DRAWING A SPACESHIP

Now that we have a background for our game, we need to focus on creating a spaceship that will be used as the “hero” in our game. To begin, open the GIMP if it is not already open and create a new 32 × 32 image like the one shown in Figure 7.35.

When you create such a small image, chances are it will look very small on your screen. In order to make our drawing easier, we need to resize the window and zoom in until you are able to clearly see the area, as in Figure 7.36.

Figure 7.34
Your final scene.

Figure 7.35
A new image is necessary for our ship.

Figure 7.36
The area is zoomed in.

We want the spaceship to be symmetrical, and to help us accomplish this, we will drag guides to the center of the image by clicking on the ruler that is positioned to the left of the image and dragging it to the right. You can position it at 16, which is exactly half of the 32-pixel image we created. Do the same for top to bottom, and again position it at 16 so that you can create your spaceship in the center of the canvas. Figure 7.37 shows the guides as drawn.