Post by Puppet in Until My End (Jam Version) jam comments

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Whoa, this game is phenomenal!

Not sure if this is something you want to talk about, but I’m really curios about your thought process on how you came up with the visuals.

I’ve been getting more into art myself, but it has been an uphill battle for me, I’m not very gifted. From what I understand, it’s mostly about finding references and other people’s work you like, and then incorporating them with your own flavor. Is that what you did? I’m curious if there were any inpsirations you had in mind while creating your visual design. I really love the black on red with white background (look at my profile image lol).

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IDKBOX194 days ago

Hey no worries, thanks for reaching out (genuinely though, feel free to ask me anything!), I've also felt the struggle of fighting an uphill battle in terms of art/graphic design stuff... I often get overtaken/outcompeted by my peers & even younger students (which is quite scary to be honest but such is life XD). What matters is that if you're having fun, keep on doing what you do!

Also yeah, you're pretty much correct btw, it's mostly about finding your own style, What types of colors do you like? What sort of games do you enjoy? What kind of artstyle do you prefer to draw? etc. This is a culmination from all of your experiences! An easy way to find this is to make a visual reference board that strictly contains things that you like (followed a skillshare class for this, helped me quite a bit when I was lost trying to find my own style)

It's also great to know your own strengths & weaknesses! an example of this is that I'm incredibly good at picking colors (in my opinion atleast XD) but I'm extremely slow at drawing illustrations so I usually prefer to do pixel arts instead. If you don't really know your strengths & weaknesses, well... experiment! See what sticks, see what doesn't, then iterate on it more! (Try out new colors, new artstyles, try out other games & see what makes them stick)

For this particular game I'm acting as the "creative director" instead of the main artist, I'm still the one making all the artstyle decisions though! The way I approached this is by getting a vibe down first, I'm sketching out designs while listening to a music that's similar to the vibe that I'm trying to go for (for the title screen, I listened to this & for the gameplay stuff, I listened to this). For the title screen I was inspired by one of gal shir's old artworks (this one in particular), for the characters I was heavily inspired by this, and for the colors I was 100% inspired from Cult of The Lamb's title screen.

As you can see, it's a combination of all these interesting stuff, but I added my own flavors/preferences into the mix (Persona's Stylish UI, Hyper Light Drifter's colors, etc). I'm 100% planning to share a bit more detail about the process of designing this game if you're interested! (currently creating a devlog right now, planning to publish it to my YouTube Channel in the coming months, check it out if you're interested :D)

Art is defo quite a long journey & it's incredibly subjective, there's no right or wrong way to do things, so take your time & enjoy the process ✨!

P.S. I just saw your previous games & your twitter btw (you're making VR worlds! that's incredibly AWESOME!!) I think you're doing great, keep going!! I personally just got a Quest 1 a few months ago & I'm having a blast trying out VR stuff XD, this medium defo has a lot of potential so keep creating stuff! Cheers ;)

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Puppet192 days ago(+1)

Oh! Thanks for the in-depth reply!

Yep, VR is why I got into game dev in the first place! I feel like I would’ve learned a lot more by now if I didn’t. Building things for VR is a lot more time consuming and there are less resources to draw inspiration from. But hey, I’m not giving up that easily lol I definitely want to learn as much as I can.

Not to mention, I started doing this whole game dev thing a bit late. So I definitely share your sentiment. I’m on the older side now and some younger people are just waaay to talented… I always tell myself that there are things that only I can do that people who are super talented cannot or won’t do. So that’s what I focus on!

I tend to be practical, but I think that’s why I’m having issues with art. The way my brain works is: If I spent my time on something, it better be useful and worth it. But often, I find art is the opposite and more about wasting your time until you get good results. It seems like it’s better to do a ton of things and then remove what doesn’t work, even if it feels like a waste. I definitely have to get over that more.

Your inspirations are all very interesting, especially that “Choose your deity” song, that’s sick looking and I’ll definitely put it somewhere as refernce myself.

My brain still gets confused about how you managed to actually combine everything in such a way though. I do think it’s all about experimentation and understanding what you like. I feel like that’s another thing I have trouble with. I need to make a lot of cringe and bad things to get to where I want to be, but it’s rough. There is a lot of hesitance on my side that I need to work on.

I do think that you are on the right track with just doing your thing, especially making that youtube video will probably be useful to yourself and other people. It’s how I got to the small successes that I had in the past, whenever I could just let go and do things.

Well, either way, that would be it from me. The last thing I’m curious about: Is skillshare actually worth it? I saw it advertised a lot, but my immediate reaction is that it’s not useful because of how much money they put into marketing. Maybe I should check it sometime.

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IDKBOX192 days ago(+1)

It definitely takes time to get good at something, especially art! (it took me like... idk how long but several years to get good at drawing... but even so some people are just talented no matter what), sometimes it's better to just let go the feeling of failure & just think the journey as an experiment, if it fails well... try again! If it lands, keep going, you got something right! (I guess it's similar to this game, it's a mish-mash of inspirations that works together, but some of it doesn't so there's still room to tweak/edit stuff). Your style is never final btw! it's always evolving, even if you don't even notice it!

Combining things is 100% dependent your own preferences, I personally keep a note of stories & game ideas that I want to tell on Notion. It syncs to all of your devices, so I'll just quickly jot down inspirations whenever they struck, then I'll just store them until I need them, in which I'll browse through them until I find something that I particularly like & fits the style I'm going for.

Keep in mind, most of it is... not great/quite cringe XD but those are the stories/game ideas that I want to read/play but... nobody is making them!!! We're creators, we can make things happen. Sometimes I forgot about that & I'm just waiting for something that will never come, so I'm taking things on my own hands!

Also yeah for the YouTube video part, Thank you for the words of encouragement! The goal of it is mostly just an outlet for me to have fun & share my stories, it's not about making it big or become famous & earn money from it (if that happens I'm 100% not complaining XD). I'm trying to give myself room to fail so it's alright for me to experiment with wierd new wacky video ideas/editing style ;)

For skillshare... it depends... there's some courses that I really liked on skillshare but most of the time I prefer learning from YouTube videos. Skillshare is pretty great for beginners (it's great to learn when everything's structured neatly) but for more intermediate/advanced users they're not that great in my opinion (some advanced topics & most unity tutorials aren't even on the platform!). It doesn't hurt to try it out though, I'm using a 2 month free trial right now to learn Blender & Procreate Dreams, defo planning to create 3D games (and maybe perhaps VR games too in the future, who knows!) so it's quite a nice foundation to learn stuff I'm new at.

The promo code is DREAMBIG btw if you want to try it out (It's from a collaboration between Procreate Dreams & Skillshare)

Seriously good luck on your journey, please share more about it whenever you have the time to do so, (followed your twitter so I'll be seeing your journey there) Cheers! ;)

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Puppet191 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

I do something similar, but more for good/feasable ideas that I collect in a special trello. I have been doing something similar with art over the last months, but yeah, that’s something I only recently started doing more. I’m definitely a bit impatient because being older and forced to make money and stuff, you know? lol But yeah, you learn stuff each step you take, worst thing you can do is to stop for too long. You need to keep going and trying etc.

You definitely seem to have figured it out, keep doing your thing!

And yeah, that’s what I thought about skillshare. I think I’ll skip on it for now, I have a hard time keeping up with gaining more info vs doing my projects right now.

Thanks for the follow! Honestly, I barely use twitter currently. Before, I used it as a way to get out of my head and fight perfectionism. But I have been getting some success with my projects recently, so that’s what I’ve been focusing on. Most of my followers I got passively through that lol, I feel kinda bad for not being active, but I’m doing my best. Just to illustrate how bad I’m with it, I didn’t even know I had 9 followers here on itch.

My main issue is usually that I don’t want to post things that won’t connect with people or are useful to them. But I think you can see a common thread here lol, I’m still bad at the whole perfectionism thing. I’ll have to work some more on that.

Oh well, thanks for the encouraging words! And good luck you to, but I’m sure you won’t need it ;)

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