So you want to create amazing worlds, characters, and special effects?

The type of art a game requires is very dependent on the way the game is designed. For 2D art, it might have to have a certain “color key”, dimension, number of colors, or an alpha channel. For 3D art, it can be even more complicated to make 3D models, animate them, texture them, and “export” to a file the game can use.

Here is a list of Tools you might need:

Raster-based drawing  Old-fashioned, pixel based drawing

• Adobe Photoshop , A highly sophisticated image manipulation program, the standard of all professional graphic engineers (commercial)
• Autodesk Sketchbook Pro , Award-winning Autodesk SketchBook™ Pro is a nimble, high-quality paint and drawing application designed specifically for use with Tablet PC or digitized pen tablets. (commercial)
• Corel Painter IX , Painter has been the world’s pre-eminent Natural-Media® painting and illustration software. (commercial)
• Genetica , A powerful seamless texture editor that comes with over 500 preset textures of all types. (commercial)
• The GIMP , Image manipulation program, on the level of Adobe Photoshop, but free. Many advanced plugins, writing new ones is rather easy.
• GraphicsGale , Great for pixel art, GIF animation. Freeware and shareware versions available.
• KolourPaint , A very simple image manipulation program which is very similar to MS Paint, only built for KDE.
• Paint.Net , A commercial grade image and photo manipulation software. Originally intended as a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows. It is designed to be used on computers that run Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or Server 2003 and written primarily in C#.
• Paint Shop Pro , An image manipulation program that aims to have features like Adobe Photoshop, but with a cleaner interface. Also does simple Vector graphics. (commercial)
• Pixia , An image manipulation program, mostly aimed at truecolor illustration, with transparent layers and outstanding support for gradients, palettes and fill patterns. Old versions in many languages; Japanese, English, and German are up-to-date.
• PhotoSEAM , Special purpose image editor for creating seamless textures and tiles from digital images, or from scratch.
• Skencil , Skencil is a Free Software interactive vector drawing appliction. Known to run on GNU/Linux and other UNIX-compatible systems, it is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes.
• Tile Studio , Graphics editor for 2D tile-based games, contains a sprite editor and a map editor, programmable output with examples for several languages
• Krita , An image editor, part of the KOffice suit, Krita is relatively new, but has almost all the features of the GIMP and other alternatives.

Vector-based drawing Drawing using shapes that contain properties

• Adobe Illustrator , A very powerfull but easy to use vector graphics application from the team at Adobe. (commercial)
• Corel Draw , A nice vector editor, often used to design printouts (commercial)
• GameBrix , A powerful free web-based vector graphics and animation tool from GameBrix generates industry standard SWF format with seamless photo capture editor. (commercial)
• Microsoft Acrylic, formerly Creature House Expression ,A powerful vector and bitmap editing suite with many revolutionary features not seen in other apps. It exports to all the major formats (EPS, AI, PDF) available for Windows and MacOS (commercial).
• Inkscape , An SVG editor with a “Corel Draw”-like interface
• Moho , A vector-based drawing and animation tool. Has a skeletal animation system that greatly simplifies 2D animation. (commercial)
• Skencil , An interactive vector drawing application. It is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes. (Not for Windows)
• Sodipodi , Also an SVG editor but with a more “GIMP”-like interface
• Synfig , A great 2D animation studio, relased under GNU/GPL license.
• Xara Xtreme , A very good software for vector drawing, which will soon be OpenSource software and ported for Linux and Mac