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...

I started sketching a game for FGL's "week long game jam" , and noticed quite soon that I have a game idea that would need smoke animation. I did not have previous experience how to create one, so it was time for few trials. One of them proved to be useful for me, and here is description how it was done with Construct2 . First of all, I tried different styles of "particles" or objects for a smoke. My target was to create something like volcano-style smoke, meaning that it will appear in certain point and starts ascending slowly to the sky. Simultaneously, this puff of smoke expands and gets thinner (=opacity decreases), and at some point it disappears totally. Just like in the still picture below: I tested couple of options for creating a smoke object, and ended up something like described in the picture below: Somehow, round shapes looked the best, but I tried cloud-like objects also. The background was light blue, so dark colors were better in this...

Yes, I am still alive and kicking, although no blog postings or games released for a while. Sometimes it is a good idea to have a little break and take a closer look what you have done recently. After releasing  Explopool , I have mostly been planning and creating different game prototypes. I've also explored various game development environments and engines to get an idea what kind of tools are available. There are plenty of choices, but I have not yet decided which one to try next for releasing a game. Haxeflixel might be a good candidate, but first I have to get better understanding on it. Stencyl 3.0 came available couple of months ago, and I've been gradually migrating to it. Android support has been the main driver for that, because I really want to go mobile at some point and Stencyl is the most familiar development environment for me currently. Since I am running my game development activities over Linux, it's not always so straightforward to switch to a new 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...