Can’t believe I haven’t talked about this application yet, since it’s my main graphic tool. Most of the graphics in Gridblaster have been drawn using Inkscape. Inkscape is a so-called vector drawing program. What does this mean? Drawing programs basically come in two different kinds: pixel based and vector based. In a pixel-based program, when you draw a line the application figures out wich pixels need to be filled, and that’s it. When you are done no additional info about the line is stored. With a vector-based program, only the starting and ending point coördinates are stored, because that’s basically all the information the program needs to draw the line. The same goes for circles, rectangles, curves, etcetera. The advantage of this is that vector drawings can be scaled and transformed without getting blurred or distorted. This also means that vector drawing programs are only usable for actual drawing and not for photo editing.

Inkscape is a free, open source application. It uses the W3C’s SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file format, an XML-based format that’s also supported by other drawing programs and can also be displayed directly (without additional plugins) by Firefox and Opera (not IE, of course). The current version is 0.45.1; it is by no means a finished product, but it’s under quite active development.
Let’s start with the features. This is a bit of a problem for me to review, since I haven’t used any other vector based drawing programs before and therefore I can’t compare. That’s why I have linked to additional reviews on the bottom of this article. Since this is only version 0.45.1, I suppose it doesn’t compare to programs such as Adobe Illustrator. I’m just gonna sum up some of the features I mainly use. Drawing tools include lines, rectangles, ellipses, spirals, freehand, polygon and bezier curves, wich allow you to draw curved lines very accurately. Shapes can be filled with solid colors, gradients and patterns. Layers and transparency are also supported. Although the SVG format supports animation, this feature isn’t available in Inkscape; it is on the roadmap for a future version though. Since I haven’t been using it for that long, there are probably lots of features though that I haven’t heard about.
Something that works surprisingly well is bitmap tracing. With this, you can turn a picture into a vector drawing that you can edit. This is how I created the icon for this website. I took a photo of a cookie, traced it, added a dark brown outline and voila! It took me a few tries and playing around with the settings a bit before I got the result I wanted, but it worked great.
Moving on to the interface. The menu and toolbars are quite intuitive and easy to navigate, with the exception perhaps of the color tools at the bottom of the window. This took me a bit of time to get used to. What I liked a lot was the fact that a very clear list of keyboard shortcuts was included. Literally every tool, command and menu option can be accessed with a keyboard shortcut. There are even some options that can only be accessed this way, so you really should take a look at the shortcut list.
One thing really bother me, though. Exporting drawings as a bitmap has a serious flaw. I draw everything quite big in Inkscape, so it’s easier to work with and add details, and then I shrink it. For example, the maze blocks in Gridblaster are 75×70 pixels in the game, but I drew them at 300×280 pixels. When exporting, you can select to shrink the drawing, but this also lowers the resulution! This means that when I reduce the size from 300×280 to 75×70, the resolution is also reduced four times, making the final result look horrible. I work around this by exporting the drawing at the original size and then shrinking it in The Gimp, wich yields a much better result.
Even though Inkscape probably can’t compare to programs like Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw, it has excellent features, and if you take a look at some of the art created with it on the website, it is clearly capable of very impressive results. Also, it’s a free program, so you can’t possibly lose anything by just trying it. It’s also quite easy to learn, and there’s lots of documentation on the website.