The Graphics.

As a graphic designer and front-end developer, the graphics was a part of the game building process I was looking forward to. I’m no stranger to Photoshop and Illustrator or hand-drawing but I had never really designed game sprites before.

I wanted a retro style eighties look to my game and found various references on the internet. There are lots of game graphics sites but nothing really had the specific items I needed. Then I found the website of illustrator Chris Hildenbrand (find him at http://2dgameartforprogrammers.blogspot.co.uk/). Not only did he have the exact look of a cityscape that I wanted but he also had tutorials describing how he creates game elements. I bought the cityscape background tutorial and my look for the game was created.

Several game elements were drawn up before I was happy but they then had to be redrawn at the correct scale for the coded sizes of the game elements.

To add a bit of movement I used animated gifs but ran into problems trying to intergrate them into Box2D which didn’t seem to like them, so I had to solve this by positioning them on a layer over the top of the Box2D elements.

Then I came to do the instruction page and realised I needed to write the copy – not only for this – but also for the small preview pages for the Chrome store pages.

Then two major problems turned up that I didn’t expect. More in the next blog.