One of my home projects is to complete a knock-off (in Delphi) of the game TriTryst that I originally wrote in C for Virgin Interactive back in 1995.  The basic game logic is working, and I can actually play the game.  But the art is ugly.  Okay, really ugly.  So I’m trying to come up with something a little more palatable before I let the world see the game.

Making art on the computer is hard.  And the available programs don’t make it much easier for the novice.  There are photo editing programs that will do all kinds of nifty things to photographs, and high-end graphics packages like Adobe Photoshop that will do anything as long as you already know what the “Magic Wand” tool does.  Photoshop is powerful, but the user interface?  Ugh!  I haven’t yet run across a simple program that will let me quickly and easily create some basic shapes in different colors, add some lighting and transparency, and save the individual images as BMP files all with the same palette.  Is it really that hard, or am I just artfully challenged?