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

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?”

All right, things have been technical around here lately, so today I am going to introduce Texture Portal, where you can get high quality texture at a price (USD 50+ - ouch). But here’s something to get you thinking - if you can create good seamless textures for games, and there are guys on the net selling it for USD 50+, why don’t you try submitting a few to them for a few bucks or start your own too?