Fledgling Videogame Developer

Most of the negative feedback on our games has been related to the poor quality of graphics and/or animation. I have to admit that these comments are appropriate: Our gamedev "team" currently has no artist at all, and actually all graphics are so far been drawn by me. And I'm really bad at drawing. Anyways, there has been a need for graphics and animation in our games. So I have tried learn to draw at least something using Gimp, Inkscape or Aseprite. Tools itself are not an issue here: there are plenty of tutorials and online manuals available. But even if you could use all tool features perfectly, it does not help a lot if you have no eye for art. I thought at some point that pixel-art would be a solution for me, and I dug out this tutorial:  Pixel Joint forum: Creating Pixel Art . Basically this tutorial was fine and everything was understandable, but I did not have enough perseverance to follow the guidelines. The theory of anti-aliasing and dithering was qu...

Since I am interested to use open-source software for game development, my drawing tools can be found from that category also. Currently, my development work is done on Linux laptop, so it also causes some restrictions for the available software. I started sprite creation with a tool called  Aseprite . It is quite simple and easy-to-use free software for creating sprite sheets. ( edit: Aseprite is nowadays paid software ). There are no complex drawing tools included, but with steady hand and patience you can create almost anything. In my case, the only major problem with Aseprite was the low performance on my Linux laptop if  not started at separate XServer (Run " xinit aseprite -- :1"  command in tty1, or something like that).  I have been using  Gimp  for simple image processing even before starting game development activities. However, I thought it was too complex and difficult to use with multiple windows and confusing menus. But then I "found" t...

The visual appearance is an important part of the video game. Just take a look to the most successful games in any category, and you will notice that very few of them contains low-quality graphics.  I am not saying that fun and interesting game (whatever is the definition for that) cannot be done with simple and even low quality graphics. But well-finished graphics makes it easier to market a game to the players. And don't forget the marketing materials, like thumbnails, screenshots and gameplay videos, just to mention some. Unfortunately, I am not very good in creative drawing and I find that one my biggest obstacles when trying to develop better quality games. I am able to draw straight lines and geometric patterns such as engineer (which I am), and that's quite about it. But when I should draw cartoon-like characters or complex background for a game, then I'm in trouble. I just don't know where to start! And if I get started, I will soon get frustrated and do the...