Art and Games Design

Hey all, just had another little something non-blue related to share. Today’s subject, this comment from TexoGene.

“Hey GYC I've got a question art/games related how did you get so good at characters, game design, etc? I want to make games in the future myself but I'm at a bit of a roadblock on the steps I should take. Do you have any advice for a beginner artist? It would be much appriciated.😄”

Thanks for the question! I decided to make this post just in case anyone else expressed interest in something similar. Now, of, course, take what I say with a grain of salt, as I can only speak from my own experience!

ART

I taught myself to draw, so I’d recommend getting your hands on as much reference material as you can. My go to books are “Mastering Manga with Mark Crilley” and “Stan Lee’s Drawing Superheros” – but really you can pick literally any “how to draw” book and the results will be the same.

Contrary to the titles, these books won’t actually make you a master of Manga or a drawer of superheroes, or anything of the sort – you might notice that while I draw inspiration from manga and anime (have you seen my character’s hair?!!?) I’m not a manga artist. Not even close. What they will teach you, however are the absolute basics of drawing and designing characters, and what you need to get started. From there, you start doodling every day, drawing and changing your characters over and over, and soon enough you’ll find your own style of drawing things. It’s not a fun, nor easy route to take, but results will happen if you give it long enough!

When I started getting serious about art back in 2015, books were the primary, but there’s plenty of Youtube videos now that you can follow along with and learn a great deal from. My personal recommendation is “Telepurte” who is an animator, but has a few minute long videos on how to draw things like eyes and hands that are amazingly helpful when you break them down. Of course, then you have things like “Draw with Jazza” and the like who go into more detail, so follow that rabbit hole to your content!

Final thing to say here is pen and pencil are great, but you want to switch to digital drawing (with a tablet) as soon as you’re comfortable with it. You can tablets for cheap, plus programs like GIMP 2.10 are like free versions of Photoshop and easy enough to learn. Again, plenty of guides on youtube now too!

GAME DESIGN

Always go with RPG Maker for your first project, in my opinion. Our ultimate goal is to transfer over to more powerful game engines like Unity, but you really want to either be a coder OR an artist, NOT BOTH. Obviously, you can do both, but the workload is just insanely overbearing for the bigger engines.

RPG Maker is a much easier engine to deal with, being VERY user friendly even for beginners. It still comes with its own headaches and bugs, but they’re more manageable because you’re not actually coding a game – so you can also focus on the art. MV is the version I’d recommend, as there are tonnes of plugins for it to make your game interesting, but I’m biased because it’s what I’m using! And the entire series are on sale on Steam (or on humble Bundle) frequently, so it’s cheap to pick up.

Then you just play around with what you can do within the program, setting up small dungeons, battles, using different plugins, etc. Until you’re comfortable starting a real project. Thankfully, there are tonnes of helpful guides online, forums, and of course, Youtube channels to help you – best ones being “Echo607” and “SomeRanDev” – who will hold your hand through an entire project.

I’m making the whole process sound super easy tbh. It’s not. Whether you’re an artist or a game maker, or both, it’s going to take time and a lot of it!

So anyway, that’s my TED talk – I don’t think I can even make comments that are less than a hundred words anymore ahaha! Thanks for reading!

I’m going back to drawing all the dirty stuff now, so I’ll see you all Wednesday for updates on the game!!