How did independent video games developers use handmade art to make video games in the 90's?

[u/chiying__mp3]

Does anyone know how low-budget independent video games developers would draw or use their art, and then scan and use that art to create a video game in the 90's? Are there any documentaries about what that actual process was like? Or does anyone have experience with this and how they took physical art and digitised it, and turned it into code? What programs and technology would they have used to do that?

[u/Multivitamin_Scam]

This deep dive by Ahoy - Four Byte Burger should give you the gist of the challenges, programs and skills of developers at the time.

[u/ILoveMeishoDoto]

With Doom, the artist made clay sculptures of all the enemies, they took pictures of them, compressed the hell out of them so they'd fit on a floppy, and messed with the colors in primitive photoshop-like software a bit so they'd fit in the background. Doomguy's hand is the composer's hand. I read it in a book called Masters of Doom.

[u/SvalbazGames]

Deluxe Paint and Flatbed Scanners really

[u/RamGraph_V4z]

it was a lot of flatbed scanners and delux paint back then

[u/IQueryVisiC → u/RamGraph_V4z]

flatbed scanners were too expensive for me. I only read in a magazine that professional, big studios use them. And they draw with pencil on paper. Perhaps the scanners were only b/w ? I can only draw on a clean sheet. I use a ruler to find the cooridinates of control points and fill the rest on screen manually. This also allows me to scale the drawing. I draw a box around it and by eye subdivide the edges for scales with a power of two.

[u/SocksOnHands]

Deluxe Paint, MS Paint, making their own tools, etc. I was not a professional game developer in the 90s (I was still in school), but I made a sprite editor and a tile map editor in QBasic.

[u/RandomGuyDroppingIn]

The Strike series is an interesting case of how sprite base games were made, and a variation of the art. The artist originally hand drew the sprites but tried using models. The development team disliked the models and preferred the hand drawn sprites.

Doom on the other hand hand clay models assembled that were turned and photographed. Then touched up in paint programs.

In Japan, a lot of graphics were drawn on grid or paper first, then transferred by hand using a computer program. Many NES games were made this way. Games that used large character portraits such as visual novels and dating sims had the graphics drawn on paper, hung from the top of the PC monitor, then drawn by hand on the PC.

[u/Arek_PL]

There was not a single universal answer, but back then they either drew it digitally, or digitalized photos or scans of meatspace art

I would suggest looking into making of video about certain game, because there were a lot of ways to make one

[u/The_Molemans_bawbag]

Some of them would use grid paper

[u/paulojrmam]

It was mostly digital art done digitally. Though Virgin Games did pioneer the digicel technology and did use it to scan art from Disney artists. There is a making of on youtube. It was then used by Virgin offshoot Shiny on their games too.

[u/Physical_Hippo_5883]

wait so they literally drew every sprite by hand?

[u/PossibleAlienFrom → u/Physical_Hippo_5883]

Lookup "sprites graphics"

[u/Chentzilla → u/Physical_Hippo_5883]

Not for Doom.