummies Guide)

The Craft of Game Systems, Part 1

The Craft of Game Systems, Part 2

The Craft of Game Systems: Practical Examples

The Craft of Game Systems: Tuning RPG Content


ADVENTURE WRITING IMAGE EDITING/PROCESSING

Image - GrafX2 is a bitmap paint program inspired by the Amiga programs ​Deluxe Paint and Brilliance. Specialized in 256-color drawing, it includes a very large number of tools and effects that make it particularly suitable for pixel art, game graphics, and generally any detailed graphics painted with a mouse. The program is mostly developed on Linux and Windows, but is also portable on many other platforms.

Graphics Wizardry (Written for GIMP and intended for use with Hampster Republic game design but applicable tips for any 8bit pixel work and for working on 16x16 tiles or those larger images displayed in our Adventures with the showbmp command.)

Batch processing stray tiles with Image Magick

Paint Program Reviews (Judged for how well they handle 8bit pixel art and indexed color palettes)

PIXEL ART TUTORIALS

HD Index Painting in Photoshop - Prepare to have your mind blown. How to set up Photoshop for Indexed-Palette Painting using all those tools normally restricted to RGB mode!

SECRET WEAPONS AND TACTICS FOR BETTER PIXEL ART

Pixel Art Tutorial - 10-step sprite making tutorial by Derek Yu. More geared towards making the kind of art best used as npc portraits in ACK dialogs but the concepts taught in this tut can help with the much smaller tile editing as well.

PRODUCTIVITY

Use macros to automate repetative tasks: Organizing And Formatting Game Dialogue (In Excel) ~ The author's tips assume the text dialog will be read by voice actors. For games with no voice acting the spreadsheet can be simplified quite a bit.


OTHER MISC TOOLS

FRAPS

Habit RPG - Gamify your life, CRPG style! Part CRPG, part hourly/daily and/or one time to-do check list, Habit RPG can be applied to anyone's daily routine, even game designers, to keep individuals and groups of people focused on a series of goals. It also brings the social media element into play so actual competition and peer pressure can be another incentive to getting things done sort of like an mmo. Users even create quests and bosses and other shared content.

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