Overview

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to draw your own icons and images, convert them to the Ringo compatible format and use them in your games and apps.

Since most of the things on Ringo are really small in pixel size (the screen itself is 160x128), pretty much everything you draw will be low-res and there will be no way to make something uber-complex. However, lack of pixels can sometimes cause real troubles when you're trying to draw shapes that are not that simple.

Luckily for us, the Internet is full of these things and there are plenty of pixel-like drawings that are free to use and available to everyone. You can pretty much find everything you want - from the icons all the way to the monsters in games.

Most of this tutorial will be based on how to make your own sprites. To do that, we'll be using GNU Image Manipulation Program or simply GIMP.
GIMP is one of the world's most versatile and popular graphics editors and the best thing about it is - it's free to use and open-source!

The installation of this software is pretty straightforward and we'll not go through it here, so make sure you download it from here and then come back.

Of course, you can use other editors, such as Photoshop or even Aesprite, which is probably the best pixel-art tool on the market. These programs are not free to use, so we'll focus on the one that is the most accessible to everyone.
Let's go!