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HelixFox posted:Pixel art is more like architecture than drawing which makes it a great art style for programmers as you can really take your time with it and analyse exactly what you're building and why each pixel is going where it's going. All you need is knowledge of some basic colour theory and a decent palette and it's not hard to put together something that looks quite striking. Uhhhhh I'm pretty sure it's not as easy as you make it sound.
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Sep 26, 2013 17:33
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xzzy posted:Or just sit down and teach yourself some art. Obviously higher level topics like anatomy and poses and quality animation takes years of training and practice, but if all you want is some pixel art and some cool textures in the background, you don't exactly need a four year degree to pull it off. There's tutorials all over the internet for creating pretty much whatever you can imagine. Or failing that, find a game that has a style you're interested in and use it as a template. Don't literally rip it off but use it as a learning tool. I could, and I actually was really into art in middle school and high school, and was even good at it. The problem is that I'd much rather focus on the programming skills I've been honing for 25 years, because it would probably take 25 years of working as an artist to be as good at art as I currently am at programming. I'm sorry if it seemed like my post was complaining "oh woe is me, I'll never make a good game because I suck at art." That wasn't my intent, but rather to open a conversation about what other avenues might be available to people who have no interest in taking the path that's been proven so far.
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Sep 26, 2013 17:33
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Fangz posted:Uhhhhh I'm pretty sure it's not as easy as you make it sound. I would politely suggest that if you are a programmer that is not an artist, you really just need an artist. I say this as a programmer that pretended she was an artist for an entire game. Kickstarters are all about visual and auditory flair, stuff that sells well in video form, and if you can't provide that, you need to go find help. That's also the general rule for marketing a game. Half-assed "I taught myself pixel art" can be alright, but it won't draw the eyes a real artist will draw. It will also piss off the real pixel artists, because yes, pixel art takes serious skill to do right. ... also, the chaos machine / Folmer really did kick serious rear end on Hot Tin Roof. The blame doesn't lie with any of the artists for our only-functional presentation, it's purely down to time - if we could have run this kickstarter 3 months before release instead of 6, we would have had way higher qualify in-game visuals and way more gameplay mechanics to show off. But I mean, we DID hit our goal, so who the heck cares, we can make the game now! It's just that that's what kept us from mega overfunding. So I guess I should back up my "go to kickstarter now!" advice with that, honestly. The longer you can wait, probably, the better. Kickstarter works best when you're showing what amounts to finished visuals and mechanics, which is precisely backward from the stated intention of the sight, but them's the breaks. So when I say "go!", it's only because to us, those animated gifs look pretty dang polished. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Sep 26, 2013 |
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Sep 26, 2013 17:44
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SlightlyMadman posted:As a programmer who's a terrible artist, this makes me sad. Art loathing buddy!  I think I've spent more time making art for this than I have coding, and it's still nothing to get excited about. Still got to make it as pretty as possible or else nobody will look at it  At least it probably looks better than anything I made whenever I first posted here. That day where I can finally bring photoshop/illustrator/blender out behind the shed and put them down can't get here any sooner, then I can focus on the parts of game making I don't hate. xzzy posted:Or failing that, find a game that has a style you're interested in and use it as a template. Don't literally rip it off but use it as a learning tool. I wish I'd done this a lot sooner. Everything became much easier when I stopped trying to invent my own style and just copied someone another game's. I may have also just ripped it off a few times too.
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Sep 26, 2013 18:24
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Shalinor posted:Half-assed "I taught myself pixel art" can be alright, but it won't draw the eyes a real artist will draw. It will also piss off the real pixel artists, because yes, pixel art takes serious skill to do right. You're not wrong, but there's an enormous gap between programmer art and professional art wherein usable results can be found. I think many one man projects could be get a lot more eyeballs if they put some effort into it instead of treating it like a lost cause.
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Sep 26, 2013 19:04
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Definitely. I really tried hard to practice pixelling small amounts for games I made, and while the results are still crap, the feeling of reward and the decrease in crapness was really encouraging. If nothing else, it keeps my enthusiasm for the projects higher for longer, which can only be a good thing.
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Sep 26, 2013 19:48
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Well, it's laudable sentiment, the idea of not giving up and trying to learn a skill. I just object to the sense that pixel art is somehow inherently easy to figure out as a programmer. (and somehow like architecture?) It's not, and the prevalence of bad pixel art (and in general, bad game art) everywhere is proof of that. You aren't going to open up paint and be Derek Yu.
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Sep 26, 2013 19:59
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It's time for more Adventures in Bad Syntax: Why isn't my background wall working? It worked before I ported this draw call over to my draw-stages code   Of course I set bg1x twice instead of setting bg1y   This could've been avoided if I'd just done something smart like naming those variables "bg1Height," "bg1Width," and "bg1Depth," I should probably do that right now. And now everyone knows my dirty illusion of how I do contiguous FG/BG elements but make them look like they're one thing! Fur20 fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Sep 26, 2013 |
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Sep 26, 2013 20:00
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Fangz posted:Well, it's laudable sentiment, the idea of not giving up and trying to learn a skill. I just object to the sense that pixel art is somehow inherently easy to figure out as a programmer. It definitely isn't, but because the space is reduced so much it's easier to learn (I think, anyway) from the do/evaluate/redo cycle. I found it easier, anyhow.
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Sep 26, 2013 20:09
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The White Dragon posted:It's time for more Adventures in Bad Syntax: You're using XNA, right? Any particular reason those are all separate variables and not Vector3's or something?
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Sep 26, 2013 20:29
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EDIT: enh it's a personal coding style argument.
Fangz fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Sep 26, 2013 |
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Sep 26, 2013 20:32
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Fangz posted:Uhhhhh I'm pretty sure it's not as easy as you make it sound. To create something passable and workable as game graphics, I mean. Not necessarily something amazing that would be an artist's main portfolio piece. It's way easier for someone with no art experience to make something in pixel art that would work fine in a game than it would be to make something that doesn't look like poo poo with a pencil or from scratch in Photoshop or in a 3D modelling tool or a multitude of other art tools. Easy to learn, difficult to master. Edit: What I'm saying is that it's easier than most other art creation methods for someone with no experience, not that it's a piece of cake for anyone and everyone. HelixFox fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Sep 26, 2013 |
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Sep 26, 2013 20:34
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I wish SA would make its mind up about whether pixel art is awesome or the devil. I'm just going back to making ANSI art with TheDraw.
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Sep 26, 2013 20:39
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Fangz posted:EDIT: enh it's a personal coding style argument. I guess it is, I just think it'd be much easier to keep track of.
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Sep 26, 2013 20:40
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The White Dragon posted:It's time for more Adventures in Bad Syntax: Without a big restructure or any mind-blowing you could start swapping out those variables 1 by 1 for an extremely simple class like: code:code:Then you could later get crazy and make arrays or dictionaries of them, but it'd be fine to start with small steps. e: fixed when I realized what you were actually suggesting Unormal fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Sep 26, 2013 |
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Sep 26, 2013 21:03
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Then again TWD's code is a beautiful monstrosity likely to implode with such baseline adjustments; a derailed locomotive teetering on the edge of the grand canyon, waiting for a moth to land on it and send the whole thing over the edge.
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Sep 26, 2013 21:16
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SlightlyMadman posted:I wish SA would make its mind up about whether pixel art is awesome or the devil. I'm just going back to making ANSI art with TheDraw. Those rabbit holes go deeper now! http://rexpaint.blogspot.com/ The main thing with KS is managing/grounding public perceptions---a well wrought demo will do that for some projects, others can wing it with an appealing written/spoken pitch coupled with a reasonable-sounding delivery date and some bits of art and music, and some still just get a psychic hold on folks via powerful nostalgia or some manner of inscrutable derangement. Ideally, somebody wants to touch on all fronts to shore up their odds, but success can probably be had with just one fully realized---timing of the campaign versus everything is always going to be there as an X factor.
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Sep 26, 2013 21:47
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SlightlyMadman posted:I wish SA would make its mind up about whether pixel art is awesome or the devil. I'm just going back to making ANSI art with TheDraw. As with using chip sounds or simple waveforms in music, I think a lot of the derision comes from the idea that pixel art is just a gimmicky way to bank on nostalgia. I don't blame anyone, as I'm also tired of the starry-eyed "you haven't lived unless you grew up in the 80s/90s" memes, but it's got plenty of value outside of that association. Low res art, if done well, is a super economical and sensible choice for indie developers with a budget. I also just think the aesthetic is cool.  vvvvv - I totally agree with this. If you're going to try your hand at pixel art, study the basics of art in general first. If you don't gain at least a limited understanding of perspective, color theory, and anatomy, your output will suck no matter how hard you try. (Quick tip/pet peeve: Don't outline everything with black.) Gaspy Conana fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Sep 26, 2013 |
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Sep 26, 2013 22:49
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I've always thought of pixel art as a streamlined tile mosaic, since you're building images out of uniform squares. Since it's low resolution and these tiles occupy a defined space the viewer's mind fills in the blanks of a lot of finer details (if your figure's eye is a two-by-two pixel square of three whites and a black, the black tile can only occupy one of the four spaces and that one will best complete the illusion of the eye looking forward). The margin for error is lower with pixel art so it looks easier but the trick of it is all the normal rules of visual aesthetics apply and if you're not a practiced artist you won't be able to maximize the effect those tiles have against one another. If you work with a limited palette you need to know how to maximize those colors in different contexts (using the color of skin as highlights in a warm-value piece of clothing, for example) and create the illusion of depth and form or how the thing you want to animate actually works in real life- it's very easy to make an awkward-looking run cycle if you don't have an understanding of physiology and the way the human body shifts and distributes its weight to create locomotion. There's a lot of reasoning and calculation that goes on behind the scenes when you're making art, let alone art to fit in a videogame, that you can't just ignore it all and ride the mind's-eye fill-in-the-blank of low-resolution pixel art or else you'll end up with ugly jagged artwork.
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Sep 26, 2013 22:58
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I've always treating pixel art like chiseling. You start with a big block of generic colors and shapes and slowly chip away to the image you want  I do agree however - "retro" can be an excuse to cash in on nostalgia and/or be lazy. At the same time some projects use it as a beautiful asthetic. What I can't stand is art/animation that look like early 2000ish flash cartoons. Blech
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Sep 26, 2013 23:07
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If you're artistically inclined pixel art can be easier than other kinds of (digital) art, but to a less artistic person it's just as difficult as anything else, or even more difficult-- artists can look at the limitations in space and color and individual pixel placement as an advantage but I doubt anyone else would. I mean, there's a huge difference between "recognizable shape" and "an 8 by 8 pixel cop car with broken outlines because it's pixel art so there's not enough space to draw a siren so I had to make the shading and highlights part of other elements of the image", how the gently caress is a programmer supposed to figure something like that out. Non-artists show me their pixel art on twitter all the time and trust me, they mean well and try really hard, but sometimes people simply don't have an eye for design. All the basic geometric shapes and limited palettes in the world won't change that. On another note, as an artist who has worked with programmers before, here's something I've noticed: Sometimes (or in my case, literally almost every time it's happened to me ever) when programmers try to get artists to work with them, they talk about game mechanics and what genre of game they're making or the features their engine has, but when the artist asks "so what's the game about, what's the story, what's the setting?" the answer will be "oh I haven't thought about it. Don't care, space maybe? I like space. Zombies are cool too. Just whatever really idk." I don't know how other artists look at that, but to me it's just completely uninspiring when someone basically says "I don't give a gently caress what you make, just make it." Personally, I've turned down every offer like that I've gotten (except one. ambushsabre you lovable scamp), no matter how impressive their tech or coding skills or whatever were. So programmers, just as a thing to keep in mind, if you reach out to artists for a collab, try to come across like you want to *make a game* rather than *get someone to replace the placeholder art in your engine*. I'd love to hear if other artist feel different btw, share y'alls thoughts!
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Sep 26, 2013 23:22
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the chaos engine posted:I'd love to hear if other artist feel different btw, share y'alls thoughts! I'm working with Orzo on his game and it started out being all filler Zelda art but over the course of development- which started with me tiling a dungeon to prove I'm competent enough for the job- we've sort of collaborated and helped flesh out the story and the setting. The original test art was all pixels and it had a classic sword-and-sorcery look because that's the first place my brain went when asked to do top-down sword sprites but when we got to talking about ideas he'd bounce a lot of them off me and I'd do conceptual sketches to visualize the idea and he'd tie it into the overall theme of the game world and I'd come back with ways to make it look interesting which might bounce back into actual game mechanics and where it is now has sort of blossomed out of collaborative communication and putting ideas down in a visual form. I've worked on another project where I was basically told "this is the story and this is how it should look" and it wasn't as fun or rewarding as working on this game. If you're an artist and you're working in a friendly setting don't just assume you're there to strictly take orders and serve as the art dispenser, communicate and bounce your thoughts back and forth and the natural process of collaboration will help both sides of the game influence the other and make the whole thing a lot more fun. An example was my idea/proposal to break away from the traditional one-swing animation cycle common in 2D Zeldas and incorporate a three-swing combo animation in sprite form- my initial thought was it was just an aesthetic reskin of the swing cycle that can link together and work mechanically the same but that suggestion opens the way to possible three-hit mechanics doing something else? I didn't just share my idea, though, I went on video comm and drew out what I was proposing live and put together a sheet of the three swing idea, using a plot-out of the actual hit detection arc Orzo supplied me for reference:  That was about 20 minutes of off-the-cuff sketching which I put together just for fun and made into a rough animation test:  And I think that might end up an actual addition to the game, and it entirely came out of collaboration and mutual feedback.
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Sep 26, 2013 23:43
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I use pixel art because I'm really bad at drawing but if I just take it really slow and draw the same thing slightly differently 10,000,000 times, one of them will look "ok".
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Sep 27, 2013 00:27
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If you're a programmer without an artist, then crowdfunding may not be for you. Crowdfunding is an appeal directly to your players - and people play video games with their eyes. If the selling points of your game are invisible, then you won't sell much by showing them. You can get by without art solely on the strength of your vision if you can come up with one humdinger of a video explaining exactly why your idea is unique and cool. Selling it effectively may require good graphic design, but in that case the art doesn't need to resemble the game, only communicate the idea, which is probably easier for a programmer to do. In the future there may be an equally liberating new funding model that's better-suited for intrinsically invisible pitches, but until that time comes, you've got to make do with what exists.
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Sep 27, 2013 03:25
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Bongo Bill posted:If you're a programmer without an artist, then crowdfunding may not be for you. Crowdfunding is an appeal directly to your players - and people play video games with their eyes. If the selling points of your game are invisible, then you won't sell much by showing them. I mean look at what Orzo did. He made a cool engine, built cool systems, started building a cool game, etc, all with a mixture of lent and borrowed art. Through that he attracted a real artist. NOW the pair of them could go for Kickstarter, if they wanted. That's also where it's handy for a programmer to learn pixel art. Not to actually use to sell the game, but to get the game looking good enough where it at least makes sense to someone playing it, and specifically, to an artist that might be willing to replace said art in a clearly good game. You just plan on getting rid of that art once you find a real artist. ... which is why artist/programmers are the most envied people in all of creation, and I hate them. Lots. 
Shalinor fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Sep 27, 2013 |
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Sep 27, 2013 03:33
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Shalinor posted:I'd agree, with one tweak: if you're a programmer without an artist, then you should probably just find an artist. I know in my case I never made much real progress toward a fully realized game until I started working with an artist.
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Sep 27, 2013 03:52
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Artists can use something like Game Maker to make a passable if limited game. What we clearly need is something like Art Maker for programmers that helps churn out passable if limited art. Not sure if I'm being sarcastic or not.
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Sep 27, 2013 04:50
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Nition posted:Artists can use something like Game Maker to make a passable if limited game. What we clearly need is something like Art Maker for programmers that helps churn out passable if limited art. It's called 'release an amazing game with such awful graphics that people make texture packs for it.'
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Sep 27, 2013 05:08
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Nition posted:Artists can use something like Game Maker to make a passable if limited game. What we clearly need is something like Art Maker for programmers that helps churn out passable if limited art. Maybe something like this would do that one day. I'm sure it currently makes lovely high poly messy not game ready geometry, but along those lines would simplify art creation if you could pull it off reference art or doodles. I think 3D is a better route for programmer art especially as modelers become less arcane. Bad pixel art is just bad, but austere 3D can work and you have the possibilities of animating it mo cap (kinect hacks) or with physics. As a non-artist even a single walk cycle is a bitch in 2D art. Especially if we are talking about the difference between a programmer with some art and no art skills. You could also do what the Tiny Keep dev did. Just pay out of pocket for enough stock art to make your KS pitch work and then use the KS money to hire the artist who did the stock art.
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Sep 27, 2013 05:28
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FuzzySlippers posted:Maybe something like this would do that one day. I'm sure it currently makes lovely high poly messy not game ready geometry, but along those lines would simplify art creation if you could pull it off reference art or doodles. That I then released a game with it that got complimented art-wise was kind of surprising, but still. It's a perfectly serviceable style for when you need "good enough visuals for the game to be fun and let an artist see how it'll work," and any 3D programmer should be able to duplicate it with a little time in Unity's animator tool. Hell, if anyone's confused how I did it, just message me. It won't work unless you add squash-and-stretch animation, but it's a super simple thing to do, once you understand the physics of it. You basically just apply volume-retaining non-uniform scales in a way that makes physical sense, then boom, Looney Toons bounces. EDIT: It's kind of impossible to use that style and have it come across grimdark, though, so it helps if your game is a bit lighthearted. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Sep 28, 2013 |
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Sep 28, 2013 01:14
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A thief lurks, invisible, setting up for a back-stab.
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Sep 28, 2013 02:02
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Unormal posted:A thief lurks, invisible, setting up for a back-stab. I'm really loving the style on these screenshots of yours, how soon do we see it in action? Like an animated gif or short video? Is it ready for that?
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Sep 28, 2013 03:07
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fondue posted:I'm really loving the style on these screenshots of yours, how soon do we see it in action? Like an animated gif or short video? Is it ready for that? It's pretty much completely playable, we're fleshing out content. Here's a few little quickly made gifs of action happening: Warrior charges:  Wizard teleports and kill some stuff with frost ring:  Farmer chucks a pumpkin to kill a group of slimes: 
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Sep 28, 2013 03:40
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Going back to the artist/programmer thing, is there a good place for me to go to work with programmers who need art? I have the same sort of problem that you guys have, except reversed- I'm half decent at art (pixel art is my forte, but I dabble in texturing, modeling and level design, too) but I can't code to save my life.
soapydishwater fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Sep 28, 2013 |
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Sep 28, 2013 03:50
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screenshot saturday! I've did a little work on cinematics, and how the game handles a cinematic. here's the first inital part which will be a collage of propaganda 
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Sep 28, 2013 06:13
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First legit screenshot Saturday in a long-rear end time: An actual new stage! And underwater ruleset effects!
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Sep 28, 2013 07:00
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I made another area of the game. I dub it "some cubes stuck together with inner shadows". Still considering going back to 2d. 3D requires a huge amount of time for a questionable amount of gain. But then again, sunk cost fallacy 
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Sep 28, 2013 09:36
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shs posted:I made another area of the game. I dub it "some cubes stuck together with inner shadows". What are you making the environments in?
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Sep 28, 2013 10:05
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I made all the individual parts (the building, the desk, the bookshelf etc) in Blender, then put them together in Unity's editor.
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Sep 28, 2013 10:27
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soapydishwater posted:Going back to the artist/programmer thing, is there a good place for me to go to work with programmers who need art? I have the same sort of problem that you guys have, except reversed- I'm half decent at art (pixel art is my forte, but I dabble in texturing, modeling and level design, too) but I can't code to save my life. Get on twitter, post mockups and tag them #screenshotsaturday. Easiest way to get noticed and network your way into a programmer's heart. Also: It is Screenshotsaturday! This is for my Indie Statik kickstarter game:  Trying to get a demo done this weekend.
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Sep 28, 2013 10:45
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