InDee Toons in Games

How InDee Toons can enhance a game in seconds

Some examples of the characters in action:

Two screenshots of a sidescrolling Action-RPG prototype featuring InDee Toons

A simple point & click adventure game in retro-style

The characters are cross-platform and cross-engine compatible.
After downloading the sprite packs, you unzip them and drop them right into your game, assign the animations to your actions and you are done.

If you would like to learn more about this, the Kickstarter page of InDee Toons contains more information, pictures and videos.

Join us on Facebook and Twitter, and watch out for InDee Toons video clips on YouTube! 
As we need to reach the funding goal within the next 27 days to make this happen, we have to tell a lot more people about the project.
Thank you for sharing, liking and spreading the good word about InDee Toons.

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InDee Toons - Animated Game Characters Kickstarter launched!

The missing link in the (r)evolution of indie game development

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Do you love games?
Of course you do!

And do you also enjoy creating games on your own?

If you have ever wondered why there is no resource for game assets, you should continue reading.

What about a library of characters for you to choose from?

You could just pick the most suitable ones and drop them right into your game, without wasting your valuable time on trying to get in contact with artists that could possibly do the art for you or even trying to create the assets all by yourself.
Creating games has never been easier than it is today.

There are wonderful tools and engines that can do most of the coding for you, but where can developers get the assets they need to make the look of their game as good as the concept behind it?

With my Kickstarter project "InDee Toons", I want to take care of this challenge by offering a stock of 50 fully animated 2D game characters, provided under a royalty-free license.

This license allows you to use the character in as many free or commercial projects as you like, once you purchased it.

By making this license non-exclusive, the price for an asset can be kept low, which makes them affordable even for prototyping.

There are two kinds of toons: standard toons and EPIC toons.
The standard toons cover all animations you need for most game genres.

EPIC toons are deluxe toons, featuring better lighting, weapons, special effects like glowing armor, more details and more animation frames.

To provide even more great features and options to improve the versatility of the characters, there are some extremely awesome stretch goals like resizing, mirroring and sprite sheet options, mounts, customizable lighting and even real dynamic lighting through normal maps.

If that sounds great to you, check out the Kickstarter page of InDee Toons for more details, videos and pictures:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2dee/indee-toons-animated-game-characters

To make this possible, your support is needed and highly appreciated.
Kickstarter funding works with an "all-or-nothing" philosophy, so the project will only happen if we get fully funded.
Apart from pledges, you can support InDee Toons by spreading the word.

With your help, InDee Toons can be the new definition of character sprites!

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InDee Toons Launch Date Announced!

InDee Toons – Animated Game Characters: Kickstarter to be launched today at 6:00pm CST

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The Kickstarter for InDee Toons – Animated Game Characters has been accepted and is now ready to be published.

The project is scheduled to be launched today at 6:00pm Central Standard Time.

I have also launched a new Facebook fan page for InDee Toons, the URL is
www.facebook.com/InDeeToons



With InDee Toons, I want to provide a stock of 50 fully animated game characters that can be easily integrated into any engine.

There will be two kinds of toons:

• Standard Toons: affordable basic characters containing everything you need for most games
• EPIC Toons: very luxury game assets with special features at a slightly higher price

Tell everybody interested in game development and indie games about the upcoming Kickstarter of InDee Toons!
Directly after launch, the link to the project will be posted here, on the Facebook page and on Twitter.

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InDee Toons Kickstarter to be Launched soon!

InDee Toons – Animated Game Characters for developers

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My current project InDee Toons – Animated Game Characters has been sent to Kickstarter and is now waiting to be accepted.
The Idea behind this project is to provide a resource for game assets, developers can freely choose from and directly integrate them into their games while being able to focus on other aspects of development.

I will post a link to the Kickstarter page as soon as the project goes live.
Bookmark this page, follow on Facebook, on Twitter, join the RSS Feed and follow by email to make sure you don’t miss the launch of InDee Toons.

You will love it!

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Happy new year!

Happy 2014 from happy revised zombies!

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It's been a while since my last post here, and there's a lot of stuff going on.
There are several game and art projects I am working on at the same time.
One of these projects is about character art, but I won't go into detail at this early stage.

Great news for developers interested in animated game character assets:
I upgraded to the modern and very powerful animation tool Spine, that speeds things up and produces animations of a much higher quality than the old tool I have been using before.
So, no more step-by-step exporting of every single frame, no more tattered edges (thanks to linear filtering) and no limits concerning the output resolution.

In the next few weeks I will revamp some of my characters so they will be just as shiny as the re-animated AweZombie in the video.

Make the best out of 2014, stay tuned for the upcoming assets, tutorials and game previews and enjoy the clip!

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Do you want to see more Clips featuring the AweZombies? Leave a comment!

UI Design Tutorial - Mana Orb - Inkscape

How to create a mana orb in 17 simple steps

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In the first Inkscape tutorial we made a simple yet great looking glass button.

If you missed it, you can read it here : UI Design Tutorial - Glossy Button

It is not required but I recommend to read it first before starting with this tutorial.

So today I will show you how to create a mana orb.

You can use it for many different kinds of interfaces and games, I just call it mana orb because I had action RPGs like the Diablo games in mind when creating it.
It can be used as a visual health or resource display or as a bowl, a bowling ball or something completely different, it is up to your imagination.

If you haven't got it yet, download Inkscape!

Click the picture to view the tutorial at full size.
Have fun!

Artist's advice:
When working with color gradients, go for natural colors and use different hues in the same gradient.
If you want a strong glowing red, use a fiery orange tone for the highlight, just like I used an aquablue in this tutorial that instantly reminds us of the caribbean sea.
A small shift in hues can breathe life into your assets.

You can experiment with Inkscape's filters to get nice textures for your orbs.
"Liquid" and "Shaken Liquid" are the ones I prefer here, but it is up to you.
The textures are locked to the canvas, so you can move your objects until you are satisfied with the texture.

An example of use
A screenshot of an Action-RPG game prototype:

Free resources
You can download the Inkscape source file with the game ready mana orb and health globe in blue and in red for free here: 2DeeArt_Mana_Orb.svg

Now we are just one more step away from an impressive role playing game user interface.

Come back soon or just subscribe to the blog to get informed when the next update is posted!

If you have questions on UI design or requests for future tutorials, please post a comment!

UI Design Tutorial - Glossy Button - Inkscape

How to create a shiny button in 8 simple steps

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A graphical user interface (GUI) is a visual interface allowing users to interact with electronic devices.

To provide an enjoyable experience for the user, buttons, sliders, panels and displays should have a decent appearance in addition to their functionality.

You need GUIs in apps for mobile devices, in websites and in any kind of games in 2D and 3D, so they are some of the most important game assets.
Quite often, the process of user interface creation doesn't get enough attention, even though they are some of the graphical elements players will spend the most time looking at when playing a game.

This will be the first tutorial in a series about general user interface design and special UI design for games, including a guide on how to design an entire UI for a video game.

We will start with a simple yet stylish glossy button in a shiny 3D look.

The button will be the basis for more interface elements, it can be easily adjusted to your needs.
You can easily turn it into resource bars, panels, sliders and a lot more in a few clicks.

All you will need is Inkscape, a free and very powerful vector graphics program.

Now let's get started!
Click the picture to view the tutorial at full size.
Have fun!

Now you can create an app or game asset of the button by exporting it as a bitmap.

The advantage of vector graphics is that you can export it as large as you like without having a loss in quality.

Now we have a great art resource we can use for almost any kind of interface.

If you vary in color, shape, stroke width and size, you can create highly diverse buttons and panels out of it.
You can add your logo or a font or design resource or experience bars for your game, even the buttons of this tutorial were created with this simple template.

Artist's advice:
When creating art and playing around with color, saturation and lightness, I recommend to always work on a neutral 50% gray background, to get a more realistic impression of how things will turn out.

This is just a sample of what you can create with the glossy glass button template.
You can download the Inkscape source file for free, including the button and all variations shown above: 2DeeArt_Glossy_Button.svg

Check back soon to see more interface magic!
I will post more tutorials on GUI design, especially for games, soon.

Have fun creating awesome buttons!

If you have questions on UI design or requests for future tutorials, please post a comment!