This week the development of the game has been focused on making art. Pixelart. While I have a little “hobby” experience drawing, I am far from trained in the skill. Let alone making pixelart, which is a skill in itself. Nevertheless, I’ve landed at a phase in the development of Earth’s Cry that art is necessary.

As with learning any new skill, there is a lot of initial joy in just learning “about it”. In earlier times I remember watching endless videos and reading all kinds of articles about the skill I was trying to learn, but usually bailed when I read a book on the skill I had to learn.

And please don’t get me started on actually trying the skill. Can you imagine picking up an actual instrument or a pencil to really try working at the skill?

All this to say, I have been through this process before and I’d like to think I learned from it. So this time I immediately jumped into Aseprite (I’m not completely clueless about pixelart), and started drawing.

My first attempt was abysmall, but I came in with a goal. It was not to make the final art, but instead to sketch. To get a rough view of what I envisioned. I needed a tile with a tree in the center, a building, some foliage and possibly a monster of some kind.

And surely, one can use a lot of imagination to see that it’s all sort of there.

I decided to try and add more detail and started out with all the various components: a tree, a house, some foliage. And while it sort of was okay, I quickly started to get doubts.

When I tried out some of the experiments in an early prototype, I was a bit hesitant about the MS-Dos style. Or calling my work a style here, might be a bit rich… I was just no super impressed and more than that, I felt it would quickly grow unclear if more were complexity were added to a tile.

My friend who is a much better artist, and I will soon introduce his contribution, suggested to me that in his experience using outlines makes the art much more clear. So I listened.

Two things happened when I started using an outline. The art became much more cartoony, but also much better. I needed to get used to this more funky style, but I also just started to enjoy the work more. It became a bit more lighthearted and I started feeling like I could actually do this.

The confirmation came when I added the art to the prototype. It immediately turned into a game. Something I felt like I wanted to play. And with that feeling I started to feel motivated to continue.

And then my friend pitched in his contribution. His landscape took it to a new level. Especially since it’s animated in the final version. I absolutely love it.

So now the high of having this amazing (to me) result has worn off, it’s now production time. So we need trees. We need trees in various stages of life. We need a lot. I’m just doing my best to crank them out and I’ll worry about the fine details later.

Hours of pixelarting later I am acquiring a new skill. I’m learning how to make pixelart. And this has been mostly through just getting my hands dirty and making a lot of bad art. I realise I still need to make a lot of improvement and I still encounter a lot of situations where I don’t know how to make something look good. Or less awkward.

Just mindlessly throwing more hours at it is not always the best solution in those cases. Reaching for feedback, for study material, for lessons on YouTube, that will definitely end up useful. But for now I’m happy to move along the development of the game.