Of Mice and Pen: Pirate Art - The Game Maker's Companion: Game Development - page 242

The initial sketch was quite loose and ill-defined, but was a great starting place from which to
develop a new, tighter pencil drawing. This featured a great, dynamic pose as well as other
content such as the parrot and the bat-skulls!
An inked version of this drawing is made, before being scanned into Photoshop. The inked
image is tidied up digitally, and the outlines of the various elements are thickened slightly. Next, a
new layer is created above the line drawing, and the blending mode is set to Multiply. This will allow
the ink beneath to show through. Flat colors are carefully added into this layer using the Paint
Bucket Tool, with the Lasso Tool defining the boundaries of all the different areas in turn.
Finally, a little shading and highlights are added using Dodge, Burn, and Hue/Saturation.
The final result is a clearly defined image that should prove a striking addition to the cover!

Pirate CD
We've deliberately created far more artwork for Shadows on Deck than is actually required for the
version of the game we'll be making in the topic. If you explore the Chapter10 directory on the CD,
you'll find many more examples of monsters, environments, and objects that you can use to build
completely new levels and scenarios. We've tried really hard to make it easy to mix and match
artwork to fulfill your own wild ideas. How about flying ships, upside-down swamps, or levels
made entirely out of skulls and bones? Perhaps you'd like to make a skeletal centipede dragon?
How about cannon-headed pirates or skeletons with spider legs? Well, if you want them, then it's
now within your power to create them. The beauty of the silhouette style is that it's really easy to
modify, recombine, and incorporate bits and pieces of other artwork. In this section, we'll give
you a brief crash-course in how to modify these resources for yourself. This is not intended as an
in-depth tutorial of any kind—more of a quick bluffer's guide to creating and animating graphics
for Shadows on Deck .

Paint it Black
Although we realize that not everyone will have access to Photoshop, it's certainly worth
investing in if you're serious about artwork. We're going to focus on Photoshop CS3 for this
tutorial, but any of the more recent versions will do just as well. Before you fire it up, take a
moment to explore the contents of the Chapter10/Environments/Cliff directory on the CD. Here,
we have a huge range of objects, scenery, and platforms that are designed to be used in the
Rogues' Rendezvous level. These are all high-resolution images colored in a mid-tone grey so that
you can easily adapt them to the needs of different levels and situations.
You should be familiar with the idea of using RGB (red, green, blue) values to specify colors,
and we're going to use absolute black for foreground objects (R=0, G=0, B=0), and a very dark blue
for objects in the near background (R=35, G=37. B=53). This slight difference is enough to give a
visual cue to the player about what to expect to be collidable within the environment. Getting the
artwork in these colors is very easy.

Adjusting the Color of the Environment Artwork
1.

Load one of the .psd files into Photoshop and double-click on the main layer to open
up the Layer Style dialog.

2. Now select the Color Overlay option within the dialog. A check mark should then appear

next to this option and the layer should turn bright red, as shown in Figure 10-21.

3. Click on the smaller red rectangle and a color picking dialog should appear. You can

now select the color you require. Try both absolute black and the dark blue value
(R=35, G=37. B=53) to see what it looks like.

4. Now use the Crop Tool to select the rectangular area of the image that you're

interested in and then press Enter to crop.