Tag: tools

Games From Scratch’s Recommended Free Tools

Games From Scratch is a prolific Youtube channel dedicated to helping solo and small team gamedevs with tutorials and tools. They really do post frequently, so if I linked to everything they made it’d overwhelm the blog, but it’s been a while since I referred to them, and they just made a nice omnibus video of free tools. There is a sponsored section in it, but if that kind of thing bothers you I suggest using the browser extension SponsorBlock, which shows time-wasting sections on the Youtube timeline in different colors.

Here is the video (13 minutes):

Here are the tools recommended, along with links (which the video maker neglected to provide):

Blender (3D modelling)
Godot (game engine)
O3DE (game engine)
Krita (raster art)
GNU Image Manipulation Program (raster art)
Audacity (audio editing)
Tiled (map creation)
Inkscape (vector art)
Pixelorama (pixel art & animation, can be run in browser)
DPaint.JS (pixel art, in-browser, recreation of Deluxe Paint for Amiga)
GraphicsGale (pixel art)
Material Maker (procedural texture creation)
Ucupaint (texture painting extension to Blender)
MagicaVoxel (voxel-based painting, Windows & Mac only)
SculptGL (browser-based sculpting)
LDtk (2D level editor)

Pixel Art Manipulation Tools

Tiled is a popular open-source tool for tilemap construction

Popular and prolific game asset creator Kenney has a page up at Github that links to some of his favorite tools for manipulating pixel art, such as creating sprite sheets and extracting images out of them. It’s got a lot of useful info! If you have an interest in this style of art, especially making games with it, these programs are worth having in your toolbox.

Kenney: Manipulating pre-made game assets

40th Anniversary of the ZX Spectrum

“What do you want from us? We’re evil! EVIL!”

Lee Reilly on The GitHub Blog offers a long post about the ZX Spectrum on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of its release. Wait, 40th anniversary? (does some math) That puts it in early 1982, the year of Donkey Kong!

To give to some incentive to click through, some of the projects linked are:

  • A Spectrum emulator written in Rust, and another one in JavaScript
  • A port of Spectrum game The Great Escape to C and current platforms
  • Tools for working with archives of Spectrum cassette tape images, including to convert one to mp3 to facilitate transferring to a tape for play on a physical ZX Spectrum
  • A Visual Studio Code extension for working with Z80 code
  • And small program to convert image files to the peculiar limitations of the Spectrum’s graphics hardware, to give your portraits some of that loading screen flair.

That last one I tested out a bit, here’s some results. I discovered it’s best if you resize the images to around the Speccy’s 256×192 resolution before processing.

Richard Speed of The Register also wrote a nice rundown on the ZX Spectrum’s history.