Subset Games Forum

I'm new to the modding community here, and I have a stupidly basic question, but not one I've really seen asked.

How, exactly, can you create a good black line outline of a ship? Or, any other object for that matter. Is there a particular tool that enables you to make clean curves? At this point, I'm too lost for my liking.

kartoFlane, if you see this, your help would be much appreciated. Of all the ships I've seen on here, I admire yours most.

But... but I haven't made any ships

There's only the one in Superluminal's demo album, guess you mean that one...
I use Photoshop, I created the lines mostly using the pencil tool and shift-clicking (click somewhere, shift-click elsewhere -> draws straight line between those two points).
There's also the shape tool that allows you to draw, well, shapes, including simple lines, but it's hard to achieve the pixelated look that way.

For some really intricate stuff it's good to use the Pen tool to create and perfect the shape you want, then outline the path with the Pencil tool (Paths > Stroke path with brush).

Generally, avoid partially-transparent pixels, they are what prevents the line from looking crisp and pixely like in FTL.
Once you've got the initial outline complete, zoom in enough to see individual pixels, and refine it - remove some of the pixels, so that curves look like this: As for designing the outline, you can try your hand at drawing it yourself, or trace an already existing graphic. The hull graphic from superluminal's album was based off of this image (the top-down view at bottom-right)

Sweet, thanks for the tips. And yes, I was referring to the one in your tutorial. The lineart on that one matches the game really well, that's what caught my eye. I've been working on a ship myself, it'll get up here eventually.