For some reason the front end design is something that I absolutely must get right before I can envision the whole game. At the start of a project, I will spend hours trying to make a title screen and find the right font. If I get that right, everything else will follow. The design elements that I choose for the title screen seem to become the foundation for the graphical style of the whole game.

Needless to say, Toxin’s title screen, like everything else in this supposedly simple abstract shooter was a struggle to get right. It was really just lucky experimentation that lead me to the nice animated effect I use for Toxin’s title screen. This effect warrants a detailed blog post of its own, and I’ll write one soon. Today I want to write about how I made the buttons for the main menu using a 19 year old graphics program.

Toxin’s main menu. What you can’t see from this screenshot is how the glowing colours shift and change using multiple blended layers.

The icons on each button are simple pixel art images which were vectorised, loaded into 3D Studio Max, then extruded. My first icons were made by extruding text using the Topaz font, which was the default font on AmigaOS back in the day. I found it impossible to signify everything using text glyphs alone, so I decided to do some pixel art.

I found Photoshop too frustrating to use for pixel art. It’s just not geared for that kind of work. You can’t delete quickly, and when you’re zoomed in the cursor does not snap to the pixel grid. So I decided to go full oldskool – I started up my Amiga Emulator, WinUAE, and loaded Deluxe Paint 4.

In a couple of minutes I had knocked up some simple 16*16, 1 colour icons ready to be imported into 3DS Max.

DPaint 4 running on the WinUAE Amiga emulator. Drawing sprites inside a 16*16 checkerboard is an old technique from the Amiga days

For those who don’t know, Deluxe Paint (invariably referred to as DPaint) was the de-facto standard graphics program on the Amiga computer, just like Photoshop is for today’s machines. It was also the industry standard for video game art up until the start of the 3D era. (At least it was in the west. I have no idea what was used by the Japanese games industry to create such pixel art masterpieces as Seiken Denetsu III and Final Fantasy 6. If you know, send me a message).

It was developed by EA, believe it or not, back when they released interesting creative software like the Deluxe Music Construction Set, and published games like The Bards Tale. The first version was released in 1985, and was in development until 1994, which was probably the beginning of the end of the Amiga era.

I still have my copy of DPaint I. I bought it for £5 in 1991 when I was a poor schoolkid saving my dinner money to buy games. By that time it was already six years old and two versions behind, but I spent hours on it drawing cyberpunk cityscapes and trying to copy Street Fighter characters from magazines.

However, Photoshop’s scripting system is far from perfect. You cannot access pixel data from within scripts, nor can you draw lines or circles or anything like that. These limitations have become really frustrating to me.

For example, on the day I started work on Toxin, I needed to draw an ellipse with precise dimensions. The whole game takes place inside an ellipse, you see. I couldn’t do it in Photoshop by clicking and dragging, it was too inaccurate, so I wrote a C program using the Allegro game library to create the precise shapes I needed. These were then loaded into Photoshop and used as guides while I created the game artwork.

Later I discovered Processing, which is much quicker to develop in than C. I soon developed a workflow where I would go back and forth between Photoshop and Processing, generating procedural content then processing it or running it through scripts until I got the desired result.

Processing, however has some frustrating quirks of its own. As a simplified front end to Java, you often get Java errors that are incomprehensible without digging into the underlying platform. Also, it cannot effectively save semi-transparent PNGs which means that the anti-aliased sprites I was creating all had a solid background which had to be removed. I ended up redesigning my workflow and using the excellent Ghost and AntiGhost plugins from Flaming Pear to overcome these problems.

From graphics app to graphics platform

All these issues got me thinking about what I really want from a high end graphics program. What I want is something like a programmable, graphical Lisp Machine; a powerful graphics programming platform with the UI of an art application, not an art application with a bolted-on scripting system.

I want the ability to programmatically control every aspect of Photoshop from both external scripts and from a real-time REPL inside Photoshop that works like the command line used in some CAD programs.

I want to be able to type line(10,10,100,100) and have a line appear on my presently selected image. I want to be able to open the REPL and assign my current selection to a variable which I can later re-select with a simple command. I want to be able to access the pixel data in my images, and write my own filters in Javascript within the scripting system itself. I think anyone in high-end graphics or scientific imaging would love something like this.

A true graphics platform like I have described would likely have to be written from the ground up with programmability built in. Nevertheless I did spend some time finding out how far I could go with Photoshop’s native capabilities.

I had the idea of writing a Photoshop plugin that contained a number of drawing functions which could be called from scripts via a Javascript library that integrates with the Photoshop document model. So you could write PSDraw.line(10,10,100,100); in ExtendScript Toolkit, and my Javascript library would construct a call to the plugin which would draw the line.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to get information from a plugin back to the Photoshop script thats running it, so it wouldn’t be possible to do a getPixel() or anything like that. At best, this plugin/script combo would give us a somewhat clunky way of drawing programmatically but little else that would justify the effort involved. (have you ever seen the Photoshop plugin API?)

As a secondary option I thought about actually embedding V8 inside a plugin which would contain an editor and debugger. Besides the ugliness of having 2 distinct Javascript engines running in the same app, the plugin architecture put paid to this idea. Photoshop plugins are one-shot operations. Load the plugin, set the parameters, perform the operation, then shutdown. My idea would only be effective if the plugin was a persistent part of the Photoshop environment.

So the only options then, would be for Adobe to integrate scripting more completely, or for someone else to start making what would be a true sucessor to Photoshop.

In game development it is common to have hundreds if not thousands of texture maps and animation frames in a single project. Keeping track of all these images is taxing for both the developer and the computer, so what we do is arrange the images into texture atlases.

A texture atlas is an image that contains many other images. Usually, all the animation frames for a single sprite, or all the textures for a single object are arranged into a single image. The game code then looks at a smaller portion of this image when it needs to draw a particular sprite or texture.

AtlasMaker is a Photoshop script that lets you create these atlases inside Photoshop. It takes a directory of individual textures and arranges them on a single image. It can be used both for atlases of different sized images, and for tile grids which are commonly used in 2d games. Earlier versions of this script were released in 2009. I know I promised an update long ago, but I have been working on my iPhone game, Toxin. I have been using this script throughout Toxin’s development, but never got round to tidying it up for public release.

AtlasMaker main window. A tile grid for a 2d game is being created

Features

• Cross platform – tested in Photoshop CS3,CS4,CS5 on Windows and Mac OSX.
• Open Source
• Create texture atlases or tile grids for 2d games.
• Several image sorting algorithms. Find the most efficient one for your textures.
• Add a margin to each image.
• Custom data file export.
• Extendable – It’s easy to add your own rectangle packing algorithms and sorting methods.

Generated with AtlasMaker: Left, a texture atlas with variable sized images. Right, a tile grid. Images used are randomly generated test textures.

Installing AtlasMaker

There are two ways to running AtlasMaker in Photoshop.
Unzip atlasmaker-v0.7.zip to your photoshop scripts folder. On windows this is usually: C:\Program Files\Adobe\yourphotoshopversion \Presets\Scripts
On a Mac this folder is at: Applications/yourphotoshopversion/Presets/Scripts

When you next start Photoshop, AtlasMaker should appear in the File->Scripts menu.

Alternatively, you can run the script without installing by unzipping the atlasmaker folder somewhere, then selecting Scripts->Browse from the file menu and then selecting AtlasMaker.jsx.

Quickstart guide

The first thing to do is select a directory of images by clicking “browse” at the top of the window. Once you have done this, AtlasMaker will scan through the images and collect size information about them.

Next, you want to select your packing method. If your images are texture maps of different sizes then you want to select the “Atlas Maker”. If you are making a traditional 2d game where the sprites are all the same size, then you want to select the “Tile Grid”

You’ll notice that some text will appear underneath “Number of Files”. This is a notification from the Tile Grid Packer telling you how many rows and columns your images will take up given the default document size. Different packing methods provide different notification messages according to their nature.

Then you can optionally select a sorting method. Sorting the images in different ways can improve the efficiency of the texture atlas. Some packing methods do not allow sorting, and will disable this option if they are selected.

You can also add a margin here if you want a gap between your textures. Margins are added on to the width and height of each image just like CSS margins.
Next, click “Document Settings” and you will be able to set the size of the texture atlas you are going to create. You can also set the document name here, and choose if you want to flatten all the layers into one, once the atlas is complete.

Now click “Create Atlas” and you’re done.

Custom data file export

One of AtlasMaker’s most powerful features is the custom data file export. You can export a text file for each texture atlas containing information about each image on the atlas. This might be XML or JSON to be loaded by a game engine, or you could use it to directly generate source code to be pasted into your application.

AtlasMaker custom data file panel. Here an XML fragment will be generated for each texture in the atlas. filenames and texture positions are substituted into the text using tags

Tags are used to substitute information about each image into the text:

• #i – Image index (0.. number of images in directory)
• #filename – Filename of source image
• #width – image width
• #height – image height
• #x – X position of top left corner on atlas
• #y – Y position of top left corner on atlas
• #p – page number

If you click the “Reorder export file” button, you can rearrange the order in which textures are listed in the export file. Just select filenames from the list and click “up” or “down” to reorder them. You can select multiple filenames by shift-clicking.

The zip file contains a readme.txt which describes every option in detail.

AtlasMaker is designed to be extensible. It is easy to add new packing methods and sorting algorithms. I have written the code to be more or less self explanatory in this regard, but if you want me to write something about it, please let me know.  And let me know if you find any bugs!

Download the latest version of AtlasMaker from Github

Download from Github

Also, Toxin is the first game I have worked on since the Smartphone stuff I did around 2002-2003. I was desperate to get back into game development and I mistakenly thought I could begin again where I left off. It was like running into a brick wall. The first artwork I did was so bad I deleted everything, took the bus into Stratford on Avon and spent the rest of the day sitting by the side of the river in despair!

It took me some time to reach my old level again and then improve on it. As much as I have enjoyed developing Toxin and the creative discoveries I have made, there has been a great deal of struggle and fruitless experimentation involved.

The interior designer and UK TV legend Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen was an unlikely influence. On his TV home makeover shows he’d get his clients to collect images they liked and pin them to a board for inspiration. I had a Toxin folder on my laptop which I filled with images from ffffound and other design inspiration sites. When I got stuck I’d fire up IrfanView and spend half an hour blanky staring at images until some ideas popped up. I highly recommend this practice. A few of the images from my Toxin folder are in the image below.

That watch is a Dievas Aqualuna Blue Professional. No I can’t afford one yet. Buy Toxin!

The first thing I did was the main ship, which is the only thing I got right first time; it remained unchanged throughout development whereas everything else got remade at least three times! I think it works really well and has a nicely balanced, iconic look. I designed it in a vector drawing package which I later abandoned in favour of using rendered, animated splines created in a 3d program.

The background was next. It was essential to get the background style nailed as it would define the look of the whole game. I tried a few different styles as you can see in the rough drafts below.

One of my biggest goals here was to create something that looked good within the phone. Too often, mobile games just present windows on to the game world without any consideration for the device that is running the game. To me this is like designing a watch face without taking the case into account.

Next time I’ll talk about how Toxin uses procedural graphics and describe how I used Photoshop scripting and Processing, a Java based generative arts platform to create much of the game’s artwork.