smal beginner question => BIG problem!! HELP!!

[saabian]

Hi, im new here!

I have question, something i dont understand at all. You can create games in "gameeditor", but to do that you need other programs were you can paint "actors" and create animations, right?
My question is simple, how/were do i paint my "actors" (background, characters, objects like stones, cars etc.)??
Maybe it would be possible to paint them in "paint" but then i dont think they would look so very nice.

I would like to create a action game like metalslug for my gp2x.
Do you know any good program were you can paint all the small pictures that will become an animation??

As far as i know, if i would like to make a
animation were the character run to the right i might would need 3
pictures (character put his left foot in the front, characters both feet together, character put his right foot in the front), once i put all 3
pictures together (animation) it actually will looks like the character is
runing. right? So do you know any (cheap?) program to do this. probelly you do, othervise it would be quite hard for you to create games .

As you can se im a big noooob

Many thanks from Sweden!

[Joshua Worth]

get the gimp

http://www.gimp.org

after a bit of playing around with it, you should get the hang of it

[saabian]

Hi!

yeah, i have been looking at gimp but as far as i understand it is not possible to paint any pictures in gimp, only "put them together" so you get an animation. if im wrong please tell me how to paint the pictures with gimp.

thanks!

[Hedfone]

I find theGimp to be more trouble than it's worth...
and its free, so thats saying something .

I use Photoshop3.0 or Paint for my sprites.
you can get some surprisingly great sprites out of paint if you're patient enough to play around with it for a while.

[Hblade]

I am going to make put together images to where you can build your own sprites, you color them and put them right where you want them, and the animation you want them to be in.

[Joshua Worth]

in the gimp, there should be a "Layers and Channels" window open by default. Open a new picture, draw the first frape, then in the layers window, click the "Copy" button. Then draw the next frame.

Once you have finished the animation, go into the "Save as" dialog, click on "Select file type" and select GIF. it will probably come up with a window asking about some errors. Select "Save as animation", and "Convert to indexed"

[Game A Gogo]

i uses paint for my pictures, then uses some other program for 32-bits and gradient.
Continue working whit paint, and you'll get to be a pro just like me in it!

remember, i paint, to make a customized color, double click on a color and then click on custom color, or dunno whats it called, the big button at the bottom of the window.

[Sgt. Sparky]

why don't you just download animation shop 3 demo?
The program is pretty simple (I have full version)
but it takes some getting used to, what i do is I make each frame with paint shop pro7, then I open the frames with animation shop 3
and I paste the frames in to an animation, If you have paint or anything like that make a blank picture with the same background as your frames for the animation, only 3x as wide as your frames then open each frame and paste it into the picture like this: use frame 1 to the left, frame 2 in the middle and frame 3 at the right side.

[saabian]

Great, thanks every one!
Finally made my first animation in gimp. But hey theres one more thing i just dont get, how do i take away/cut away the white background from my animation? it doesnt look very cool with a white "box" behind eatch animation!

[Sgt. Sparky]

make the background all black and save it as a .png or just use a transparent background if you can . but what I used to do is have a character background the same as the level background , but that did not look to good , so I just did transparent.