Sorry to be a complete n00b, but I was wondering what the best package was for making sprites. I haven't drawn any coder art since the old days of Deluxe Paint on the Amiga. But I find all this photoshop business very confusing. Are there any really simple packages out there to assist with this sort of thing?
I'm been a commercial game coder for years now, but I really want to make a homebrew schmup on the side. Perhaps I've just been put off because I've seen what artists have to do to create assets for current and "next-gen" games.
Sorry if this kind of thing is common knowledge already
Well I'm a hardcore spriter to the 3rd power. I personally like full controll over each pixel and color so I mostly use MS Paint for everything. However I do use a free utility called Graphics Gale. No offence to photoshop users but i feel that the filters and blurr tools are a really half assed way of making sprites. (Probably to the detriment of the indiependant pc game creators.) I like photoshop for touching up character art and drawn images but feel that has stagnated the art industry. Shmups have always had crisp pixel perfect art now everyone is taking a crapply pixeled image and blurring the hell out of it, giving it a "muddy" texture.
Hehe sorry for going offtpic a bit. Try graphics gale.
Cool stuff, Pixel_Outlaw. I think you should have a look at ProMotion, too. I know no better tool for pixel art, as it really gives you full control over each single pixel. It has great palette management, too.