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Sure you could. You could draw some crap art, plenty of fucking fantastic RPGs have taken this approach in the past and it didn’t hinder them at all. Working with and around your limitations is part of the craft.

I can only speak for myself, but I find projects with visuals that have poor technical quality significantly more impressive than ones with AI art–regardless of how you feel about the financial aspect, in the former case it’s immediately clear that the creator actually gave enough of a shit to try.

Personally, I don’t fight it. If I can’t bring myself to touch something, I do something else for a while. For literal writer’s block, I might spend some time on code or art for parts that are written…or I might pick up a side project for a day or two and come back with fresh ideas.

Forcing yourself to work on a particular creative project can lead to burnout, so I prefer to wait until I’m ready to get back to it. Of course, I have the benefit of my creative projects being a hobby so it’s a lot easier to take breaks.

I’d like to get that RPG of mine finished one of these days :D

One man’s slow descent into madness in the quest for an adequate tileset

Overall, I like it. The one thing that bothers me, at least in that screenshot, is the fact that the furniture at the back of the room isn’t actually flush with the back wall. I’m not sure most people would notice, though.

If your answer is “yes,” then does that mean we should all stop using translation apps and learn every language we want to translate?

Actually, localization is a pretty complex job that requires good understanding of not only language but also cultural context, context within a larger body of work, the nuance that specific words & phrasing can bring…machine translation is not a good tool for this, and while it’s one thing for a player to decide to use it to try and understand a script in a language they don’t speak you really shouldn’t use it to “translate” your work–that’s just lying to your customers.

Yup, seconding this. It’s 100% legal to make a game with the same basic mechanics if you don’t use the same name, textures, specific character designs, etc–all the trademarked & copyrighted bits–but if you do you can expect a Cease & Desist if the game ever gets big.

(also not a lawyer, the above is not legal advice, if you have legal concerns contact a professional to be sure)

If you’re a complete novice, I wouldn’t worry too much. But you could take a look at early arcade games for inspiration–many of these games were very simple (and thus, not too hard for a beginner to implement) and since the medium hadn’t really ‘solidified’ there were lots of concepts and ideas that didn’t stick around. Some of those ideas disappeared because they were shit, mind you, but I reckon there’s still untapped potential to be found.

I’ve done it before and have no qualms doing it if it’s a paid gig. It’s expected that not all jobs are gonna hit your interests, after all.

But if money’s not changing hands, I’m not gonna bother. I’d rather spend that time on projects I’m actually passionate about.

Love the texture on that ’stache!

Agreed! Although I could pick out a few examples from the past the whole latin chanting thing is not actually common overall.

Also, just to tack another note onto your comment:

Serious as a tone can be reinforced in a variety of ways beyond just increasing the intensity of music. While it’s uncommon, some boss fights in games deliberately use a slower, less up-beat tone because it resonates thematically with what’s happening in the narrative. In the right circumstances, an unexpected choice like this can be much more powerful.

I agree about not forming a team with friends, but I would tack a couple of things onto that:

• Doing (short) game jams with friends is actually a very nice way to get into jamming and learn together, since you already know your team-mates well and the project has a very short timeframe
• Likewise, comparing notes / sharing progress casually with friends who are working on other game projects can be (from my experience anyway) a very good source of motivation

As a fellow guy-making-an-RPG, I wish you the best :D I don’t use RPGMaker either so I can’t help with specific advice on that tho.

Jeroen is right that RPGs are a really big undertaking, and that you can’t maintain motivation on such a project forever. But don’t let that discourage you either, take breaks when you start to feel burnt-out and jump back in with a fresh perspective.

It can also help to talk about what you’re working on with friends or other devs, from my experience there’s nothing more motivating that seeing what someone I know has been up to and wanting to share new stuff with them.

Take this with a grain of salt, as I’m just a hobbyist and haven’t done any professional work. But from what I’ve heard from other artists, social media success is not really necessary to be a successful artist unless you want to get all of your work / do all of your advertising from social media. For instance, I know there are a good number of artists who make their money from selling pieces irl rather than online–in that space, being big on social media isn’t gonna be a major boost.

With that said, art is a tough career in general. I know a lot of newer artists who have difficulty finding consistent work. I nevertheless wish you the best of luck!

Definitely feel this, as someone who has a hard time drawing female characters… Sadly I don’t have any examples to post in the thread since I have a bad habit of simply throwing unfinished pieces in the trash if they’re not working out :/

Take this with a very large grain of salt, cuz I haven’t released any of my pixel art assets on itch. But being both a programmer & a pixel artist, here are a few things I’d consider when releasing an asset pack:

• Do the assets have one or more shared palette(s)? If so, including the palette(s) would be very helpful for anyone who has to make alternate versions or edits of the assets.
• If we’re talking sprites rather than tiles, I’d consider including them as both individual textures and as spritesheets. And in the latter case, providing some text or markdown file that serves as an index of where all those sprites are located (ie. separate asset filename, position in the sheet / pixel dimensions) would be especially helpful for programmers
• If you’re shipping the images as RGBA or similar rather than indexed color, make sure the fully-transparent regions are all the same RGB value, and that color isn’t part of the palette. While they’re no longer common, some indexed-color tools still exist and they usually ignore the alpha channel.
• Also consider pre-optimizing the files if applicable, PNGs in particular can be made much smaller while remaining lossless. There are tools you can find that do this for you.

While I have no real need for a rug asset (mostly because I’m a pixel artist myself), I still wanted to chime in and say that these look really nice! Good work and bad pun (my favorite kind of pun)!

Working on trying to nail a particular vibe in my head. Still not quite hitting it, but I’ll keep trying…

It’s a cool challenge, definitely recommend trying it out!

There was a pixel art challenge posted on Mastadon the other day, to recreate one of several photos as a 1-bit piece. I sat down and just kinda zoned out for an hour, and when I woke up this was on the canvas:

For comparison, the original ref is here

Nice! I especially like the astronaut

Wow, that’s one heck of a transformation!

Playing around some environment ideas for my rpg. This first attempt is a little too generic I think, but I’ll get there in a few more tries no doubt!

Itch reads the greater than sign as a quote so you only get one set of whiskers: owo<

Nice! I especially like the rendering on the top-right one

Nice! That cupcake looks tasty :D

I meant to post the hires version of the 2nd as well, but I guess I clicked the wrong file! I guess you can use that to see what resolution the final version will be at :D

I guess these would fit in here. These are some initial planning sketches for a (not game-related) commission I’ve started working on this week:

The final piece will be pixel art, but it certainly faster to lay things out with my tablet. I’ll probably keep using this hybrid approach in future pieces as well.

I didn’t start the thread, but I think it’s ok if it’s the finished version of an earlier sketch post. Especially since folks were looking forward to it!

Looks like some good refinement!

These are great! I love the structures in the second two, even rough they still have a very strong sense of form.

That’s how it goes sometimes! I like it when you start doodling a little and a piece just comes out on its own