Presenting Games with a Story
Read this post in its full formatted glory at https://blog.mavnn.eu/2026/05/06/presenting_games_with_a_story.html
As a special bonus extra for following the blog, here's a sneak peak of the draft course description for the under 18s online course I'm planning to run next half term (i.e. starting in a few weeks time). If it sounds interesting or you've got any suggestions, let me know.
Separate from the ability to create art (visual or musical) is the ability to use it. This is a course on using the digital tools available freely to create assets (the artwork and sounds) for games and digital presentations. Not how to draw, but how to turn your picture into a game character. Not how to play an instrument, but how to use a crisp packet to make the sound of sneaking footsteps in the woods.
Using some example visual novels as project starters (like the ones you can build in "Coding Games with a Story"), we'll spend some time looking at the process of creating digital art assets, starting from prototyping, deliberately 'wrong' placeholders and story boarding to work out what it is that we even need.
Then we'll move onto the tips and tricks of the trade for using digital art tools. We'll look at how to take existing artwork created on paper and turn it into assets that we can use easily and that look good without spending forever and a year doing so. We'll use layers to create many variants of the same image without having to redraw it every time, and to let you perfect parts of the artwork independently, and then we'll expand their use to have a look at basic animation techniques. And we'll look at how to use art styles to your advantage, such as using pixel art to create a final visual design that looks good but isn't quite so labour intensive.
On the audio side we'll learn how to balance and adjust the volume of our recordings so that they match well together, have a look at Foley work (the creation of sound effects using everyday objects), and play with some effects to do things like voice acting multiple parts with the same person.
We might not end up results like a AAA computer game with a budget of millions, but we will end up with a set of skills to communicate your ideas more quickly and more accurately - and a lot of new ways to cheat on making things look and sound better quickly!
To take part in this course you'll need access to a device that has both Krita (for visual work) and Audacity (for working with sound) installed as we will be using them during the sessions. Both pieces of software are available for free, and the course introduction will contain links to download them safely. Between sessions you'll need access to a way to take pictures and record audio - any smartphone will do. If you have a graphics tablet for drawing it will be a nice bonus extra, but it will not be required.
Finally, to take part in the course, you will need to be know how to download, save, and find the example starter files that we will be using (links will be shared for each session). To fit all of the good stuff into the short five week format, we will be assuming a foundational knowledge of saving and loading files on the device you are using.
