Presenting Games with a Story

Want to learn how to use freely available digital tools to create assets (the artwork and sounds) for games and digital presentations? Not how to draw, but how to turn your picture into a game character? Not how to play an instrument, but how to use a crisp packet to make the sound of sneaking footsteps in the woods?

Using some mini-visual novels as example projects (like the ones you can build in "Coding Games with a Story"), we'll start with prototyping, deliberately 'wrong' placeholders and story boarding to work out what which assets we even need to make to complete our project.

Then we'll move onto the tips and tricks of the trade for using digital art tools. We'll look at how to take existing artwork created on paper and turn it into assets that we can use easily and that look good - without spending forever and a year doing so. We'll use layers to create many variants of the same image without having to redraw it every time, and to let you perfect parts of the artwork independently. Then we'll expand their use to have a look at basic animation techniques. And we'll look at how to use art styles to your advantage, like using pixel art to create a final visual design that looks good but isn't quite so labour intensive.

On the audio side we'll learn how to balance and adjust the volume of our recordings so that they match well together, have a look at Foley work (the creation of sound effects using everyday objects), and play with some vocal effects to allow things like voice acting multiple roles with the same voice actor.

We might not end up with results like a AAA computer game with a budget of millions, but we will end up with a set of skills to communicate your ideas more quickly and more accurately - and a lot of new ways to cheat on making things look and sound better quickly!

For this course you'll need access to a device that has both Krita (for visual work) and Audacity (for working with sound) installed as we will be using them during the sessions. Both pieces of software are available for free, and the course introduction email will contain links to download them safely. Between sessions you'll need access to a way to take pictures and record audio - any smartphone will do. If you have a graphics tablet for drawing it will be a nice bonus extra, but it will not be required.

Finally, to fit all of the good stuff into the short five week format, we will be assuming a foundational knowledge of downloading, saving, and loading files on the device you are using. We will regularly need to download files from links provided and to save files in one program and open them in another.