DS art

Being a 2D artist for Nintendo games is really great. I work primarily in Photoshop, which I love more than most people. The lack of resources specifically for DS art is vaguely interesting - once when googling DS art I found a guy who predicted with a fair amount of certainty that 2D artists will no longer have jobs in the distant year of 2006 now that the DS exists. Not only do I still only work in 2D, but the vast majority of the games I've worked on have been in 2D with supplemental 3D content. I love talking to other people who do the same thing because everyone has their own little quirks, tips and tricks when making things. I understand not posting technical details, but you'd think there would be a forum somewhere where 2D game artists talk about their favorite Photoshop tool or something. I'm convinced there is one somewhere and that I can't find it. heh.

I think the most important skill I've developed since working on GBA/DS games is the ability to multiply/divide things by 8 in my head. It sounds stupid but it's really useful all the time. Sprites are always multiples of 8, like 8x8 or 16x32 or 64x64 and you can only fit a certain amount of sprites in the 256x192 background. I have Photoshop set up to make DS stuff as easy as possible. My grid is set up with lines every 16 pixels w/4 subdivisions, and my ruler units are always set to pixels, anti-aliasing is turned off in all my selection tools, and my Magic Wand always has tolerance set to 0. I would forget the last one a lot during my first game and there would be pink pixels on things where I'd accidentally filled in part of something with FF00FE instead of FF00FF. One of those is transparent, the other is neon pink. heh.

These are my favorite links for when I was first starting out and would do stupid things like save sprites in RGB or use FF00FE. I wish I could find more! Looking around the homebrew scene I could only find people using a lot of .jpgs of assorted sizes and color depth. I very rarely work with .jpgs for anything in a game.

-Derek Yu's Pixel Tutorial. One of the more useful sites on the web to get you started.
-A 2-Frame, 4-Frame and 8 Frame walk cycle tutorial. This is the best example of a side-view walk cycle I've ever found online.