Making Visual Assets for Gamesalad

DRM: Digital Rights Management

Dimensions

Every graphic in Gamesalad is saved as a square. So even if your graphic is a round ball, it will still technically by a square.When creating art, both the height and width must be multiples of 4, to stop the image from pixelating and loosing quality.

Digital Rights management is about making sure you have the rights to all assets used. So you canʼt use an already existing character in your game like Mario, and you also canʼt use images found with a google search, because these images donʼt belong to you.Itʼs best to create your own art assets so that you will definitely own them, although if you go in the direction of using other peoples art, you go into permission and credit. You must have the original artists permission and they must be credited for their work.

File Format

When you export images from whatever program you were using, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. there are different file formats available, which create different effects.

- .PNG : These are what you want to use if your image has transparency, the exported file will hold all the alpha channels and maintain transparency.

- .JPG : this is the format for non-transparency images, just solid assets.

Optimization

IOS saves images at sizes:16x1632x3264x64

128x128256x256512x512

1024x1024

Basically Gamesalad save all images at one of these size, theyʼre the only sizes it can use. That doesnʼt mean that if you import a 16x6 image it will stretch it, it just means that graphic will be saved as a 16x16 file, and take up that amount of memory.The program will bump the size up to the next level if you go over, so if you import a 32x35 image, it will be saved as 64x64.the bigger the image size, the more memory it takes up, so itʼs important to keep these rules in mind, and if you have an image that just pushes over to the bigger size, think if it really needs that extra space. Could my 32x35 be brought down to a 32x32 to save memory?

Y (Height)

X (Width)Resolution

Export/Create all files at 72 pixels/inch in the graphic making program. This is the maximum resolution a monitor can output, so it would be unnecessary to export at a really high resolution. It wouldnʼt display and it would just take up more memory space.