An understanding of history, civilisation, human nature and economic are some of the essential knowledge for game designers, and for those interested in RTS or war-games, “A Short History of War”, a free online book touching on the various aspects of warfare throughout history (from as anicent as Sumer, no less!), will defintely find it helpful!

GameDev.Net has featured a series of tutorials on creating minimal pixel art with Photoshop. If you have attended the game art workshop last Saturday, or just curious about learning more, this series of articles have many tricks of the trade to impart.

“What’s pixel art, precious?” you may ask. Below is an example of one.

Flowers done using Pixel Art

Don’t worry if you go “huh” at the title of this post. This is for the programming crowd

There are many menthods to find out if two objects have collided, but what’s next? You have to know what to do with the collided objects. There are many ways to go about it, but one of the more elegant one, which uses OOP Design Patterns, is to use the Visitor Pattern. Here is a good page on how to use the Visitor Pattern to handle the game logic after two objects have collided.

For those interested in getting started in 3D for XNA, you may want to try out Riemer’s XNA Tutorial on a simple flight simulation. It’s pretty short and informative and the below is the outcome of going through it.

ActionScript has changed a lot since 1.0 - now with 3.0, it is almost like Java. If you need some ActionScript help, or just want to see how things are done, head off to Senocular’s ActionScript Library, where you find dozens of scripts for all sort of helpful effects, utilities and design patterns which you may need. There are scripts for AS 1, 2 and 3, so regardless of which you are using, you will sure find something of value there!

For those of you interested in XNA, there’s a full featured video on how to create a 3D game in XNA, inlcuding the assets in SoftImage, and it is a video, not some boring book. You can download it, along with the source code, at GameTheory.

And for those interested in game competitions, “Dream Build Play” - the XNA games development competition, is on. The dateline is on 26th September, so for those who are interested, there is about three months left. Find out more about the competition at the Microsoft official DBP site.

There are over USD75,00 worth of prizes to be won, so it’s not a chance to be missed!

I was browsing the Internet randomly when I come by this rather detailed tutorial on using Photoshop to draw a Two-Handed Sword (from Lineage II) digitally. Check it out if you are interested!

The first of the “Photoshop Xmasher” tutorial series has been released over at Xmashed.com. This week’s article addresses the age old question of how to do rounded rectangles. Be sure to take a look.

Click here for a direct link to the article or visit Xmashed at http://www.xmashed.com/.

Game Maker and lots of other freeware game engines are pixel-based art, and making pixel art for them could be a lost Dark Art in the years to come. So if you are interested in pixel-based sprites, you can find some really nice read-ups on the theory of pixel art and some concrete tutorials at “So you want to be a pixel artist?”

First, the pretty video:

Now, the link to a Game Maker files where it allows you to make near replica clones of Super Mario Brothers.

And oh yeah, there’s still one slot open for the XNA Workshop. That slot has been taken, sorry!