Creating a Paper-like Look in Photoshop

By Alex Schearer | July 24th, 2010

This is a follow up to my post creating great game artwork from paper. Today I thought I would shed some more light on the subject of Petunk’s artwork focusing on how I achieved the results using Photoshop. As a quick recap, for Petunk I created the artwork by hand using construction paper and scissors. Once ready I scanned the artwork into my computer and loaded things into Photoshop. With the artwork on my computer it’s time to explore how to prepare it for use in a game.

In my mind there are several objectives I’d like to achieve through Photoshop:

  1. Design and layout assets scanned in earlier
  2. Create text which is easy to update and maintain
  3. And, re-use scanned in assets as much as possible
Since creating artwork is relatively time consuming I want Photoshop to help me avoid doing so whenever possible. If we can address each point above I think we will have reduced our workload quite a bit.

Read More »

Petunk Week 3: Putting it all together

By Alex Schearer | July 19th, 2010

Time for another weekly update. Since last week I’ve been hard at work integrating the artwork I created with my game engine. The results I’m ready to show you include the basic game — title screen, level select, etc — along with an improved level editor. I’ve now started to use the editor to generate as many levels as I can and identify any new ideas I might like to add. Check out more details and an updated prototype below.

Read More »

Create Great Looking Game Artwork Using Paper

By Alex Schearer | July 16th, 2010

Today I’d like to share a little bit of the process behind the artwork for Petunk. I believe the style is attractive and distinct, and the best part is I was able to do it without strong technical artistic ability, investing lots of time, or spending much money. If like me  you’re not as strong an artist as you are a programmer read on to learn how to use construction paper to achieve a cool look for your game.

Scenes of development for Petunk's Art

Different scenes from the development of Petunk's art

Read More »

Staying Motivated in Game Development

By Alex Schearer | July 13th, 2010
Workshop for creating Petunk's art.

Scissors, construction paper, rulers, and more all go into making a new screen for Petunk.

I talked about this a little bit in an earlier post, I think that it’s easy to lose motivation especially for longer projects. I recently had a chance to think a little bit more about motivation and I thought I’d share the results. For me the start of a project is always the most fun — you’re exploring a new idea, you’re coding new code, things are taking shape really quickly. But at some point you hit a phase where progress slows down — the features are implemented and now you have to fix bugs, there’s only hard things left that you put off doing, etc — and at this point it’s easy to get distracted by a shiny new idea. Personally, I feel taking a game from the rough “prototype” phase to being a full, polished game is a ton of work, but in my opinion it’s also something that separates “serious” developers from less serious ones.

So with all that said here’s how I try to tackle the problem:

Read More »

  • About Me

    Hello, my name is Alex Schearer. I grew up in New York and currently live in Seattle.

    I am a software engineer who works on Microsoft Exchange by day and indie games at night, and this is my blog about game development.

    More details about me.

  • Pages