It seems to me that the hobbyist game developer comunity is most lacking in artits. There just aren't near as many of them as there are programmers or even music artists. This is sad to me because the quality of a game is, more often than it should be, judged by it's looks. The graphics of a game is the first thing perceived. Potential players will see how the games look before they play it. And we all know how valuable first impressions are, right?
Being a good artist is difficult. It requires a lot of work and patience. It's not like programming where you can create something that works good after learning the basics. Until you are at least halfway diecent your art won't look good, which can be discouraging.
I don't know what all that has to do with this tutorial but anyway, the best way I learn is to take some good art and see how it was created. I don't claim to be good but I don't think I'm bad. Here is a way I discovered to make some nice looking stone/metelish tiles. We start out with a 64x64 image in Gimp.
- Fill the image with a light gray.
- Use airbrush to paint over it with a rusty color.
- Use the normal brush tool and the 32x32 or 16x16 Sketch brush to lightly paint back over the image with the base gray color. A good way to do this is to turn down the brush opacity and go over it all several times. The texture actually looks pretty good just like this.
- Hurl some noise onto a new layer (Other noise algorithms will work fine too).
- Bumpmap the background layer using the noise layer as the map. I use a depth of 1. Delete the noise layer after your done.
And that's pretty much it! For fun try blurring the noise or playing with different settings in the bumbmap (the waterlevel specifically). You can come up with some very nice and unique looking tiles.
