Designing Arcade Computer Game Graphics [Paperback]

Ari Feldman (Author)

Book Description

Series: Wordware Game Developer's Library | Publication Date: November 1, 2000

Graphics play a central role in the computer gaming experience, and arcade-style games are no exception. Designing Arcade Computer Game Graphics emphasizes the development of quality graphics for 2D arcade-style computer games, both online and offline, including such topics as game design and documentation, graphics tools, animation, proper color usage, and fonts. Graphic designer and animator Ari Feldman provides a step-by-step example of designing 2D graphics and animation for an arcade-style game.

* Understand the capabilities of various display modes and learn the nuances of designing for each of them.
* Follow the step-by-step Fish Dish example for designing 2D graphics and animation for an online game.
* Create detailed design plans that document every aspect of the creative-related issues associated with your games.
* Find out the most important features of graphics creation tools, including painting programs and screen capture utilities.
* Identify the essential graphic file formats used in arcade game graphics development and find out which image compression techniques are most suited to arcade game graphics.
* Implement file naming conventions, version control, and backup strategies to manage your graphic assets.
* Discover how the proper use of fonts can liven up your graphics in addition to displaying important game information.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ari Feldman is the creative lead at ZapSpot, where he designs artwork and animations for arcade games. He has created game artwork for the Atari ST and Windows platforms, and is also the creator of SpriteLib, a collection of animated objects for arcade-style games

Product Details

• Paperback: 514 pages
• Publisher: Wordware Publishing, Inc. (November 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556227558
• ISBN-13: 978-1556227554
• Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 7.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #800,058 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent resource, January 4, 2001

By 

milieu (Washington. USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Designing Arcade Computer Game Graphics (Paperback)

This book is ideal for the garage developer or the hobbyist. If you are a professional artist or 3D modeller, I doubt you'd find anything of interest here. I am writing this from a solo game developer who wants to be able to create the graphics for my games, and this is exactly the book I wanted.

The book focuses on 2D sprite graphics, and does an incredible job of covering this subject. It begins by discussing image file formats, and the various pluses and minuses of each. From there, it lists the features you need in a graphics tool, and then evaluates dozens of programs using this feature set.

From here, he moves directly into production, color theory, palettes, sprite animation, and fonts. Throughout the focus is very much hands-on: how you get the work done, not abstract academic issues.

Finally, the book concludes by walking through the design of an entire game. This is not a brief overview; it's 80 pages long, with lots of examples.

Pluses:

The author doesn't presume you are on a million-dollar project. The tools reviewed are generally priced in the under $100 range, and there are a number of shareware and freeware tools.

The CD comes with a ton of demo versions of the software reviewed, plus a lot of sprite art.

It's not a Windows-only book; he also covers DOS, Mac, and Linux, and makes obvious attempts throughout to show you how to be cross-platform with your graphic resources.

The chapter on design techniques. Too many people just dive in without any planning, and get frustrated.

Minuses:

He doesn't spend much time talking about high resolutions; in fact, almost everything focuses on 640x480 or 800x600. In these days of 19" monitors and 1600x1200 desktops, it would have been nice to get some info.

There's info on DOS and Windows 3.1. While I guess you can make an argument for a DOS game these days, Windows 3.1 is a completely dead platform and a waste of time to develop for.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Graphics Design for the Hopelessly Lost, December 12, 2000

By 

Shane Ragone (Hanover, MN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Designing Arcade Computer Game Graphics (Paperback)

This book is for anyone who wants to design game graphics, but has trouble learning how to properly use the graphics tools that are available to them in the most popular packages. It is the only one that I have found that effectively tackles the subject of sprite creation from the artists standpoint.

The table of contents are:

1. Arcade Games and Computer Game Platforms 2. Designing for Different Display Modes 3. Image Compression and Graphic File Formats 4. Files and File Management 5. Evaluating Graphics Creation Tools (Brush, Shape, Block, etc.) 6. Essential Graphics Tools (Dos and Windows packages and utilities) 7. Color and Arcade Game Graphics 8. All About Color Palettes 9. Arcade Game Animation 10. Fonts and Arcade Games 11. Planning Arcade Game Graphics 12. Hands-on Arcade Game Project - Fish Dish 13. Miscellaneous Topics and Final Thoughts

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A disservice to the game programming community, June 27, 2001

By 

John Hattan (Southlake, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Designing Arcade Computer Game Graphics (Paperback)

A book on designing sprite-style art for games is a good idea, and I was hopeful that _Designing Arcade Computer Game Graphics_ would be a great little repository of tidbits for making attractive and fun-looking arcade games. Given that it's by Ari Feldman, author of the SpriteLib library of arcade clipart, I was even more hopeful that it would be backed by the requisite experience. Unfortunately, though, this book failed on all fronts.

To start out, there are parts of the book that are just frighteningly outdated. DOS graphics stopped being an influential market around 1994, yet this book devotes an inordinate amount of space to a discussion of EGA, VGA, and SuperVGA graphic modes. Despite the dominance of DirectX for arcade games, DirectX is not covered and is barely even mentioned!

Similarly, the survey of available graphics editing and viewing tools is almost ridiculous. The best example of this is the author's apparent soft spot for DOS-based paint programs. The most egregious is the author's review of DeluxePaint, which was discontinued by the publisher in 1993. In fact, the only paint program that is reviewed that you'd actually be able to find on a shelf is Paint Shop Pro.

Near the end of the book, you will actually come upon some content, namely a discussion of how to design sprites for a hypothetical computer game called "Fish Dish". While there are a couple of tidbits of good information, the tutorial is too focused on drawing fish sprites and there's not as much that's applicable to sprite-drawing in general as there should be. There's certainly nothing to justify the book's high price.

About the only thing that is worthwhile about the entire book is the inclusion of the SpriteLib graphics library. This is a small set of arcade clipart that has been available for free for several years from the author's website. SpriteLib was pulled from the market when the book was released so that there would be more incentive to purchase the book. In retrospect, the author should have made SpriteLib shareware and spared folks from having to spend $50 on a lousy book and a small collection of clipart.