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Hey guys, I'm a newer gamedev who has always been bad at art. Thus most of my newer creations are pixel art sprites and various shaders to affect them haha. I mostly used Asesprite white GIMP for the normal mapping. Sometimes if I need tiles or textures I use Substance Designer. But today I bought Spriter Pro, Texture Packer, and Sprite Illuminator and they are really helping out my animation process and automating some of the mundane parts of actually packing sprites. Which led me to these questions! So, what do you use, what are you trying to achieve artistically, and what could be easier?

Cool! What are you using to make the sketches and what are you using that for the eventual character asset too?

I know! And I hope they work out! it would really suck to end up back here after they end of life "their" flash emulator lol

I don't actually have any, if I really need a mobile game my preferred genres are top-down shooters and tower defense games. But what I do is look for people who need apps playtested. I'm fine with catching errors, especially if I don't have to fix them! And I want people to test my games when I post them so I think it's only fair haha

Do you mean C# or JavaScript or when you C# or Java you just meant any Engine/Framework/etc?

I use Unity, I played around in a few other engines but it's what stuck.  I was a dev for 10 years before Unity including C# through SharePoint so learning wasn't any type of problem. I had a really good book that explained the Unity quirks and it helped me learn it. I'd say 3-4 months before I jammed out my first game though even being a coder. Cuz just cuz I code doesn't mean I draw or compose hahahahaha

Hello, My name is Rick! I've been coding for 10 years but only in gamedev maybe 6 months lol at this point. It's nice to meet you too!

And sites like Newgrounds, AlbinoBlackSheep, etc. Losing them all would blow! Maybe someday they'll be run in an emulator in browser lol

Other good flash games were Pico's School, and most of Tom Fulp's other work which allowed him to continue his dream of making animations/games you know? Cool Stuff.

I unfortunately never got to play it and now I'd need to switch browsers haha. But you know what I'm talking about Flash games, some of them, had such a huge impact on the current indie scene!

See I'm more inclined to say that HTML5 might take on some kind of support for it over JS (maybe both :)  ) but you're right but it still won't feel quite the same but I guess it never can again you know? Everyone is a kid once I'm probably just looking at flash through nostalgia glasses.

I made a similar topic on Reddit and got some responses but I wanted to see what my Itch,io friends think. Flash was a classic tool of the old school web and think about the nostalgia you get playing Fred's Adventure, Crush the Castle, or many others. I know animation can be uploaded to Youtube but is it really the same as the character flash had? So What games/shorts are you guys going to miss and might like to be seen redone in new technology (html5 or an engine)?

Out new dev Joey is ready to start work maintaining and fixing up any issues we might have for this jam project!

I was thinking a puzzler or similar for easiest as well just because generally you know straight off the bat that you don't need to be realistic and that definitely helps. Especially if you pick like a game targeted for little children, "Add the number!", you know, that's obviously easy. But in terms of real games targeted to general audiences you may be right with the puzzle platformer!

These are great tips! Thank you so much!

You mean with the enemy path finding? Yeah it can be easy but I think part of the challenge is making it look like the enemies aren't just following A* algorithm paths or whatever, plus custom behavior. I will say it is much easier to design any genre today than it was 10 years ago, that's for sure.

I've asked this question on a few forums but I want to know as much as possible for this skill which eludes me. I can seem to get the basic shapes right but once I need to add detail I can never get the sprite looking like I want. So What do you all do? If I have an idea I try a 16x16 sketch, then try to add detail at 32x32 then if needed go to 64x64 should I just start at 64 you think? Should I block in then save multiple drafts and just keep practicing? How do you guys get detail into your pixel art?

I think everyone here is forgetting the infamous zip bomb. Just because an archive is small doesn't mean it can't contain a lot of content haha. Especially with random generation and such. 

Especially when it needs to be so responsive being able to communicate hundreds of moves a minute and syncing them from at least 2 servers, possible 3 with 2 clients and one central server. Maybe that's why we haven't seen many great RTS games, or at least I think, lately. 

I think that's the real measure of hardness. How hard it is to get the elegance and immersion to represent your genre and still stand out, you know? Like you said a Visual Novel is hard because it requires great story, art, and music, but a roguelike can generally  be forgiven on story and sometimes even art and music if the programming and behaviors are unique enough. So I think it's also subjective I guess lol.

I completely forgot about MMOs and you're right. I think anything with multiplayer and class balancing is up there on the hard scale haha.

I've looked this up before and it's not going to have any influence on my game design in the near future, but maybe some people can share their experience with different genres and help newer game devs such as myself with ideas and planning later on. 

So I guess my question is: What is the hardest genre of game to make (design, art, or programming)?

With a follow up question: What genre of game is the easiest to make?

I've only ever made 3 games, with 1 launching. An arcade style shooter, a platformer, and now I'm building a roguelike. From what I've read and agree with, I would say fighting games are the hardest to make. First, they're a bit harder to put story into, but then also the hitboxes and combinations of buttons you'd have to keep track of would be nuts to make let alone test. I don't think there are as many indie fighting games either, which again makes me think it may either be difficult, or the market is small, though I would definitely buy a good fighting game. As for the easiest genre I would say most arcade games (Not Street Fighter lol) but things like pong, space invaders, etc are some of the easiest to make just because the genres were usually made based off technological limitations. 

What are your thoughts, my dudes?

I'm currently trying to get more involved in the community and give some feedback, until I have a prototype/demo I'm happy to put out for criticism. That said, I'm trying to change up my art style from badly drawn high-res "pixel" art, to actual minimalist good looking pixel art haha. Like right now I drew my main char as a 64x64 and I like him, but his proportions are too off from being too large compared with the natural unrealistic-ness of pixel art. So I'm working on reducing him to a 32x32 sprite!

Remember to play test and have others play it too now that it's so close to production. Then you can figure out what needs done in what order. When I made my game for my first jam I did that and the 2 most popular feedback suggestions were a pause and exit button haha. (Sorry that's not an insult against you I'm sure you're game is great and you did a fantastic job, I more mean it easy to overlook simple things in your own work lol)

I've been around Itch since the last "First game Jam" but I figured I'd introduce myself. My name is Rick and I've been a dev for almost 10 years now but only just started making games. I like gamedev because it lets me make use of my other hobbies, art and music, as well as programming. I entered a game for the Jam. Red and the Golden Orbs, but my next work I want to be a bit bigger, more like a small roguelike like the Binding of Isaac. Like many of you, I'm a hobbyist, right now I have enough free time to commit to gamedev at the moment so I'm moving a bit faster. I don't want to get rich making games, I want to make a game that at least one person plays over and over again and enjoys.

Did you get it working? Were you trying to use an existing project or upload new? 

So, I'll probably update the version momentarily but since I've put it up I've added an exit button, credits, and more sound effects haha! Make sure to check it out! Right now I'm just trying to figure out what else needs done, but over the next few days I'll probably try and get a few people to test it out and see if they notice anything.

Thank you! I've really wanted to finish a game for a while now and it feel so good to have something playable for people even if it's nothing groundbreaking lol

Good luck dude! Sorry about having to leave your house, been there lol. But hopefully you finish! I'm almost done, right now I'm just tweaking all of the little things, but once you get a demo up or further it feels so much better haha

So, I'm not going to be uploading any videos or pictures today, but I'll do one better! Here's the project page where you can download and test out my game! I'm not done yet by any means but I figured for how far it's come I'd like for people to at least be able to play it haha. Project Page

If you play it, let me know what you think! And if you find any bugs, because I know they're in there, or have other feedback, please post it here or to the comments section of my page!

Working from home today, whenever I take a break I've been drawing up new animations for the monsters. So far nightmare's 1, 2, and 3 have all been redone, I'm probably going to leave the fourth and fifth enemies as is since I like how they look. I'll post a video later with the new monsters and the boss fight!

I'm finally  "done" haha. Or I should say, every level, the boss fight, and the title and end screens are completed! I'll probably put it up as a project in the next day or two if anyone wants to play it early lol. But it can be played through multiple times so it definitely seems to be working. There is still a lot I want to do now though, in addition to stuff like finishing the music.

I did get a fourth song written and produced so now I only need like 8 more haha. I also need to add more sound effects and do a bunch more playtesting, but I'm happy to say I can submit something now haha! 

Not much for today but I am working out the boss fight so far and I did a bunch of play testing. I wanted to show off level 5 but I think I'm going to go with this gif of the boss fight. So far it's only the boss, but you jump on him a number of times and he respawns away from you each time, so it should be a bit more challenging than the regular enemies. I plan to add in spawned enemies as well, but one step at a time haha. Here it is: Boss fight

Hey guys, I'm back, didn't get a ton done game wise yesterday. I did get the 5th almost complete and the boss level is taking shape now. I did however get 2 songs out haha. So I'll post screenshots or a gif later but for now here are the tracks for levels 1 and 2. Both are in the same style as the starting village song, just that they both get darker and faster. I switched leads for level 2's track but it's still an old chip lead, I'm just not sure from which system it came from haha.

Here they are! level1    level2

I like it so far! I tried out the demo and it worked completely for me, I got to the end. I did notice that I could jump through from the bottom of platforms in dream mode, is that correct? It would make sense on one hand because it's a dream, but that's the only feedback on the demo I could give haha. The concept seems really awesome and you obviously have the mode switching down which is really cool!

This looks really cool so far! I'm also making a platformer, but in Unity. I tried to use pygame before and I really liked it because Python is my favorite language to code in but I switched to Unity because I think for my first couple games I need the engine to help me out where it can in the development process haha. But I think if I ever made a strategy game it would be with pygame since all my data libraries are in Python. I really like the art so far, the sheep look really good!

Thank you! I assume you built your own physics system for raycasting instead of the base Unity physics? I actually used the Corgi Engine on the asset store because I didn't feel like reimplementing all of that haha. But other than that I made sure to try and keep everything the same scale and made sure the colliders were as tight as possible because I know that if you have a ton of different objects with different scales that will sometimes mess up the raycasting.