kite - That gave me a great idea for how to do the art for the fighting game my friend wanted me to make, but I haven't been too lucky in finding a good generic fighting game character sprite sheet yet; still looking. Something with a very generic human form in all the animation positions for punching kicking and what not.

I guess what I was looking for was tutorials other graphic artist used to help them learn the intermediate art of creating game assets or simple to complex level design. I've read a lot of the tutorials on this site as well as read books on game design in a programming sense. But when it comes to breaking down the elements that should make up a level, the styles and genres of games, and how they place obstacles and traps on the screen it's all a little fuzzy and I'm wondering where others learned their craft.

Coming into game design my roots stem from video production, so lighting and camera tricks are easy for me to figure out. But I've had one heck of a time with development of titled backgrounds and set pieces. I don't know where to start or how to have the continuity I want from my characters movement to the solids they stand on or even interact with.

I'm self thought on just about everything I know when it comes to graphic design, so I wonder if other self thought artist out there would like to share the resources they may have used to help them hone their technique?

I use adobe flash professional to create all my game art because it seems pretty forgiving and is default vector art, but I know most use Photoshop but I just never figured out how to get the smooth crisp lines I want.

On top of what programs are best to use, how do you decide the size and scale of the art? how do you know the players character should be 40 some odd pixels and the trees be 90 or what not? What am I not getting when it comes to that angle of looking at the graphic design for my games?

So are you guys gonna take like a level from each of your own games, tweak it for style points and continuity(player health, score, and collected items) throw that into a zip. Then set the Construct oven to 350 bake until playable & golden brown?

serves 3-5?

Boy if I was a bit more notable on this forum, I would suggest that dinner party would sound like a fun way to introduce new hobbyist indie developers to the community!

And this just show cases how wonderfully broken the system is, makes you wonder if Popcap or some other company has patented the idea for an in game economy using real money to augment the players in game wealth.

seriously if the video game medium wasn't bastardized enough with console wars and pirates, you have to practically have a multi-million dollar law firm just to find out if you can actually make a game influenced by franchises that don't even exist anymore.

Don't even get me started on the statute of limitations, that's Disney's demonic undoing. I'm still face palming at how long it takes for something to hit the public domain.

TL;DR: Joannesalfa, this is why we can't have nice things.

So here is the game on the arcade with those thoughts Robin had implemented, let me know what you think?

scirra.com/arcade/example/5747/shep-the-great-duck-rescue

I'll also update the link for the dropbox version.

Those two points are great, thanks. The idea about the camera really put into perspective some of the design issues I was having trouble addressing when it came to researching other games and how I set up my level.

I'm gonna play around with some different window sizes and scaling to see what I can come up with. As for the hit animation, I wonder if I could put a sound bite to it and that would do the trick too?

I think someone said they were changing the servers, I bet that broke the website for today.

I'm having trouble loading the websites pictures to the point the site is almost entirely plain text :/

I dig the idea of helping out on cleaning up event sheets & working on effects for you. ATM I still working on learning all the tricks of how this program handles it's tasks(try to read a tutorial a day) so I'm not sure if I'm the guy you want but I really liked your game idea and would love to see it finished.

I just put together my first game this last week

dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23327366/Shep%20%26%20the%20great%20Duck%20Rescue/index.html

and why not here is my event sheet for testing out my enemy movement

dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23327366/EnemyFrogs.capx

I'm kinda breaking into this whole construct 2 game development coming from action script and flash so I know I still have a lot to try out and learn. But I figure this community seems too helpful not to try and give back.

I haven't received too much feedback on the game so far and wanted some honest opinions of what people thought.

dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23327366/Shep%20%26%20the%20great%20Duck%20Rescue/index.html

controls: WAD for movement E activates the red switches and mouse fires the gun.

Hints: there is a hidden block, and watch out for frogs from the grass.

I was planning on making more levels for the game but I wanted to get feedback on what people thought of the game.