i am a bit confused on what to use to make a good 2d game. i have been messing around with adobe photoshop elements 2, but it seems more like a digital photo editor then a 2d graphic creator. are there and programs that specificly focus on the creation of 2d sprites or images? appreciate any help.

Adobe Photoshop is more an image manipulation program than for actually creating graphics, although you can often do some very good things with it, and its also very good for touching up your images.

Adobe Illustrator is more designed for creating images from scratch. Illustrator works with vector graphics, but can output them in a raster file-format for you. I find its especially good for cartoon type graphics, although I''ve seen some not so cartoonish stuff made as well.

That being said I''m not much of an artist, so you may want to get advice from some other people before rushing off to get illustrator.

For small sprites and other pixel art, using Illustrator (or any other vector graphics package) would be a bad idea because it's very difficult to work pixel-by-pixel. For such things, I use MS Paint and Photoshop (both running at the same time with a lot of copy-n-paste going on between them - Paint is good for pixel-perfect work, but Photoshop has an excellent color picker and some nice brushes).

For bigger things that don't have to be pixel-perfect, I generally draw them by hand either on paper or with my tablet (and Alias Sketchbook Pro), and then manipulate them in Photoshop until they look the way I want them. I would use Illustrator for some of this stuff, but I don't have it (and Photoshop can do enough vector graphics to suit my needs - try using the pen tool in Photoshop, or the polygonal lasso tool combined with stroke/fill in Elements).

[edit - spelling mistakes]

[edited by - RabidCow on May 23, 2004 3:27:02 PM]

Maybe the folks in Visual Arts can help more so than Game Design. *MOVED*

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Just waiting for the mothership...

there is also the way to use a 3d render and animation software. combined with a cartoon shader.

pro: you only have to model your sprite once. and then simply animate it in the needed poses.
con: learning to handle such a software needs time ... and lots of money when you don´t use a freeware one like blender.


tilesets games sprites
http://www.reinerstileset.de

For pixel work such as sprites and tiles look for software such as GraphicsGale, ProMotion, Gimp etc.
However, I still use Photoshop or Painter Classic for the blur,
layer and special brush functions. After a while, using copy/paste or file/open, you''ll be using your favourite functions from each of the products without knowing which one you''re in.