Hokay. I just had a holy shit moment where I realized how much work making a game is going to take. I'd like to make something like harvest moon... walk around, chop weeds, feed chickens, milk cows, mine stuff, water/plant crops, get tired, go to bed.

I still think this is a reasonable goal, but I realize this is going to require more than a random tile-sets I snagged from google. I'm going to have to learn how to draw stuff .

Now question is, Is there any software available that is made specificly for this kind of thing, or good tutorials that someone could recommend? I've gone through a couple for drawing tiles. I get the how to of drawing 2d spritesheets and tilesets... but I'd like to know what people do/use to make these things in a reasonable amount of time...

Currently I'm using gimp, and it took me about 2 hours to draw a 3*3 tileset :-(

Gimp is good, if you set it up properly. Personally, I prefer Graphics Gale, but that's only if you're using Windows. I hear good things about Cosmigo Pro Motion, but it's expensive as fuck, so I hadn't had the opportunity to try it out.

I believe some of the links here are still working, so you might find a few decent tutorials there.

Drawing tilesets takes a long time, period. Especially if you want them detailed.

Well, That will keep me busy for a good while, thanks!

There's no shame in downloading placeholder graphics. There are several free and public domain tiles out there.

It's more important to get the game engine working, than to spend hours on perfecting an image sheet.

When this game gets near completion, it's much more likely that you can post your game and say "I need artists..." and you'll have more people offer to draw for you (maybe even for free), than if you're just starting, and neither you nor they know all the tiles and animations you'll need.

And even better, at that stage, you may get someone to render the scenes in 3D (and then flatten it to a 2D sheet).

Hey... Thanks Cop I never even considered 3d to do 2d stuff, I think That's the avenue I'm going to explore, to me it seems easier (for animated things at least) to draw one 3d model and take many pictures of it, rather than draw many 2d pictures. This is going to be fun.

I've run into problems drawing stuff too. I'm not good at it, and it takes forever. I'll probably end up tweaking favorite animations from other games beyond recognition Writing music for the game is my forte...

Oh gawd I havn't even thought about sound yet. . I'm just in it for the experiance though I'd like to try to suck equally at everything until I figure out which area I'd like to focus on.

Same here I haven't touched any sound routines yet.

Depends on what you want from your sound.

Do you need some major coding and have dynamic sounds/music that changes according to events?

Will it be simple where you have a continuous background loop, a few sound effects for chopping/hacking/mowing/milking?

For that, create a stub. When you need to start the "milking" scene/animation, along with everything else, call the stub with some placeholder stuff:

  if (event.type == MILK_COW)
  {
    // All the other stuff...

    play_sound(SND_MILK_COW); 
  }

...

void play_sound(t_sound which_sound)
{
  // STUB
  // TODO: Actually play a sound
}

Your stub does nothing: it's in place for when you (or someone who can help you) can just drop some code in there and get it working.

I tried Allegro 5 sound, ran into problems with one of the dependencies (I used pre-compiled libs). I finally got fed up and switched back to Allegro 4 and was able to actually get a game created without spending days figuring out Allegro 5 dependency headaches.

I think it would be pretty awesome (also, useless) if Allegro had a default cow milking sound.

I need to get in to the habit of writing stub code more often. It makes prototyping a lot easier.

I just got done using TrueSpace to render ALL my graphics for a simple game. It looks really nice this way, you just need to remember to have the lighting be consistant from image to image (always coming in from the same angle in most cases).

I then used ImageReady to trim them (crop) and resize to what I wanted. I like ImageReady because it handles the alpha portion of the image properly when resizing etc... you can resize your rendered images down to tile size and resave as a PNG and have your alpha channel preserved perfectly. The result is nicely blended alpha tiles with that 3D Rendered quality. It's an awesome way to do things when you're lacking in artistic ability. Pick up Poser software to create 3D rendered people and animals and you're set! (I used poser to render a simple hand for an awesome looking mouse pointer)

Yeah I'm a little worried about how things are going to look. I guess the key is consistancy. Always view the scene from the same angle with the same lighting across each map. I'm not very far along... Right now I'm trying to figure out how to use Maya... Its insane how many buttons/menu's/tabs there are.

Thanks for including some of the software you're using Neil. I'll definately check out ImageReady.