Creating ART for iPhone Games: part zero

I’ve been thinking about the process and tools of creating art for iPhone games. Having just finished Ghost’s Attack for Tarver Games…the learnings are fresh in my mind and now would be a great time to write about it. I don’t know if this will go beyond blog posting but if I can ease the way for artists who, like me, are fascinated by this gigantic little platform then I will have been of service.

So.

Here’s some first thoughts.

If you’ve made games before…everything you know will be useful. Modeling, Texturing, animation, pre-viz/concept development, visual effects…all the skills that go into making art for games will serve you well.

There isn’t a lot of information out there to inform the technical process…most of that pipeline stuff – how to get your art into the game – was a lot of trial and error, with some hints along the way and a dedicated team to swarm and solve the issues in near real time. The tools, many of them great (I’ll write about them as part of the process), are useful and excellent. But figuring out, for example, why the mesh I just animated in 3dsMAX rotating in a 360* loop clockwise shows up in the export tools and in-game rotating counter-clockwise??? Well it was a mystery…sort of.

I’m thinking that it will be useful writing about these kinds of problems and how they were solved. Perhaps some will say. “well yeah, duh! Anyone knows that!”

Well, yes, anyone does probably…but I didn’t and the journey of discovery was very rewarding. So, at the risk of opening myself up to ridicule and scorn I’m going to write anyway. Maybe someone will benefit from knowing how to fix the jacked up UV’s that happen sometimes when using Max’s UnwrapUV modifier and the PVR tools for exporting collada to POD files. Basic stuff like that.

…and then there is the totally shcizophrenic experience of creating art on a PC and building on a mac. Twisted my mind all up. Sort of. Not that it wasn’t twisted before…but

OK

Here’s a list of Basic Tools – PC based unless otherwise noted (mac)

• 3ds MAX
• After Effects/combustion
• Photoshop
• PVR Shaman
• Collada2POD
• PVRTexTool
• UI Builder
• Quartz
• XCode
• Git
• GitX
• GRAB
• SKYPE /SKYPE
  

I’ll cover these tools in the context of making art and getting it into the game and some of the problems encountered. And how I survived and thrived making art for a really cool project with some great people.

regards,

Dr_D