GRAPHIC TIPS FROM FISHHEAD PART 2
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About Styles, creating lots of graphics and ripping
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! WARNING ! this article is written mainly for "newbies".

In part 1 you learned the basics of how u could create decent sprites. I already said there are hundreds of ways how to do that. Everyone has his (her) own style!

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STLYLES
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Well..you first have to deploy your own style. When you are a newbie, and you want to learn how to do nice graphics, it ain’t a crime to "steal": not direct ripping of course, but just look at the masters, and try to do it the same way.

This reminds me of 8 years ago, when I was a young boy, and I wanted to do my first game I didn't really have a clue of how to do the graphics. (I didn't have a clue of how to do the game either cuz I didn't know there was something like klik&play, but that’s another story). I had a game called Donkey Kong Country on my SNES, and I loved the graphics of that game. I tried to draw exactly the same way (not knowing they were rendered graphics)and that's the way I learned to shade.

OK that’s a stupid example, but I think the best way to learn is watching how the masters do it. Just pick a game with graphics you like, and try to do it the same way.
Just like I watched RAREware, Hooghaar watched the Mario games and Circy possibly watched how Picasso did it

After that you can begin deploying your own style. you can make things more cartoonish, more realistic, abstract ..and so on.

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CREATING A LOTTA GRAPHICS
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When you create a game, you have to do a lot of graphics. At this point your style gets important. To make your game look good, and even feel good, you must do everything in the same style. If you have an ugly style, it doesn't matter, as long as everything in your game is ugly in the same way. And if your style is simplistic, it doesn't matter, as long as everything in your game is simplistic!

Now take Hooghaar XL (you can find this in the download section-platform). If you look at the graphics of this game, you will see that everything has a simple shape, everything is shaded the same way (big frontal light source), and everything has the same way of colouring. And you see, the effect is amazing, it just looks good and feels good all through the game.

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RIPPING
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Now that is why you should never rip graphics. In the first place you will never learn how to do it by yourself, in the second place, it is gonna be unattractive, because it is not YOUR style, so the game won't feel good because the ingame graphics just don’t match with the menu's, counters, your logo and whatever! Only rip when you want to do a fangame, most people hate fangames anyway. (I know there are good ones)

I wish you all luck,

Fishhead