Photoshop for fun and game design

[bayonetbrant]

Here's a good place to start for map stuff

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkBj6Kfmxkim3bBQm2F_0ww

[Staggerwing]

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkBj6Kfmxkim3bBQm2F_0ww

Subscribed for later viewing!

Any recommendations as to a site for free textures and plugins and whatnot?

[BanzaiCat]

Any recommendations as to a site for free textures and plugins and whatnot?

"Google Image Search"



What do you mean by plugins, Stagger?

Free textures...there aren't many of those out there. Google that and you'll find several, including http://www.brusheezy.com/textures

[bayonetbrant]

check out John Coopers page for some good info

http://www.jrcooper.com/wargameart.htm

[BanzaiCat]

check out John Coopers page for some good info

http://www.jrcooper.com/wargameart.htm

I stumbled on this and thought, WTF?

http://www.jrcooper.com/computer.htm

Then I saw he hasn't updated it in 7 years. The art in your link is pretty cool though!

[Jamm]

A word of advice, just because a site says its textures are free, their definitions of free are sometimes blurry.
Read the terms of use.
Many times they are free for personal use only, so anything for commercial use is prohibited.
And if the terms of use is pages long and has been written by a team of lawyers, avoid the site like the plague.

[Staggerwing]

Good advice. Thx. 

Are the OST textures free to use for KS backers? (J/K )

[bayonetbrant]

see attached

[GJK]

Adobe certainly has the tools that make designing your own boardgames a possibility.  I'm very competent with Photoshop but have stumbled learning Illustrator, which I really would like to use with Photoshop.  For those who may ask what the difference is, Photoshop is mostly raster based imaging meaning that if you scale an image, you'll get pixelation that can be quite obvious depending on how much scaling you do. Illustrator is vector based imaging meaning that you can resize the artwork as much or as little and as frequently as you like and it will look crisp and clean no matter.  A good example of this is with some pdf's that you get.  You may notice that if you zoom in or out, the image "redraws" on the screen and it's just as sharp as it did at 100% zoom factor.

Another tool that Adobe has that is quite useful for game design is InDesign.  This is a desktop publishing app that beats the snot out of trying to do it in something like MS Word.  I've self-taught myself how to use it recently by watching some online videos like those linked above.  This weekends project was putting together charts and references for a tabletop game that I've been tinkering with (see attached).  Pretty cool stuff- this is definitely a tool to have in your bag if you're thinking of coming up with some of your own designs!

[bayonetbrant]

I have done almost all of my publishing in InDesign

But then again I have almost a 25 year history of working with desktop publishing at this point, & I have worked with almost every app there is. So picking up InDesign was not that tough for me

[GJK]

I found it to be fairly straight forward.  There was an initial learning curve where doing things seemed kind of wonky as compared to how you'd do it in say MS Word or Excel but now that I've done a couple of full rulebook layouts and now all these charts, I'm feeling really good with it.

I should add in the Illustrator vs Photoshop chat- someone may ask "well why not just always use Illustrator if it's vector art and looks better?".  Answer: Illustrator doesn't have the graphic tools that Photoshop has (for the most part).  Photoshop has many built in filters that let's do just about anything with an image.  Illlustrator can do some of that but not nearly to the same degree.  What would seem natural is if Illustrator and Photoshop were combined into a single package but of course that would do Adobe no good. 

[bayonetbrant]

What would seem natural is if Illustrator and Photoshop were combined into a single package but of course that would do Adobe no good. 

That was SuperPaint
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperPaint_(Macintosh)

I did a LOT of old bldg. layouts for RPGs with it

[Jamm]

I like AI as it is very powerful, and forgiving if you want to make any changes to your work.
I used it almost exclusively for the maps in 'Brother Against Brother'.
But if you want the details you have to use PS.
Most of my projects, I use a combination of the 2.
I also use ZBrush and GIMP for some aspects of a project.

I've just bloodied myself in battle with InDesign for the OST rulebook.
It is also a great program.

[GJK]

To me, InDesign seems to be a close cousin to Illustrator- much more so than Photoshop.  I need to keep playing around with Illustrator because I definitely want the ability to do vector art (though Photoshop now has more and more support for it).  I think that gets me is the 'paths' with the anchor points and such.  That and I keep wanting to do things like how Photoshop does it...."I just want to crop the damn thing, how do I do that!!".  Jamm, do you recommend that I keep trying to stick with Illustrator (since I have it and am comfortable with other Adobe products) or is something like ZBrush, Inkscape, Gimp maybe a simpler way to get the basics down before transitioning to Illustrator (in your opinion)?

[BanzaiCat]

Illustrator is probably one of the less-intuitive programs in the Adobe lineup (probably the worst out of the bunch now that FrameMaker is long out of the picture). It can be gloriously frustrating sometimes, but I agree, the results are always light-years ahead of what you can do in Photoshop.