Friday, February 27, 2009

Photoshop with Title Safe Area Guides

If you want to easily create mock-ups for your game and take the title safe area into account you can do this in Adobe Photoshop. If you are targeting your game release on the Xbox 360 you'll need to consider the safe area as you will have users that are using non wide screen CRT TVs that won't use your full resolution or even HD TVs that might have some amount of over scan.

To do this in Photoshop:
  1. From the menu, select File -> New and then choose the NTSC, PAL or HDV (with guides) preset. In my case i'm going to use the 1280 x 720 resolution for my game.


  2. You will then have a new PS file with guides for the Action Safe and Title Safe areas. The Action Safe guides are the outside and the Title Safe guides are the inner ones.

I plan on using these templates to mock up all of my menu and game screens. This will also help out as you can easily get the coordinates of your menu and game elements starting positions.

I'm sure that you can do it, but haven't tried yet, is take this template and make the guides actual colors on the layer, save it to a file and then render it to your game screen. This will be an easy way for you to check your title safe area while the game is running.
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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousJuly 2, 2009 at 3:41 PM

    Hows the development coming on... I once wrote an F1 manager game back in the day, really miss a decent one. If you do the motogp one right, a few tweaks in the math and you'll have F1 too so I'm really interested!

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  2. The NigeJuly 2, 2009 at 4:15 PM

    Thanks for commenting. I've put the GP manager game on hold for now as I think it was a little too ambitious for my first game.

    I did get to a point with simple simulations that had the dots moving around Sachsenring and doing realistic times. All that would be left is all of the menu screens for managing the riders teams and the market/sponsorships.

    I'm a huge fan of F1 - longer than MotoGP so I've thought about developing the game so that it could be easily made into an F1 manager as well.

    What was your F1 manager game on? PC? What was the name of it?

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