ROAR!!! Check out these awesome Dinosaur characters, totally FREE on the Gamefroot Marketplace! We’ve got a Tyrannosaurus Rex, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Brontosaurus, and Velociraptor. Go make a Dinosaur game now!
More Top-Down tiles for free!
Now you can make awesome topdown games just like this! Just open the Marketplace, and grab the asset pack called “Top-Down Expanded”.
The pack includes an assortment of characters, and trees, grass tiles, desert tiles, rock tiles, industrial tiles, ice tiles and wooden tiles, as well as a bunch of obstacles and props.
Go get it now. It’s free!
Game Roundup – December
Happy Holidays Gamefrooters! This most recent round of Gamefroot games have shown that a lot of people have been grabbing heaps of free goodies from our new Marketplace – so if you haven’t tried that yet, check it out now!
Here are some fun games made by you guys that we’ve been playing:
Use these characters in your Top-Down Games
Note: to use these character images, you will need to cut the sprites out of the sprite sheet (you can use this http://spritecutie.com/), and follow this tutorial: http://gamefroot.com/knowledgebase/animate-and-upload-your-own-character/
Our new Top-Down game mode doesn’t yet have the variety of characters that platformer mode has, so here are a couple of sprite sheets to get you started!
To upload these characters into your games, first download the sprite sheets by right-clicking on them and selecting “Save image as”.
Then fire up the new Gamefroot Level Editor and set your game to Top-Down mode by clicking File > New Level > Top-Down Level. Then open the Asset Manager. Click the asset pack called “My Assets”, click “Create New Assets” and select Characters. Then click “Upload your own”, and find the location where you saved the character sprite sheets.
Feel free to modify these as you wish.
Continue reading “Use these characters in your Top-Down Games”
Game Roundup – September
It’s been really cool to see the creativity displayed on Gamefroot, with so many people creating awesome games! We are so glad that the Gamefroot Game Creator has become an outlet for all this creative energy, and has enabled so many people to tell stories and share them with their friends in such a quick and easy way.
Here are some shining examples of Gamefroot talent:
Pimp my Game – Using your own Character artwork
Note: this tutorial has been updated here http://gamefroot.com/knowledgebase/animate-and-upload-your-own-character/
With Gamefroot we make it easy for the entry level game designer to effortlessly create a game using the default assets, but for the next level of game designer* we offer a lot more customization. You can design your own characters, terrain, in-game items, and backgrounds. You can then upload these assets into Gamefroot to build games that are uniquely your own. In this series of tutorials I’m going to show you how to do all of that to create a masterpiece you can be proud of. *To take advantage of Gamefroot’s customization it is important that you have image editing software and a working knowledge of how to use it.
Continue reading “Pimp my Game – Using your own Character artwork”
How to Unpublish a Game
Note: this feature is currently unavailable
Decided you want to keep prying eyes away from your hard work? Maybe you want to make changes to your published game and don’t want people to play it until you are finished. It’s OK! You can very easily remove your game from public scrutiny by opening it up in the level editor, opening the File menu, and clicking Publish. Check the Draft button and click Save. Now your game has been reverted back to Draft mode, and it will no longer be visible on Gamefroot.com
You can re-publish your game again at any time.
Share your games
Note: an updated version of this tutorial is here http://gamefroot.com/knowledgebase/publishing-your-game-to-share-it-with-the-world/
Sharing your Gamefroot creations is simple. If you have published your game then it will appear on the Browse Games page (if it is popular enough), and the All Games page.
To share a specific game with people, click the share button underneath the game on the Gamefroot website.
Pimp my Game – Make your own terrain and items
Note: this tutorial has now been updated here http://gamefroot.com/knowledgebase/how-to-draw-your-own-game-objects/
With Gamefroot we make it easy for the entry level game designer to effortlessly create a game using the default assets, but for the next level of game designer* we offer a lot more customization. You can design your own characters, terrain, in-game items, and backgrounds. You can then upload these assets into Gamefroot to build games that are uniquely your own. In this series of tutorials I’m going to show you how to do all of that to create a masterpiece you can be proud of. *To take advantage of Gamefroot’s customization it is important that you have image editing software and a working knowledge of how to use it.
Gamefroot terrain tiles and item tiles
The single largest element in most games is the terrain tiles, so making your own terrain tiles is very important in game customization. All tiles in Gamefroot must be 48 pixels high and 48 pixels wide, and they must be PNG or GIF files. You can have objects bigger than a single 48 x 48 tile by making an object out of multiple tiles, or you can make an object smaller than 48 x 48 by leaving transparent space around the object inside the tile.
Designing tiles
Think about the purpose of the tile. Is this an item? Will this tile be an obstacle? Remember that the whole tile will be solid, not just the part of the tile with artwork on it. If it is going to be a background tile then this doesn’t matter – the player won’t be bumping into it.
Also remember that terrain has 2 layers – take advantage of this to make cool layered effects.
Consider the visual style of your game. Draw up your concepts, and test them out with your other game elements to make sure they don’t clash or look weird. When I draw tiles I often work at 400 percent of the actual tile size – that way I can work on the details, and then shrink the artwork down to its proper size and make any tweaks that are needed.
If you are working on pixel art, you can do the opposite – work small and upscale it for the final version.
Once you are happy with your artwork, cut it into 48 x 48 pixel images and save them as either PNG or GIF files (PNG files have better transparency).
Uploading and testing your own tiles
Now that you are ready to upload your new tiles, open up Gamefroot and select the Terrain Tab. Click the + button, browse to the image file on your hard drive, and select one or more images to upload.
Click Begin Upload and the files will start to upload. Once they have all been uploaded, close this box and your new terrain tiles will appear in “Your Terrain” tab.
The exact same process above applies to item tiles as well.
Now you can make games entirely out of your own tiles!
Happy game making!
Let’s get Advanced – Make a Spring
Note: this tutorial is out of date. You can use the concepts from this tutorial combined with the up-to-date tutorials listed below:
- http://gamefroot.com/knowledgebase/move-it-physics-movement-and-the-constantly-loop/
- http://gamefroot.com/knowledgebase/remotely-trigger-other-scripted-game-objects/
- http://gamefroot.com/knowledgebase/use-a-time-delay-block-to-animate-a-game-object/
You can make some really cool things in Gamefroot’s Advanced Behavior Editor, and there are a few core blocks that you can use over and over again to make interesting things happen. Today we will focus on using message blocks to trigger other blocks.
You can use message blocks to send specific messages that activate other behavior blocks, and you can set time delays on these messages. (These kinds of messages are different to in-game messages – they only send messages to other behaviors and these messages are not shown to the player in-game.)
In this tutorial we are going to use the power of timed messages to make a spring that launches the player into the air.