A month in the life of an artist

I'm making the game I always dreamed: Farewell. I'm making it all by myself as SoloDev. The first thing I'm aiming for is to make the demo of my game, which I did last year but with placeholders. Today I'm aiming to have the demo published by June, with my own assets.

To achieve this, I divided the first few months of 2023 as follows:

• January: Assets and scenery.

• February: Characters and animations.

• March: Integration (same state of the previous demo but with own assets)

• April: New Combat System.

So, February is over and today I want to talk about this beautiful experience.

Beginning of February

In the previous blog I talked about how, without knowing pixel art, making all the assets was quite complicated. I deal badly with frustration and with art it seems to multiply.

I'm going to leave a graph of how I thought my frustration was going to be versus how it really was.

Expectation:

Reality:

Going from making simple inorganic figures to organic meaningful figures and then animating them was one of the most complicated things I had to do. And the first big challenge I encountered was the boss.

The Boss: A New Pixel

The idea of the boss was a box that transformed into a Mimic. Now, since it wasn't a human figure I spent a long time trying different shapes until one had some resemblance to a mimic. From then on, I didn't like everything I did. I tried different types of boxes, shapes and figures but nothing worked, until after dozens of attempts I liked one. I started adding details and this was the final version:

I didn't like it, it felt weird. Asking for feedback from artist friends I was able to add a little more detail and with some tweaking I finally got this:

I loved it. I really liked how it turned out, but there was one big problem. This enemy and the rest of the characters looked like they were taken from different games.

I panicked, because there was nothing I could do to make them look similar.

I tried to change the colors because I thought they were darker, but it still looked like another game. I took out details, but the same thing kept happening. I was like that for a long time until a friend of mine came up with the answer: the lines. The difference was in the figure itself, and he also gave me a tip that I quickly applied: make the figure more cartoonish. Finally it was like this:

Really, to go from knowing nothing about pixel art to have achieved this enemy makes me proud, because it seems that you really get things done with a lot of effort.

Unfortunately, this was not all, because then came the second great challenge: the walking animation.

The Walking Animation: The Pixel Strikes Back

For the animations themselves there is a challenge, which is that it's harder for me to see references because if I copy them the animations look pretty similar. An artist friend of mine gave me an idea that helped a lot. He recommended to make a basic 3D character, put the animations I needed from Mixamo and take screenshots to use them as a reference. So I did the first blocking walk animation with 10 frames:

What I did then was to make the character based on that animation and fix a couple of problems I had, and I got it like this.

I didn't dislike it at all, but when I put it in the game I saw the real problem. The animation was in another perspective than the game, so it didn't feel integrated.

So, I started the animation from scratch, which took quite a bit of work but I had it after a few iterations, reducing the amount of frames to 6.

The problem is that, for me, it still looks weird, so I made a last attempt but with 4 frames reducing it to the minimum.

It seems to me that it still has a lot of room for improvement. Unfortunately it's not like the box that I look at it and say "hey, good job", but I have a lot of things to move forward with and I spent more days on it than I should for now. My idea is to go back and tweak the animations that don't feel quite integrated once I finish March, already having all the new art in the game. This also helps me to look at the animations with an outsider's eye, because after looking at pixels for so long it's very difficult to know if what you're doing is right.

Pirate: Return of the Pixel

Finally, to end this post with something more cheerful, I have to tell you about Pirate.

Pirate was the first character I had no idea how I was going to make, even before the Boss. While it was quite a few attempts and frustrations until it came together, compared to the box or the animations it was a walk in the park. This is the first of the new characters that I made: Pirate.

Perhaps what gives me a bit of a laugh writing this is what the first version of him looked like, which looks like a meerkat.

Pirate was what I most enjoyed drawing and animating, and I feel satisfaction when I see him. Because when I think I can't handle a challenge and I see Pirate I remind myself "yes, I can handle this".

Summary

February was incredibly difficult and exhausting, to the point that I'm still with a burn-out today, but it also makes me feel good that a lot of the hardest work is done, and now all that's left to do is integrate.

The last thing I want to emphasize is that, all these two months of work making art made me have a greater vision and respect for the artists. I found myself asking them for several days "do you deal with this every day?". It even opened my vision that if with two months I found all these conflicts, how many more am I missing with people who dedicate their whole life to this?

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What about you?

Are you an artist? What are the things you deal with the most day by day?

Not an artist? What things do you see in them that generates you a lot of respect?

If you found it interesting, remember that you can subscribe to be notified when I make a new post. I will be posting on the 7th of each month.

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