Newsletters from the original ACS Fan Club - Tons of useful ideas and some of the old ACS game design tips you will find in these ancient scrolls still apply in ACK!
Starting out on Game Programming While this article was written to newby programmers it has an important message that applies to all game designers. "Remember the story of Daedalus and his son Icarus."
Crafting A Vintage CRPG - This one is a series of web logs kept by Adam Haase "which will detail my project to develop a true CRPG (Computer Role-Playing Game) for the TI-99/4a home computer system." I especially enjoyed his Inspiration article with all the vintage rpgs he draws inspiration from.
A structured approach to creating a CRPG, or Things to do before you load up your RPG creation software.
Creating a Game Design Document
Designing Video Games (For Dummies Guide)
The Craft of Game Systems, Part 1
The Craft of Game Systems, Part 2
The Craft of Game Systems: Practical Examples
The Craft of Game Systems: Tuning RPG Content
ADVENTURE WRITING
- The Aristotle approach to writing
tvtropes.org ~ This wiki is a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction.
The Hero's Journey or Monomyth (See Illustration)
The Hollywood Formula
3-Act Structure
The 9 Act Screenplay Structure
Story Structure ~ From Aristotle to Dramatica
Story Goal & Structure
The Story Tree
Writing for Videogames: Part I
"Show, don’t tell, isn’t enough for us, because now its “Play, don’t show.” Our audience is not passive"
- GrafX2 is a bitmap paint program inspired by the Amiga programs ​Deluxe Paint and Brilliance. Specialized in 256-color drawing, it includes a very large number of tools and effects that make it particularly suitable for pixel art, game graphics, and generally any detailed graphics painted with a mouse. The program is mostly developed on Linux and Windows, but is also portable on many other platforms. Graphics Wizardry (Written for GIMP and intended for use with Hampster Republic game design but applicable tips for any 8bit pixel work and for working on 16x16 tiles or those larger images displayed in our Adventures with the showbmp command.)
Batch processing stray tiles with Image Magick
Paint Program Reviews (Judged for how well they handle 8bit pixel art and indexed color palettes)
PIXEL ART TUTORIALS
HD Index Painting in Photoshop - Prepare to have your mind blown. How to set up Photoshop for Indexed-Palette Painting using all those tools normally restricted to RGB mode!
SECRET WEAPONS AND TACTICS FOR BETTER PIXEL ART
Pixel Art Tutorial - 10-step sprite making tutorial by Derek Yu. More geared towards making the kind of art best used as npc portraits in ACK dialogs but the concepts taught in this tut can help with the much smaller tile editing as well.
PRODUCTIVITY
Use macros to automate repetative tasks:
- Autohotkey
http://numsum.com/ ~ Free online spreadsheet creator. Users can share spreadsheets created there.
OTHER MISC TOOLS
FRAPS
Habit RPG - Gamify your life, CRPG style! Part CRPG, part hourly/daily and/or one time to-do check list, Habit RPG can be applied to anyone's daily routine, even game designers, to keep individuals and groups of people focused on a series of goals. It also brings the social media element into play so actual competition and peer pressure can be another incentive to getting things done sort of like an mmo. Users even create quests and bosses and other shared content.
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