These are on-line resources about art - visual, sound, and written - which are of some value to this class.
Principles:
Assessment:
Learn to Art:
- Drawspace: A site taking you step-by-step through the process; you use the free bits, of course.
Tools:
- Piskel - Make 8-bit style art online. Easy, fun, and effective.
- FireAlpaca - Free arting tool, with many fine features.
- Aseprite - Another pixel-art tool, with many cool features.
- Graphics Gale - Yet another tool for making VG art, free!
- Studio Miniboss - Dozens of pixel-style animation examples/tutorials.
- The Gimp - Fully-featured digital art package. Did I mention it's free?
- Paint.NET - Really nice graphics/drawing software; "Gimp lite" (link is to actual file, may age).
- Pivot Animator - Use this to create animations more easily.
- Universal LPC Sprite Sheet Generator - Create your own FRPG sprite sheet online.
- Maze Generator - DL the SVG file, open in The Gimp, and you have a usable game maze.
- Tiled - Free tool for creating tiled maps for games.
- Online Image Splitter - Upload individual sprite sheet animation sets, download collection of image files.
Resources:
Three-Dee:
Audio/Sound:
- How to record sounds using our lab computers - This allows you to capture whatever your PC is playing, whatever the source.
- Create or Edit
- Soundation - A composing tool, like LMMS or Mixcraft, but simpler, and browser-based: ask your teacher, as we have an account with them!
- Soundtrap - Another amazing browser-based composition tool.
- Audacity - Great sound modifying software; good for making ringtones too.
- Sfxr - Amazing software for generating game sound effects; web-based version is Bfxr.
- Royalty-Free - Used by YouTubers everywhere for background music.
- Looplabs - Free web-based composition tool, in a very usable beta release.
- PulseBoy - Chiptune heaven.
- beepbox - Chiptune nirvana.
- Fruity Loops/FL Studios - Popular, but not free, and quite good.
- Live - By Ableton, you can get the 30-day trial version, very nice.
- SunVox - Yet another browser-based composition tool.
- BeepBox - Browser-based tool for making chiptunes.
- Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch - An amazing and disturbing tool; it's also included as a tool in Audacity.
- Noteflight - Compose and play music via your browser.
- Flat - A sharp tool for using musical notation to compose.
- Dubstep Cube - Entree to a general music generation site with amazing tools.
- Bosca Coeil - Create music, free, DL or browser based.
- FMOD - This is a pro tool, integrates with Unity, Havok, etc.
- EarSketch - Library and curriculum for making music in Python or JavaScript, of all things!
- Download and Sample
- Soungle.com - Download various sounds easily.
- ccMixter - Vast repository of songs, samples, etc., all free.
- soundsnap - More samples of all sorts, free
- freesound - Yet more random noises, free and searchable.
- FindSounds- Short for public domain, easy to search.
- JungleVibe - Searchable source for free music.
- SoundBible.com - Many require attribution, all are free.
- Macauley Library - At Cornell U, this has animal sounds from around the world.
- Game Theme Songs - Borrow snippets and/or edit samples heavily: use attribution.
- Game Sound Conference - Annual con about composition and sfx, with many useful resources.
- Free old folk songs - Stream from the classic Alan Lomax collection: Morrocan to American to Romanian, for flavor.
Writing:
- The Seven Basic Plots - One approach to plot-driven writing.
- Twine - Open-source (free) tool for mapping plot and dialog.
- Yarn - Planning on complex dialog with options? Use this to map out your story - and it's free! DL, unzip, and run from the folder.