Ok I know it costs money, but as a new artist and game designer it was worth the money to buy a Wacom Intuos tablet. This came witht he free software ArtRage 3. Since I had that deal I was able to purchase ArtRage 4 for $25 instead of $50. You can find Wacom intuous 4 tablets online for $56-$80 (Amazon is at the low end) brand new with the free art program codes. So total price is about $80, but I just started doing all of these things maybe 2 weeks ago and I'm really getting good. I am making game characters and uploading the .PNGs to Construct2.
Artrage4 has almost everything Photoshop has that matters for tablet drawing. If on paper you can draw ok with ArtRage's quick to learn settings you can draw really nice things.
Wacom tablets have like 2048 pressure sensitivity. It's very close to paper, but a lot more forgiving. You can still scan your work and upload it to artrage, but doing everything electronic is much faster.
I pay for Adobe Creative Cloud, but I like ArtRage way better than Photoshop CS.
ArtRage might take a couple days to get used to, but I'm sure photoshop takes way longer.