Black Ink
TLDR; An exciting platform capable of producing HUGE resolution paintings with highly customizable brushes. I have never used a painting application and been inspired BY the painting application itself before Black Ink.
To get a good impression of this product and its developers visit the Black ink forum: http://forum.bleank.com/viewforum.php?f=3
The following is based on my personal experience and user feedback I’ve read in the discussion boards.
Be aware that this software is:
- In development. Updates roll out on a regular basis, and u2 (developer) is highly responsive to suggestions and issues. Some tools you might depend on may not be included in the current version. For example, at the time of writing this review there is no smudge tool but it is slated for inclusion.
– Real player with 1251.7 hrs in game
Great Computer Art Program
Black in is an abstract conceptual art program that uses certain brush settings inorder to convey concepts from the artist.
Preface
[olist]
- For those looking to get the most out of this program: I would recommend using a graphics tablet; as it helps simulate using traditional mediums such as drawing or painting. If you can draw fairly well without looking at your drawing hand, a cheap wacom or Huion tablet will do. If you’re having problems with hand-eye coordination, you could try for a higher end graphics tablet with a digital displey (such as the Wacom Cintiq 13HD), or practice a lot more with the current tablet you own; However, graphics tablets aren’t required to use Black Ink.
– Real player with 249.2 hrs in game
articy:draft 3
This is an over priced, under powered waste of your time. I have spent YEARS using ARTICY Draft. I spent thousands of hours on the first edition. And to date have spent almost 1000 USD on the suite. It’s a failed experiment. The development team has all but abandoned it, save for things that allow them to sell in new markets.
This has the power to be a wonderful tool for organization of an MMORPG or RPG game. You can cross reference quite a bit, and create some very unique flows. But it’s just not designed for anyone who either writes or creates game mechanics.
– Real player with 1610.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Design & Illustration Education Games.
In short, I highly recommend this software to anyone who is serious about making a video game. That said, here is my explanation as to why I say that. making a video game is not easy. You have a lot of tasks that need to be thought out and features to develop. In steps Articy:Draft 3 a tool that allows you to create your virtual world in one piece of software for export into you game engine of choice.
Now if you are like me and bought the Articy:Draft 2, you may ask yourself why upgrade? My answer, it depends upon your technical specs you want to get out of this software. Do you want to use XML and Excel or Word? Well then there isn’t too many reasons why you would want to upgrade. Otherwise, I would upgrade as the JSON exporter alone made the choice for me. As a game developer, I needed JSON in order to read the exported documents in my proprietary Game Engine. The other upgrades are nice ease of life features, but the ability o produce JSON documents and the ability to make plugins was my deciding factor and I’d bet many other people made the same conclusion.
– Real player with 534.3 hrs in game
PixelOver
This is a tool for pixel art that I wasn’t expecting I’d get in love with so much! ^^
Even in early access, PixelOver is a pretty solid and unique software. Also, it’s constantly & actively improved by the developer (and it kinda amazes me how fast he’s working with this project).
Here’s a (non exahustive) list of features from PixelOver that I like a lot :)
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It converts normal 2D art to pixel art (you can use bitmap files and vector files!)
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Customizable palettes, shaders and dithering for pixel art conversions
– Real player with 39.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Design & Illustration Animation & Modeling Games.
it’s Early Access, but it gives you enough tools for it to be worth a buy! Quick and easy bone animation, but it’s not just that, you have other options, like transform, deform and skew! A warp transform tool would be so amazing if added!
You can manipulate these tools on every individual frame on your animation if you want!
PixelOver is pretty useful! I love it!
– Real player with 33.4 hrs in game
Awakening
Awakening. I thought it was pretty good toolset for being free, then again I probably dont know what im talking about. I recommend you try this for yourself, if you are at all interested though.
– Real player with 5.7 hrs in game
Awakening is a Free application authoring tool, not a game. It worked on win 10, looked ok, played ok, was understandable. Has instruction help manual with some tutorials inside the program. The company that made this is gone underground though, there is no website or youtube videos. Don’t hold your breath for help here on Steam for bug correction or upgrades. The one on steam is version 1.8. Try google awakening, there might be a higher version out there on sketchy shareware sites.
Try this application authoring tool, if you wanna learn to code or make your own game.
– Real player with 0.3 hrs in game
SolidFace Parametric CAD Modeler 2D/3D
Audience?
The audience is probably engineering, construction management, and drafting degree students that like to game. In those type of degrees, a significant mistake on a draft can result in a large profit loss.
Expensive?
It was the first drafting software available on Steam. Much of the prices on the more professional software available through Steam are kind of smokey, if you know what I mean. For example, Maya, Modo, and Substance Designer/Painter all have modified licenses for use and some are less capable. This is the full version of SolidFace with full licensing, with the catch being drive locked. The opensource options for drafting are BRL-CAD, OpenSCAD, FreeCAD, and LibreCAD. The opensource options, except for BRL-CAD, are very young compared to SolidFace.
– Real player with 59.0 hrs in game
001 Game Creator
Especially for the money, I don’t think you’ll find a program more fun to use when putting together your games. I haven’t found a more flexible engine (Short of maybe Unity, which still requires extra licensing) to quickly piece together scenes and basic mechanics to sketch out game ideas without diving into a million menus. They don’t even have to be simple prototypes, as I am also able to implement complex mechanics in no time at all using easy drag and drop scripting. I have found that my only limitation so far has been my own terrible math skill.
– Real player with 4553.1 hrs in game
I’ve used 001 now for almost 15 years. I’m currently working for SoftWeir Inc. and have contributed to 001 in many ways. That being said, I originally purchased 001 years ago through their website as any other customer, and not just given a free copy as a team member. I’m not being paid to write this review.
001 is a very capable engine designed to bring your ideas to life, as quickly as possible. You can import assets, just plop them into a map or interface, tweak some triggers then start building a game. If you are familiar with the engine, and have the assets ready, you can quite literally prototype ideas in under an hour (Of course depending on how many existing systems and assets you can leverage, and what gameplay you are looking for)
– Real player with 1955.3 hrs in game
Axis Game Factory’s AGFPRO v3
Game factory does not make games. It is a level / world design tool. A really good level / world design tool for Unity based games. You see everything in real time. You can play test your levels, run around and stuff, but its not a stand alone game game engine, just a level / world design tool. However, calling yourself Game Factory was slightly misleading, but whatever. On the forum, the developers hint at wanting to one day make it a stand alone game engine, but I’m not sure if its a hint or misleading. Since they call it Game Factory, I have to lean toward the potential of misleading here.
– Real player with 238.5 hrs in game
(tl;dr: Summary at bottom. Also pay attention to review dates….especially the positive ones….)
Update Jan 2019: Seems AGFPRO and Geovox have finally had the option to purchase them on Steam removed for Australians it seems.
Everyone else has my pity.
UPDATE: Some AGF content is game breakingly broken at the moment. Dev ZekeThe Defender aka Alex has posted a fix that requires rolling back AGF to older versions.
Sadly he has also quit AGF. So could be a while before a proper fix is provided. Until then consider AGF broken and I seriously recommend not buying it or it’s DLC’s until the matter is resolved.
– Real player with 135.1 hrs in game
CUR3D Steam Edition
While the usual tools fail, CUR3D can repair and convert 3D files (not made for printing).
Recommended! ( if you know why you need this software )
– Real player with 22.0 hrs in game
After spending a bunch of hours mucking around in Blender and Zbrush trying to get a video game mesh into a printable state, this just worked.
– Real player with 11.8 hrs in game
Zen Arts: Relaxing Pendulum Paint Simulator
Relax in nature sounds and create mesmerizing pendulum paintings with a simple click.
Suffering from stress, anxiety or sleep difficulty? Or simply just love to make beautiful, amazing arts?
With Zen Arts, relax in calming nature sounds and create mesmerizing pendulum paintings simply with a click. Headphone recommended!
Nature sounds and expressive arts via painting or drawing are both widely used to relax and help treating anxiety disorders. Nothing is more relaxing and hypnotic than taking a deep breath and watching the pendulum slowly swing from the ceiling while making soothing, mesmerizing patterns. Zen Arts simulate the calming experience of making pendulum paintings without the need for expensive setups or the annoying clean-ups afterwards!
CopperCube 5 Game Engine
Lets be clear, Coppercube is intended to be simple and easy to use. This is a software for non programers, or those like me who prefer to focus on art and design, rather than typing tons of code. For this Coppercube is the best out there. Porting between PC, MacOS, WebGl, Android, and flash is near seamless. Most of the time its as simple as clicking the publish to option. There are tons of behaviors and actions to mix and match to do most things you will need, and their is a Javascript API if you want even more control. I’ve used quite a few game engines over the years (Multimedia Fusion, Gamemaker, 3DRad, Jamagic, Gamesalad) and none were as easy and fast to develop 3D applications than Coppercube.
– Real player with 3991.5 hrs in game
I have been playing around with CopperCube the past couple of weeks and I have fallen in love. 1 being that it is easy to get something simple up and running but also the option and simplistic coding. I start messing with the action and coding behaviors and find it to be quite easy when following their tutorial (but I am coding savvy). Graphic wise it isn’t Unity but I am not out to make a AAA game either.
I am running this on my Surface 3 so anyone who comes across my review I would say it runs smoothly on it and isn’t a resource hog which is a huge plus to me.
– Real player with 357.7 hrs in game