Of Mice and Pen: Pirate Art - The Game Maker's Companion: Game Development - page 236

and manipulating the planks using the Selection, Erase, and Transform/Scale Tools until they
look battered and split. Several new assets were produced from existing platform elements by
scaling and rotating them. In this way, you can produce enough material to ensure a level has lots
of uniquely interesting components within it (see Figure 10-16).
Figure 10-16. Breaking up and recombining objects
The environments must also feature interactive components; these are the platforms and
objects Flynn can walk on or use to traverse otherwise impassable areas (see Figure 10-17). Such
objects must look clearly and distinctly as if they can be walked upon, which for the most part
means they have flat upper surfaces, and are arranged in such ways as to suggest a route across
the environment toward a target area or objective. These are an integrally important part of the
game environment, and will require substantial testing during the Integration phase of the art
process. As with the characters, the different elements of each level are arranged into separate
.psd files for backgrounds, objects, and interactive objects.