shmups.system11.org

Ah, here's a tough one. Everyone probably knows one of the biggest things that can kill a game's development is a lack of resources. So here's my question:Where can one go to find decent graphical resources for a shmup? I'm referring to things like sprites for players/enemies, tiles for use in drawing backgrounds, and soforth.

I would start off by considering the concept and style of shmup you wish to make. Work out the mechanics and then figure out the design elements and resources. It's actually better that you do something that's original than something that's borrowed from other games.

I'm not purely referring to rips. I'm also wondering about open source or public domain graphics, primarily things like tiles that can be used for terrain from a top view perspective. To be honest, this is primarily what I'm looking for. Anything nature or city based.

Of course, I'm not just asking this for myself, I'm sure a fair amount of people here could use access to resources to help their projects along.

How about coming at this from another angle:

There's a lot more free, and also very cheap 3d content knocking around on the internet. You could use this to 'render up' 2D sprites if you needed to.

This is pretty much how stuff was done in our last game:


There's loads of free modelling and rendering packages, and some really great ultra-cheap packages.

http://objects.povworld.org/links6.html massive set of links to people releasing models from POVray's site.

http://www.turbosquid.com/ -commercial models, many are really cheap though.

Well, I suppose that could help for sprites, but...What about terrain/backgrounds/tiles? While I have some utilities that can handle designing space related backgrounds, things like landscapes/cityscapes are another story.

Yeah, sorry - there's no easy answer there I'm afraid short of putting the work in. Making tilesets is painstaking - I once made a few for a project that later moved to 3D (and so I completely wasted my time), including a tileable animated water texture - it nearly killed my soul doing that!

Perhaps setting your game in space, or up in the clouds is the easiest answer.

I have seen shmups that use a slow moving fully animated rendered backdrops - one enormous texture. Not sure how feasible that is; I suppose it would depend on the system you are using.

The question of background art is an interesting one. If I had $100 to spare on backgrounds, I'd use Terragen to pre-render random high quality terrain maps and then import the coolest looking ones from a top-down perspective into tilesets. Although this might end up being more time consuming than its worth to get the results you're looking for. I suspect that similar random art generators are out there, possibly some of which are more suited to shmups?

Yeah Terragen is a lovely program.

For more traditional background tiles you could do worse than grabbing a copy of Tile Studio. The examples are of platform games but it's just as suited to shmups.

depending on the style of your game, satelite pictures might also give you background graphics. The problem is finding a good compression algorithm, you will probably need to cut down on resolution and color depth.
If you want to convert a large graphic with redundant elements into tiles, I´ve written a Blitzbasic tool that can do this. The algorithm works by splitting the graphic into tiles and searching for similarities among them. Whenever similarity reaches a specified level, tiles are considered exchangeable. Anyone interested in the source code, just say so and I´ll post it here.
edit: at the moment, I can´t find the old file, so sorry, can´t guarantee right now.