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I'm an mobile and web developer. I got interested in game development couple of weeks ago and I'm really looking forward to work on a mobile game.

I will be doing everything including the game design part. The problem is that I never designed something from scratch. Simple and static objects are not my concern, my main concern is dynamic objects, like a moving character. Should I draw multiple images of the character in different steps or am I missing something?

I'm not looking for something advanced, all I need to know some details about drawing and design for 2d games development.

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closed as not a real question by Byte56, Sean Middleditch, Nicol Bolas, msell, Anko Jun 14 '13 at 22:45


Sounds more like you benefit more from talking to someone about getting started in game development. You should head to the chat room or one of the sites listed in the on topic help page. Otherwise, can you clarify what you're asking? "Should I draw multiple images of the character in different steps " are you talking about animation? Moving sprites around? –  Byte56 Jun 13 '13 at 22:28
I'm nearly certain he's talking about how is sprite animation completed - i.e: frame animation. –  Vaughan Hilts Jun 13 '13 at 22:38
Thanks for the link. I'm talking about animation. What tools designer use mainly for game design, do they use photoshop only for example? I just need more info about the tools designers use and why? You get my point? –  void Jun 13 '13 at 22:38
Tools will vary, it depends on what you're comfortable with and what the goal is. Animation is done by drawing multiple images one after the other. If you have a more specific question about it, you should edit your question to ask that. –  Byte56 Jun 13 '13 at 22:42
Ok I see thank you very much for the info. I thought there are other techniques rather than drawing multiple images one after the other. One more question, any good tool for 2d sprite animation? I'll edit the question right away. –  void Jun 13 '13 at 22:52

1 Answer 1

up vote 3 down vote accepted

There are a lot of approaches for 2D animation.

The most common that I've seen is traditional frame-based animation where you draw multiple frames and just swap between them. Any art tool that you're comfortable with you can use (photoshop, illustrator, corel draw, whatever).

A slight variant I've seen of that is modeling/animating a character in a 3D studio package (like max or maya) and then just rendering out frames. You can get some interesting effects that way. One of the games I've shipped, Splode did that.

Another technique I've seen is to do 2D skeletal animations where you have mostly rigid body parts bind those to bones in a skeleton and animate that. It gives you a different look but has lots of benefits (at the cost of being a lot more complicated than just drawing a different image). A good example of that done in an iPhone game can be found here: Sometimes that's done with a combination of the frame-based animation (e.g. the head will have different frames for different expressions).

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