Beginner GameDev Mistakes - Ep 1
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 มิ.ย. 2024
- As always, game development and design has no real "rules". There are exceptions to everything. But this series seeks to provide a broad, general and hopefully helpful lens for new developers. Including a series of "mistakes", bad habits and pitfalls I see countless developers run into with their games that they might not be thinking about. In this video we look at inconsistent / incoherent graphics and visuals. How it happens, why it's a problem and how to prevent it.
▶ Edited by Vossel: / vossel
▶ Support my work: / shaunjs
I mostly make devlog videos about my projects and tutorial videos for GameMaker. If that interests you it would make me super happy if you would subscribe and stick around.
![แฟนแนวใด๋ - ยูริ โตเกียวมิวสิค [OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4_XVMuhhbsU/mqdefault.jpg)
What mistakes do you think are commonly made by new developers? What typically separates someone's first game, from someone's one hundredth game?
Beginners suck at making organized stuff.. usually
Polish is so important, and is often overlooked by developers just starting on their first game. By the time someone has made an entire catalogue of games, they usually know how to polish up their game.
I think it'd be worth making a video on level pacing, particularly avoiding making levels too large or too empty
Not having a tutorial. Having someone throw me a txt with 10 different keys to remember without even opening the game just kills my willingness to play the game.
lack of audio or just poor audio choices
and I think this goes beyond graphics too... consistency in the lore/story, consistency in the mechanics, etc... is all important too I think.
This even goes beyond gamedev
@@shawermusThis even goes beyond life
I imagine lore/story can have room for flexibility for the sake of a good experience moment to moment. But yeah inconsistent mechanics can just be frustrating.
Tell that to from soft and it's fanboys. Every single conversation with an npc is like talking to mannequin that barely moves, doesn't even have a decent lip sync, and all they say is a lot of nonsense. Game of the year, best story ever they say.
@@JesusProtects Sounds pretty consistent? I mean you're free to dislike FromSoft games for whatever reasons, but the fact your complaint is "every single NPC follows these design principles" suggests that inconsistent game design is not one of them.
I started my game with one completed, fullcolor sprite before i'd made any other sprites. It wasn't until i started actually having movement mechanics that i realized "hey, this artwork would read terribly on a lot of backgrounds and it's time consuming to make" so i started doodling all my animations instead. The simple doodles turned out to be more charming than the rendered sprite. Professional artists can easily make the mistake of going overboard early on, is what I'm saying.
oh this is me hands down. Working out the balance is a constant thing to make sure I get something half decent that doesn't eat up time.
I think that's the mistake that gets a lot of us, we start making "finished" assets way WAY too early because we want to see what the game is gonna look like. Using placeholders for as long as you reasonably can is the way to go in most cases.
Oh this is awesome because you present a problem, and offer SOLUTIONS to them - most people just tell you what you SHOULDN'T do! Thank you for this series, i'm excited to see where it goes :)
I've been following your channel for years, and had a game of mine in Feedback Friday a while ago. I vividly remember your main critique being that my art was super inconsistent, both from the other art in the game, and in relation to my game's design. I've never had such simple advice hurt me so much, but also be so intensely important to my future in creating things than that. Like, I had felt like I had worked really hard on the art, and I had been making art and games for like 6 years at that point, so I felt like it was a failure on ME, but it was very correct advice to give. And even in the short amount of time since that Feedback Friday, I've watched my projects get better simply from just having a more consistent design language.
This is ABSOLUTELY a skill that all creatives need to put the time and effort into, even outside of game development and drawing. And it's importance on your piece of art as a whole SERIOUSLY can not be overstated. And it goes so much far beyond just making the game simply look better. I hope this series goes far, because having this advice like this when I started would have made such a MASSIVE difference for me, and it hopefully will for all the new developers watching your channel.
Being able to take positive criticism is probably *the* most important skill and artist can have. That alone sets you above so many others.
I always phrase "just because it should doesn't mean it always should" as "you need to know what the rules are so that you can decide how to break them."
Yeah, generally, the only hard & fast rule in any creative endeavor is there _are_ no hard & fast rules. Everything is negotiable if you know what you're doing and you're prepared to deal with the consequences... but you need to know what those consequences are. Those guidelines exist for a reason and when you thumb your nose at them, you're giving something up, so it's helpful to know what potential minefields you may be stepping into. But often the pros far outweigh the cons.
By the same token, you also need to know what you're _gaining_ as well. Following a "rule" because someone told you to or because you're "supposed to" has got to be one of the _worst_ reasons to do anything. It's important to know why the rule exists and what it's trying to accomplish.
You see this all the time with things like "Show, don't tell!" or "he and I" which people were corrected on at some point but never told how and why those rules applied in that specific case, so even if it was the correct advice at the time, they just start to apply it to everything, even when it's entirely the _wrong_ thing to do.
I like your version better.
I've heard something similar to the latter when discussing music and music theory
This is no joke! I spent at least a month of development time focused on finding, in particular, an environment art style that worked for my game. Some of the experiments were truly heinous, but it really is necessary to play and try things. It develops your art skills and, crucially, your eye.
4:30 wasn't explicitly said but customizing asset packs can also work wonders! Inscription is a great example of that
5:20 also worth noting Thomas Was Alone has visual effects do a lot of heavy lifting to make the minimalist assets look better, 3d games especially benefit a ton from filters/shaders but they can also enhance 2d games
Another thing you can do is make mock ups. You just take all your assets in an art program and put them all together, to create what would look like a screenshot of your game. This is helpful not just to make sure the art is consistent and works together, but also this is where you can see what the overall feeling of your game will be visually.
Fantastic simple explanation of what is a topic that could be a series of tutorial all on it's own. Well done! Glad to know this exists for people!
You're like, the chillest game development youtuber ever. There's something so warm and empathetic about the way you explain things which really helps with that feeling of shame that may often come with being new at something.
0:34 I greatly appreciate this sentiment here. I find a lot of beginners materials I've seen over the years get a bit too needlessly antagonistic and rigid right off the bat.
I already knew this cause "asset flipping" was a major issue in the indie space a few years back. But I appreciate how you show it off, calmly explain it and yet still have this very nuanced opening, so I look forward to your next installment.
While some asset flips are blatant (just buying an asset pack and making a whole "game" out of a basic asset pack that had nothing done to it) and are/were a problem, I do think there's too much stigma behind using assets from asset stores. I also hate the stigma behind some engines like RPGMaker. You CAN make awesome games with "simple" engines like RPGMaker, just look at OMORI. Just over 52,000 reviews and a 97% positive rating says that yes, RPGMaker games can be awesome.
@@Dhalin I don't disagree with you. I was largely noting while I knew the subject matter of the importance of artistic cohesion I appreciated the approach to teaching it and the idea in the time stamped part.
I have nothing against RPG Maker, never tried making anything with it but played plenty of good games made with it... the classics of the medium were built with very limited systems and some of the worst games in recent memory are on strong engines. The tools you have will not inherently make a thing good or bad, that's on the craftsman's skill and effort.
Nice video! A few specific points that might be helpful for people--
1. Another point of consistency that I see people struggle with a lot is the perspective of an asset. For example, in a lot of top down games (think Pokemon), the assets are 'tilted' so you are viewing them almost from a side angle. If you're going to do that, do it with everything! Make sure you understand what 'angle' the camera is at in your 2D game, and keep it consistent.
2. If you want to make multiple scaled versions of an enemy with consistent pixel size, it's often easier to start with the biggest size, and scale down. This way, you don't have to entirely redraw everything every step of the way, just spend some time cleaning things up. Often, what I'll do is make the smallest version FIRST, just to make sure it reads at the small scale, then go straight to the biggest version, and any in betweens are just the big version scaled down.
3. Shaun is totally right! Avoid asset packs!! It doesn't matter how bad your art is. If you draw it yourself, your game will have a unique look. Beyond just the art style, that goes for the content too-- I've played a million games with knights and wizards and goblins and skeletons. If you're inventing a new fictional race called a 'drifter' that I've never seen anything like before, regardless of the art's quality, it'll still be way more memorable than the best drawn typical tolkienic fantasy. Not to mention-- I used to suck at art once too-- pushing yourself is the only way to improve!
These are some good advice man I hope you keep making videos like this in the future.
Can't wait to see the rest of the series!
yo this is amazing i want more episodes! nah for real this is great keep up the good work
Thank you very much for this tutorial Shaun! Even though my art teacher was talking about this in class, I probably would have still made this mistake. Can't wait for the full series!
This was an excellent topic to start this series off on, cant wait to see how this series evolves over time.
As a 3D Character artist myself, for those of you who are struggling with this issue, I find that keeping an asset that closely resembles the style you are going for close by is one way of maintaining visual consistency when designing or choosing new assets. In the same way that all artists need references, keep your intended visual style in your mind's eye for as long as possible till you can tell off the cuff if something fits your unique aesthetic.
I think this is very good advice. And moreover you can make an entire series on "beginners mistakes".
As a graphic artist who barely can code I feel on the other side of the story. I never made the mistakes that you describe, but in the other hand I made a few mistakes that you probably will never make (related to coding or game design). That is what I would love to see more videos like this.
Digging into mistakes (with the clear caveat that rules can be broken) is an excellent series idea I want to see more of.
On-point, no-nonsense super useful content, subscribed instantly. Thank you very much for this video.
i really appreciate the point made about making your own art. i wouldnt say that i cant draw but my art style isnt necessarily what i would like my game to look like and sometimes i just take other ppl's assets but it ends up not being consistent enough.
This is a great idea for a series. Can't wait to hear what else you have to say.
Epic! Thanks for this, looking at diving back into GMS after a break for about a year.
Fantastic video! I don't think I'm a beginner anymore but it's still helpful to me.
Great video! Resizing enemies is something I tend to do quite often, and I don't think it breaks the aesthetic at all. In the end I believe it all goes down to what the developer wants to do, but as you mentioned, they first need to know consistency can be an issue.
For a future episode, I definitely reccommend talking about a game's scope and preproduction. Most beginner devs (myself included) wanted to make a really big and extense game as their first, and it doesn't usually end well!
Yeah, I hate how a lot of game devs think things like crafting, trading, and branching dialogue paths are mandatory in games. And when they try to add these features, a lot of times they end up barebones or lacking and it's annoying. A great example? Bloodstained. I loved me some Symphony of the Night back in the day, and Bloodstained is probably the closest thing we'll ever see to a re-release of SOTN or a game similar to it, as Konami only cares about pachinko machines and phone games nowadays. But, Bloodstained as much as I enjoy its gameplay, I find to be somewhat annoying. The difficulty was ramped way up, and the game assumes you are engaging with its more annoying grindy aspects, like the food sidequests that are just simply annoying. I didn't grab an SOTN-like game to engage in its barebones crafting and item collecting games, nor did I ever play SOTN and go "gee, you know what I wish this game had? farming enemies for materials to craft items for permanent buffs!" ..
Good job! You nailed it my man! I'd love to see you make a video about beginners that force themselves to work on a game even though they lost interest/don't enjoy doing it
Great video! Can't wait for more
This is fantastic advice, and something I still need to work on haha.
Consistency in graphics is one of the earliest things I was taught in Game Design school. Now I knew it was important already, I will admit. But the point is that it is something often taught very early in Game Design, so I totally agree. Even such a simple thing like picking a consistent colour pallet can do wonders.
I love this series already :). I will book mark it and post it every time I see someone wants feedback on their artwork and has this issue.
Thanks for this video, Shaun, and cheers to the series! I like to think about the less obvious things when developing games, but it's always nice to refresh on mistakes that I may be making. As always, you're a great help to the game development community.
Recommendation: Put the topic of the video is about in the title of these videos. It would be nice to know what beginner mistake you will be covering.
At least with pixel art, the use of assets at various resolutions is generally referred to as "Mixeled Art" (no, I don't know who coined the term, I just remember that I know that). Mixeling isn't inherently bad as long as, as Shaun put it, the art is consistent. It's usually okay to use different pixel sizes as long as they exist on their own plane and context like a different pixel size for the background if it's further back or you are using a small size for the UI so text is more readable. A game that does this is Into The Breach (and their other game FTL to some extent), which doesn't look bad because it is used consistently depending on whether it's the game board or it's the UI/Map.
It almost universally looks bad unless its a deliberately chaotic scene, or the aesthetic is minimalistic, or its used for things like UI elements. Doing it between different background layers because you can always looks exceptionally amatuerish and terrible.
As a solo dev who lack artistic talent, doesn't have artist friends to help, can't afford freelancers, and relies on assets (and in the past, sprite rips from other games), it's nice hearing that just 'trying' to make everything match up is half the battle alone, I've tried to atleast keep a semi-constant style in the current project I'm working on and that the fact that I look at an asset and I'm like "no that'll look very out of place" is nice to know it's a good start.
That being said, I've also tried working around for story/plot reasons why things look the way they do at times if they look somewhat inconstant and trying to reinforce it with a reason.
Good video!
I’m planning on redoing my first game due to how much I’ve learned about gamemaker, but also to fix the varying pixel densities. I’m looking forward to seeing more in this series!
Great video as always!
A perfect example of this is West of Loathing. The game is stick figures! And it all works very well.
I have unfortunately have the inverse problem, I am an artist first but a fledgling (and struggling) programmer.
Whoa I did not realize this was you until now hearing your voice, didn't expect the new profile picture.
Artistic consistency is something I try to help a lot of people with, especially with pixel art.
I'm saving these into a playlist to refer back to and refresh anything I might-or-could end up forgetting.
I don't have anything to make videogames right now but once I can I have myself plans to do game development, I have some form of artistic ability, looking my profile pic for reference, so my bad art will look different from a non-artistic devs bad art.
Great points that I've tried desperately to explain to many of me l my peers over time, and they just don't get it sometimes. Good job explaining it.
Hello Shaun, first of all, your content is excellent. Your videos have been really helpful to me. I'm currently working on my first game, and I must say, it has been quite challenging. In response to your question, I believe the most difficult aspect, at least for me as a beginner, was choosing the game idea and mechanics. Coming from playing Atari games to modern ones, the first thing that came to mind was creating a AAA game where my character could do everything and more than I could imagine. However, that led to a problem because, as beginners, we don't know much about the complexities of game programming yet.
Then, there's the decision of choosing the game genre and mechanics to implement, as well as setting limits. In my opinion, if you decide to implement only one mechanic, you need to polish it to the point where it feels incredibly well-executed, just like you achieved in your game, Poky Poke, which is beautiful.
I hear people sometimes complain about variable jumping when it isn't necessary, so thinking about game identity and fine-tuning what is and isn't necessary in a game is also a good thing to think about I believe. I know sometimes I make the mistake of trying to include lots of cool ideas that just aren't relevant to the core idea of the game.
Keeping towards a more minimalist design do help. Have a reason for whatever you add. And do experiment with removing elements.
(Though sometimes adding a pointless ability to jump can actually make the game better. But again, you add it for a reason. It can work as a way to express yourself in a game for example and give an illusion of freedom, even when it actually does not give you extra mobility. This is pretty much why jumping is in the game Smite. It was intentionally not added at the start as it had no function. Then added in later since they discover it indeed had a function, just not the one you first expect.)
In my opinion Thomas was Alone doesn't look as good as it does because of its pixel art, but because of how masterfully it's lighting system is designed.
Shaun, much respect, but I actually think this isn't the best starting place for a beginner dev. Art is the polish on top of a game, and most people's first games aren't about polish. They're about getting it DONE. In fact, worrying about art is what stopped me from developing so many times.
With that said, I agree with the spirit of your argument - consistency is more important than quality. But even then, if you put an MSPaint Grover overlaid on a stock image of people eating salad, that's fine for your first game!
For me, every small game has been a piece of learning. One was for physics. One was for level design. And I think my next one will be art.
Compare it to a bike. Peddling backwards is a mistake. Wobbling? That's just part of learning to ride the bike. Inconsistent art is the wobble. Worry about peddling first.
Hey Shaun, Thanks for staring this series. Please consider modifying the text in your videos so that it doesn't blink. Even more challenging is right at the beginning, where the words come one or two at a time, and spend much more time moving, and fading in and out than sitting still. Looking forward to your series!
I'd also add asset packs are great for placeholder and just prototyping stuff up well. Also if you like an asset pack and you can't draw, there's little things you can do to make the asset fit such as recolouring or decolouring (saturation) as well as adding or removing outlines.
Once you know what your art rules are for the game you can then apply them to other assets and create derivative works and better integrate those assets you've chosen. Saying that, it's not an easy skill and takes practice.
Great examples. One visual inconsistency that always sticks out to me is high-fidelity particle effect or sprite transformation in a low-res pixel art game. Essentially procedural animations and effects sometimes end up at a higher resolution than the sprites.
definitely over planning has to be one of the problem
i did overplanned and it wasted my time since i wasn’t experienced enough to follow just as planned
things get different and i definitely learn something new during the development and found and realize a solution better than planned one
it only wasted my time but i can see this might be frustrating someone
please just try trials and errors and actually *try to do it and fix it properly* you’ll learn a lot that you needed before you actually try to make a properly planned project
As someone working on their first game, this seems like something I had in my head, but probably would have screwed up on. Thank you:)
Nice video, I would like to see more videos like this (I am a beginner and want to stomp out any mistakes that could follow me through my career)
Inscryption is a good example of managing to find the correct asset pacts that mix together.
Thanks for the video :)
a true legend!
This is a really good point. I kinda was starting to think the same thing... lo-fi art doesn't always look bad; actually it often looks cool and fun... but inconsistent art looks super bad!
as the game maker jam is gonna start soon very useful
thank u shaun, u own
1:52 I don't think inconsistent art or inconsistent visuals are necessarily bad. Just look at Dave the Diver, for example. It's a massively successful game with more than 40,000 reviews on steam, and it's a mix between 3D perspective art and 2D orthographic pixel art. There are even some 3D models in the game (cough cough the bosses and half of the environment) which just have pixel textures slapped onto them, but they still look like 3D models. Good visuals are important, but they won't fix an unfun game. That's why we, as game developers, focus on making the gameplay fun during the prototyping phase instead of focusing on the art. Prototypes should be ugly but fun. Of course, inconsistent art or visuals done by beginners due to their inexperience is almost always a mistake and doesn't look right. But when done right, it can actually look pretty good.
Where consistency REALLY matters is the story. The story is the backbone of the entire game, because game development is just a form of storytelling. Like writing books or filming movies. It all revolves around the story.
So I'm almost a complete beginner, going through unity's own learning courses mostly just for fun. I don't have my own fleshed out idea but I know if I do create a full game, it's 100% going to be inspired by TWA. I've spent some time outside of tutorials on my own 2D project mainly to experiment, perhaps build some game mechanics, but so far my main issue is actually that I get sidetracked by trying to make it LOOK good, or look the way I want it to and I end up hyper-focusing on that rather than actually making the game... For example, like I said it will be inspired by TWA, one of the first things I did after starting the project was try to figure out how he did those shadows. This landed me in a rabbit hole of explanations and tutorials that I simply could never understand or replicate without learning a lot more.
About 1. Inconsistent Art, what personnaly annoys me is incosistentcy in SHADOWS in the game. I often see 2D top down games where some objects have shadows and some not and for me personally its stupid. It takes away sth. If you have shadows then EVERY object should have shadows. I often comment that on some developer channels and they never reacted on that :-(
It should be highlighted that new developers should not focus on this TOO much. The worst thing you can do is put in too much effort on art when you should be focused on quickly testing game concepts to see if they are fun. Making everything fit together in this way is HARD and a lot of developers leave it till much later in the process - placeholders are fine. In fact perhaps this video should encourage one to spend less time on art than they would otherwise, knowing it will likely be wasted without first knowing what most of the stuff jn the game even is.
All good points. I know you were not bashing asset packs, but you could point out that asset packs are great to prototype with.
For the art, and dev art is perfectly ok, it is. If you can stomach making art.
This could be just me, but I just cannot get excited about drawing art for my game.
I don't like eating mushrooms. I have tried mushrooms in many many dishes, and every time, I do not like them. And that is ok
I don't like drawing. I have tried many styles and many programs, I don't like drawing art. AND THAT IS OK.
Dawning drains my productivity energy exponentially faster than writing code.
But this isn't about just art. It could be anything, Art, code, music, UI, Code, Marketing, Etc...
The key is to understand it, and take steps to mitigate or circumvent that drain, to prevent burnout.....I have gone off on a tangent...
Great video!
I remember unconsciously doing this when I was foolimg around with game maker in college. Trying to make sure that even though I was using other assets that they were all consistent with everything in the game.
Great advice! I've found in my own work that a 'patchwork' kind of look that combines many visual styles/real photos intentionally can have a kind of amateur charm, especially for certain types of games. (Like WarioWare!) Still, the more I've transitioned into making my own assets that match the existing ones, the happier I've been with the visuals.
5:15 omg I love simple black and white blob and friend
When I was younger and learning I used to just slap things together I found on google and draw things I couldn't find.
This made my games look horrendous and limited my games artstyle.
Now I stick to more simplistic pixel art and my games look significantly better.
I'm a developer who makes games whose plots resemble that of film. I think you should do a video on mistakes that indie devs make when writing narratives for their games.
4:18 if you're going to have multiple sizes of an enemy, you should start with the largest and scale down.
Generally though. consistency is something you'd address with a polish pass near the end of production.
> Because, when I say mistakes, obviously game design is an art. There are no real mistakes and there are exception to every rule.
Basically these are guidelines, not rules.
But I would propose ONE RULE to actually stick to: Understand the guidelines - or in lieu of guidelines, understand what is common/best practice and why - before you decide to go against the grain.
You can break as many guidelines as you want - as long as you do so knowingly and intentionally, and are aware of the challenges that will cause (like loosing out on player familiarity, etc.).
But whenever you break with best/common practices unknowingly, unintentionally, unaware of the ramifications - in most cases that will be an actual, real mistake.
As a player - the broken consistency example looks waaaay better.
I thought I was doing a pretty good job at making my first game.
Then game maker made an update and BAM
289 errors
yeahh, I wouldnt recommend updating gamemaker in the middle of making a large project
@@Pika782 it's isn't large. It's my first game :/
@@michaelafton2307 even so
Yes, thank you
Incosistent graphics, in a community of mine we call this "clashing styles". We referred to it when people mixed Super Mario Bros 1, 2 and 3 stuff willy-nilly - of course you can make it work, and the 3 games don't all have the same content, but try to favor one whole game's style over mixing everything at the same time.
It's specially jarring when you have things like a snow level set on the overworld with random lava pools, something that unless you manage to execute well (because you're going for unique styles of levels), will most likely look bad.
consistent graphics. i cannot stress enough how important this is when trying to create visuals that are aesthetically pleasing. some people have good attention to detail for this. whilst others can't wrap their head around it.
heck yeah!!!
I think another big issue new game devs have is "I wanna make the next GTA!" Or Skyrim or a huge MMORPG which will revolutionize the industry...
I mean, it is easy to fall into this trap, when you never really worked with engines before, but you quickly find out and just smashing asset packs together won't give you a good game. It is a learning process and i would always advise starting with something smaller and simpler. If you have no experience at all, i would even recommend cloning a simple game by rebuilding it, so you get used too how the engine works. Like make your own little mario, tetris or something. Simple simple stuff.
Then when you got experience, you probably by now also have a proper game idea which you probably can actually do.
What is the name of the game at 0:30 ? It looks sick!
as a longtime pixel art drawer, i made not be the best at it, but i have strong feelings about inconsistent resolutions and rotated pixels. it looks so amateurish and even you example with matching assets, the characters were double the resolution and it was composited at the window resolution rather than pixel resolution. but big pixels still aligned could be used to convey depth and stuff being out of focus, if it was drawn well (and especially if it had in focus versions and you can move between different 2d planes and show that it’s out of focus). but 99.999% of the time it’s that way because they’re inexperienced (whether first game or not).
Nice!
I'm surprised no one mentioned it yet, the importance of a prototype then an MVP
I've seen devs throwing themselves at projects without careful planning, without a proper prototype, without first making an MVP to show
They just "wing it" which is bad
I'm no expert in the field but if i don't use at least 3-4 A4 papers and a three days walk / plan kinda thing, I won't feel comfortable tackling the project
Hey you might wanna work on your audio Equalization for your vocals, it's clipping in such a way that monitors and TV screen speakers (so basically the most basic speakers that people use) have a little bit of trouble with. It seems to be specifically the lowest frequencies in your voice but I could be wrong. Just mess around with it in whatever video editor you use. (I typically use Da Vinci Resolve because its free and has a decent amount of tools to use straight out of the box like an equalizer for audio)
This is the hardest thing to explain to my team, they just want to use asset packs to speed up production but I have to constantly remind them that consistency is key.
TLDR: if your game looks bad it won't look good
See, this person gets it
consistency is key in real life too
Hearing "game design is an art" said so factually brings me joy, because I've had heated conversations with people who won't recognize game development as an art form.
Inconsistent visuals bug me a lot but I am also not a fan of the conflicting "mess" approach either. Sometimes that gets worked out (as noted in the video) but sometimes it carries on... Like, devs throwing all kinds of fancy effects and dynamic lighting on pixel art hurts my brain. 💀
I could imagine a situation where you intentionally break this rule, like a fish out of water narrative or a "this thing shouldn't be here" moment, which can be used for jokes and more serious stories.
Again, it should fit themetically with the rest of your game.
Most games I notice that struggle with graphical consistency or even gameplay consistency heavily use asset packs. Asset packs are great if art is just not your thing, but not just any asset pack works.
What is that platformer with the spear? It looks very, very fun!
That's my game, PokeyPoke!
Ok before getting into the video, what is this background game! Spear jumping is a feature i didnt know i needed until now
I absolutely hate doing the artwork part of game development. But for my first game, it was important that I did all of the artwork myself. And yeah, the number one complaint was the artwork. But the game still has a bunch of positive feedback, and I don't think that would have happened if I had just gone with pre-made assets.
What about scaling down?
Like making all your sprites bigger than anticipated then resizing down.
Does that work since you're not stretching it per se?
Not if it's pixel art, generally. Unless it's drawn at a 1:1 pixel "size" then it will resize to the same resolution but you'll still need to clean up the resize manually
While I'm a new developer, I know this from graphic design classes. Though it can be hard to avoid. For one game, I'm making it all with free asset packs, and I'm hoping I can use a shader/renderer thingy to fix it. With some others, I'm using magicavoxel, and the first thing I did was design the design grid.
This can matter to me if it's particularly jarring, but it often won't be. It's definitely not something to be stressing over as a new developer, especially if you aren't trying to sell your work (at least for more than a few bucks)... especially since you probably don't have a competent artist who can do your design work. Keep an eye to it, but don't buy the idea everything has to be consistent.
I play a lot of indie games. I've experienced a lot of jank. Conflicting asset aesthetics is almost never what takes me out of a game, and consistent assets have never saved a game that had other problems.
If I had to point to any singular thing most likely to ruin the experience of your game it's bad controls, and they're a very common problem for indie devs.
I agree with asset packs are a problem. Its an easy n00b trap falling into it then none of your game actually matches but also you may find other games with the same art which also looks really bad unless its purely a learning project
As a guy who strongly believes in consistency, I think I'll do just fine.
4:40 consistently bad art (on purpose or not) in a game is quite charming to me
Can someone pls help me i made a running animation oit of 12 images and when I code it I just picks the first frame as the running animation
Hard agree on all of this. I'm a fairly new programmer who "can't draw" and in my game projects I'm mostly relying on asset packs and such. I know I'm not achieving a consistent visual style but still working on how to fix it.
Before watching - some I've noticed from my own work,
-difficulty != fun
-go small but deep
-sound design is important
-perfection is impossible, just ask if it breaks emerson.
I want to see a game exclusively built out of things that youtubers have told us not to do lol