Creating 2D Digital Art Assets for XNA Game Studio Mark Thompson,
[email protected] Department of Computer Science San Diego State University Spring 2010 Intended Audience The content of this document is directed towards digital artists (referred to as artist for rest of document) who charged with creating digital art assets for games, or applications, programmed using the Microsoft XNA Game Studio. However, some XNA programmers may also find this document useful, especially if they are creating digital assets themselves, or implementing a menu or Heads Up Display (HUD) system. What this document is NOT This is not a tutorial, or “how to”, on using an image editor, e.g. Adobe Photoshop or GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). The assumption is that the artist is competent in using such image editing applications. Also, this is not a programming guide that provides the technical details of using and displaying digital art in XNA. There is a variety of resources, both books and Web, which provide extensive tutorials on this aspect of XNA programming. Lastly, this is a not guide for techniques in user- interface design. 1. Introduction No 2D, or 3D, XNA game can be created without an extensive collection digital art assets ranging from PNG images to 3D models. There are many books and articles about XNA game programming which are geared towards the technical aspects of programming. For these books, sample game code is often provided via the Web so that a programmer can download, compile, and then run the sample games. However, many of the digital art assets, specifically 2D assets, are simply just provided as is, with little background on why or how they were created.