Designing WP7 Games: Making Graphics, backgrounds for your game

Oh this title just stinks.  Getting over this stinking cold and my brain is still getting up to speed from the fever.  Well, got to get started sometime.

Continuing the review of the https://create.msdn.com/gamedevelopment, the wheels came off with the video about drawing the background (I mean this only that I got confused by the video, it is worthwhile to watch, especially if you know Adobe). 

Wow, now I know how it must feel to be a non-techie when I go over the non-techie’s head.  I have no context of Adobe Photoshop.  I can definitely appreciate the art, nice job, but seriously how do I duplicate that work? 

So I attempted to do the same thing with Expression 4, which you can get Expression Design 4 included in a free download from https://www.dreamspark.com, this is means free if you are a student at an accredited college and the offer is not limited to the STEM-D students. 

Like the ending of the video: “There you have it, your background is ready to be processed”, really, only if the unnamed artist did it for me.  Which he did, and it is beautiful when you run it in the emulator, really, give it a try. 

So it got me to thinking, how do I use Expression design to do the same thing.  Umm, well first I would have to take a class on digital media.  Or I could struggle with it for a few minutes and then give up as usual or see if one of my artistic friends would do it for me for free.

Since I have few or no artistic friends, I reviewed the Creating Graphics and UI Controls with Expression Design, after downloading Expression Studio 4.0 Ultimate from https://www.dreamspark.com.

Plan on taking about 45 minutes to work through the Creating Graphics and UI Controls with Expression Design.  I made the ugly blue png shown below, in about 30 minutes.  My Mom is proud of it, but then again she thinks I am a pretty nifty guy.

I got to say that Expression 4 is pretty impressive.  Of course if you have access to Adobe Photoshop and know how to use it, you should prioritize your time to optimize your learning how to use Visual Studio and do overall game design.  But I just discovered that I like Expression Design, pretty cool.  Now if I could just do that cloud thing, wow that would be even cooler.

While you are at the Dreamspark site, also download the excellent and free graphing calculator, Mathematics from the same site!