From looking at the games being made here, I reach 2 conclusions:

1) A (relative) handful of members have made most of the games. These are the people with 10 or more games to their credit.

2) Some members (especially at first) struggle with getting backgrounds together, even for simple, text-based games.

Backgrounds can be made in many programs (I often use Photoshop Elements, myself), but people don’t always have access to better applications. PowerPoint is widely available (many people have the Microsoft Office suite), and it is more than adequate for making simple backgrounds, especially for text-based games. No, there aren’t a lot of image-editing tools, but for many games, you don’t need them.

The key points for making good backgrounds in PowerPoint are:

Use page setup to make the page 24.69 cm (9.72 inches) wide and19.38 cm (7.63 inches) high. This makes a perfect fit for the game. (Yes, you could use a different size, but if you retain the ratio, it works very well). The size given is close to the default slide size.

Leave a space for the title. The space should be in the upper left corner and measure 1.08 cm (0.42 inch) high. The width would vary with the length of the title. A 23.6 cm (9.29 inch) width accommodates even the longest possible title. You can use the drawing tool to make a rectangle there to help guide you. You may wish to delete it once you finish the background.

Likewise, leave a space for the clue bar so it will not obscure your game. Again, you could draw a rectangle to help you. It should measure 0.83 x 12.36 cm (0.33 x 4.86 inches), and be positioned 1.09 cm(0.43 inches) below the upper left corner.

If you draw these rectangles they won’t look quite right when you are in the game creation stage, but they are spot-on when the game is previewed or played.

You have a choice of many fonts and colors to make your background more interesting. And if that’s not enough, check out the “WordArt” option.

There are simple drawing tools, and drawings and pictures can be pasted or imported into PowerPoint. Some formats aren’t supported, but you can still do quite a bit with PowerPoint.

You must save your background in a format supported by PurposeGames: JPEG (JPG), PNG or GIF.

So if you have a game in mind, go to it.

If not, see my next game “Games You Can Make”.

There is another easy way to create backgrounds, especially for text games: Write in your favourite text editor and than make a screenshot. Resize and/or crop the image to 700x550 in your favourite image editor and save it. That's it.

Example: http://www.purposegames.com/game/2516 ... A screeshot (of the program TextEdit on a Mac) was used as basis to create this game's background.

A tad different question but still related:

I have a few ideas for making 25 cities of [insert country].
I really like the original lay-out from the games David ceated in the beginning and also saw games created by Kathy (25 cities of India) & Niklas (25 cities of China) that used the same lay-out as those countries had in the continent games created by David.

How do I get something like that for say Brazil? Does David have to provide an emty template of the country in question in the game creation section first or is there an easier way?

Thx in advance

http://s1.directupload.net/images/071001/vuhkb39i.png

Equestenebrarum:

Great job with the specific problem.

Tassos:

Nice website. I've bookmarked it, and will no doubt be using it in the future...

Corel Print House has always been on my system so that's the one I've used. It may be convoluted compared to the other programmes above but for me its full frame is automatically fitted into the purposegame quiz and it works for me.