Mobile Development News

Developing software for mobile phones and other resource constrained devices has a variety of critical differences as compared to developing for a desktop or server. However, creating graphics for these devices has a number of key difference, too. You can't just rely on Photoshop to resize your image and have it look good. A full screen graphic on some devices can be as small as an icon on your desktop (well, if you have large icons on). Making these graphics look good on a phone and, in particular, making icons look good when only a few pixels large is often a lost art. This article, over at orange.PIXEL talks about creating graphics for mobile devices (PixelArt) and gives concrete examples of doing so.

This is useful for developers and artists alike. You know those hack graphics that you throw together to show where a graphic might go? How often do they get used in a shipping product? Yeah, too often. I won't name any names, but some of my crappy graphics ended up in some other project years later and really looked bad. I was shocked the client didn't want to make their own graphics or at lesat make these look good. So, anyway, as a developer these tips can help make your graphics look better in the accidental even that they will ship. The rest of us will thank you for it. ;)

As mobile games are still growing and improving every day there is a big need for better and more beautifull looking graphics. Where most developers dont have the resources to spend money on graphics and even if they have there seems to be alot of people that forgot how to do "simple" PixelArt. The last few years we have seen games on PC's and game consoles moving into 3D, with this shift came the change for programmers to think three dimensional about their code. On top of that the graphics artists had to switch their way of working aswell. Three dimensional games generally use big textures based on real life images, structures, and the game world will blend them, scale them, rotate them, paste them together into a great 3D environment.

This is all great but the way you create big textures is not a useable way to create small pixelart fit for mobile devices with their tiny screens. In this article I will try to explain some working methods on how to create great looking graphics for the mobile devices like cell phones, pda's and who knows what designers will come up with.

orange.PIXEL