This post is going to talk very briefly about the improvements I made to the basic graphics of the Third Tortoise Game, as opposed to the first two.
(The first two tortoise games I made were Tortoise Trails and Sixty Shells. With the exception of a really bad flash game I made in high school, they were the first non-text games I ever made, and it shows.)
So, when I began making my third game — Lettuce Walk, an interactive procedurally-designed puzzle game — I wanted to improve the graphics. However, since I lack artistic and Photoshop skills, I needed to think of easy ways to do it.
This was how they looked when I started:
And this was how it looked after the improvements I made:
I think this is a huge improvement. What did I do?
I found a picture of a rock on the Internet. I imported the rock into GIMP (a free Photoshop clone). I cranked up the brightness so that it was almost totally white, and then I made everything that wasn’t white transparent.
Then, I overlaid this rock mask on top of the game board, creating the appearance of a well-worn game board.
Then, I replaced the solid-black tortoise icon with a tortoise icon filled in with a picture of obsidian. Additionally, I added a small animation when you pick up the lettuce. Here’s a still of it:
Basically, when your tortoise lands on a head of lettuce, it explodes in a burst of green leaves. Even though this doesn’t change or improve the mechanics of the game in any way, I think it makes it more visually stimulating and fun to play.
I hope people will enjoy the game when it finally is released (hopefully sometime this month).