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Generating game content

Feb 22, 2008
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Part 2 of this series »

If you can’t draw graphics or create sounds for your games, here are a few interesting tools I came across recently that can help you.

sfxr

sfxr

sfxr generates random sound effects such as explosions, sounds for jumping and so on. The sounds are nice and crisp and you can easily tweak a randomly generated sound to suit your needs better. A nice feature is that you can click on sound types to generate a sound for common actions in games.

Pixel Robots & Invader Fractal

Pixel Robots

Pixel Robots generates random sprites that resemble robots (well, duh). It’s a Java applet (made with Processing) so you can (or, have to) run it in your web browser. Hence, it is not too convenient to use for pure sprite generation purposes – but it is quite nice eye candy.

The author mentions the Invader Fractal as his inspiration. It is a quite similar thing, in that it generates a sheet of tiny sprites and runs in browser (it’s a Flash applet).

Both generators are quite nice in that their authors give good insight how the programs generate the sprites.

Richard’s Evolving Sprite Tool

I saved the best for last. Richard’s Evolving Sprite Tool, as the name implies, evolves sprites. The main idea is that the program generates a grid of mutated sprites and you can choose the one that looks good. The selected sprite then spawns mutated offspring. This continues until you decide the sprite is good enough. On the left, there’s an example of an evolved and hand-colored sprite (grabbed from the Retro Remakes forum thread).

Richard's Evolving Sprite Tool

It is also much more of a tool than the two previous generators, the user can edit the sprites inside the program. After the user has edited a sprite, it can be evolved further. Very nice if you’re short on inspiration.

Next thing Richard needs to do is to add a way to colorize and animate the lovely sprites.

kometbombNote: Since this tool has gone AWOL, here’s something similar: Retro Avatar generator. For example, the avatar created from my name looks like what you see on the left (cute!).

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3 responses to "Generating game content"

  • Shfoosmuck says:

    May 11, 2008 at 19:20

    		1

    Awesome. It’s all the things that were keeping me from making games- solved.

    You rock. Subscribing.

  • Dan says:

    May 17, 2009 at 07:04

    		2

    Oh no! The sprite evolver is 404 :(

  • kometbomb says:

    May 17, 2009 at 10:26

    		3

    @Dan: Seem’s like it has completely disappeared from the net. :( I’ll see what I can do.

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