Coder Art Upgrades

Hiya.

Art is something that I’ve wanted to improve on basically all my life but for one reason (or excuse) or another I’ve never had the confidence to push forward. I’ve always owned sketchbooks and I’ve filled many but my art hasn’t progressed much beyond “huh, that’s a cool picture. What’s for dinner?”. Here’s one of my better pieces of digital art.

Five Arcade has been stagnating for a while and one of the reasons is the constant second guessing of the art in the game. I cannot settle on the level of quality. So much time has been wasted modifying tiles, changing tiles, making trees, deleting trees, is that pixel in the right place? So, no more! Time to get decisive, learn some new techniques and make art. Hopefully in documenting this process, some useful information can be gained if you’re as paranoid about your art as I am.

I’m currently studying some courses from Proko, specifically Drawing Basics, Marvel Comics, and Digital Painting Techniques. I chose these courses because I thought they would be best suited to improve my art enough to make Five Arcade pop. Throughout this diary I’ll share what I’ve learned and how I’ve applied it to the game. The coolest thing so far has been value selection. What colours to use for lights, darks, and highlights. One of the first assignments was to draw a pear…wake up, I’m talking! A pear, the fruit, the thing every art person (pearson?) loves to draw because it’s so interesting.

The challenge was to pick out the shadow shape, the mid tone shape and highlight shape. Two values for the Shadow, two for Mid Tones, and one for the Highlight. The process of doing this just screamed pixel art to me, so I’ve been using this to create simple pieces. Here is the exciting pear again, but in juicy pixels!

That looks much better than I thought it would. Maybe this is working. Why did no one tell me that you can get better at stuff?!

Five Arcade has a strong Space and Land shift. I need these areas to be visually distinctive and somehow cohesive. And because the gravity shifts quite a lot, doing linear levels with solid background objects like trees, houses, etc, doesn’t feel real to me. I want this game to feel like an arcade game that is alive, but there is little sense of depth, currently anyway. How can I achieve a nice sense of place for Ve to fly around in. I’m going to start with the far distance. Let’s not overthink and start with some planets, stars and basic spacey things. In space no one can hear you pixel.

Some Specs:

• 5 colours only
• 256 squared pixels max
• game themed

Look, it’s a hungry planet!

Some Time Later…

Things are improving. I’ve done a few more value studies and improved on some shape design. While this may not look particularly impressive, its a massive improvement over last week. The purpose of these exercises is to find the shapes of the shadows, midtones and highlights. Still a long way to go but I want to see if I can apply this to make a cool space station design which, like most good things in life, will be inspired by the Nostromo from Alien. (Sometimes I write a sentence that makes me pause and think: Did that make sense? and the answer is usually: No, no it didn’t. Then I just accept it and move on).

This looks cool. I don’t know if I have the ability to push past this level of art and keep up the progress of the game. I love making this game but being a solo dev has it’s challenges, I will keep pushing forward with the art courses and hopefully the game will show improvements, but as a one person operation, its hard to perform surgery on myself without knocking myself out first….what the hell did that mean?!

Where Are We?

I’m in Northern Ireland somewhere…I think. Games are a funny sort of thing. Sometimes you can do minimal work and things seem to fly along. Then you can work every waking hour and progress seems to slow all the way down. All this is to say, I haven’t got a single clue how close this thing is to being ready. It could be Five days ago (unlikely) or Five years from now (unlikely), but my guess is it’s going to be somewhere between those two times. Doing these art classes will hopefully bring this game out of the amateurish looking state it’s in now to hopefully something that has a chance to stand on it’s own feet. Time will tell, it usually does.

Bye for now.