• Introduction
• What is a point-and-click Game?
• What is Escoria?
• Requirements
• Basic Concepts in Godot
• Basics Concepts of Escoria
• About this book
• First Quick Game with Escoria
• About the example game
• Our project planning
• How to start your Escoria project
• Create your first scene
• Testing your Game
• Create Actions
• Escoria Fundamentals
• The Items
• Main Scene
• The Esc scripting language
• Inventory
• Verbs & Actions
• Speech Text
• Dialog interface
• Main Player
• What you need to know as an artist
• Artwork Import
• Scene composition
• Animations
• Music and sound effects
• Terrain: Light and Perspective
• What you need to know as a game designer
• Global states and saving
• Structure
• Booleans and conditions
• Instructions and commands
• Dialog trees
• Internationalization
• Audio speech files
• What you need to know as a programmer
• Game menus
• Implementing savegames
• Optimization
• How to publish
• Export your game

Artwork Import

It is common to say that contemporary video games put all the efforts in graphics regardless to the story. In the point-and-click genre, the story is the most important part. But graphic elements will evidently be part of the pleasure. More than that, they are a real part of the game because the player will have to deal with the items. So good artwork is required for a game to be good.

Preparing artwork

You can draw your assets in your regular graphics software, but you need to pay attention to the resolution and the transparency of your picture.

One way to ensure having a fairly high resolution image, is to work with a full size canvas of your future game resolution with the background or a sketch of it. If the canvas size hasn’t been defined by the team yet, do it quickly. By doing this you ensure that all assets are well scaled and have a fairly high definition.

To keep the transparency of your assets, be sure to export them in PNG and don’t forget to hide unnecessary layers.

It's a good idea to trim your artworks of their transparent portions. For example if you want to do a foreground with some items on the right and some on the left, it's better to put each one on a separate picture instead of creating a full frame size picture with a lot of transparency. The reason to do this is that in the game all graphics are load in memory without compression, and a big transparent picture take more space in memory than several small ones because even if pixels are not visible they do exist. In our example we rebuilt our foreground in the Godot scene based on an export of the original drawing in part (here highlighted in orange).

If you have done all the foreground in one layer, you can duplicate it and crop or delete the transparent parts in each. You can split as much as you want. Moreover, it will give more possibility to reuse or animate the graphics if this done.

Plan for artwork

Organize your assets. You can do it the way you want but stay consistent to help other contributors easily understand what you did.

Respect naming rules if possible. The number of assets can increase really fast. Force yourself to naming conventions as early as possible. It will particularly help the designers to find the states of an item without having to browse the directory. You can keep a table of assets if you want to be sure of what you did.

Keep all the native source files to be able to modify them quickly if needed.

Artwork import

Once the drawings are made and exported, they have to be used in the project. The files should be stored into folders of the project directory to be available as resources. They will be referred to by Godot using the res:// local file system.

Your graphics will be used in nodes. Many node types can receive artwork:

• Sprite
• AnimatedSprite
• TextureFrame
• TextureButton…

Be sure to use the 2D version of these nodes if your game is a 2D one, or the 3D version otherwise.

Generally, those nodes have a Texture property that helps loading the picture. When doing animations several textures can be imported (see the Animations).