I’ve always wanted to make a beautiful game. Beautiful art and the such but never am able to make anything look halfway decent. How exactly can you make beautiful art? How do you guys do it? (By art I of course me the lovely pixel art)
Being a good artist takes a lot of time and practice.
You can’t expect to be a good programmer within a few weeks. Nor can you become a good artist unless you put in the work.
Study other peoples artwork to get inspiration, ideas and to pick up some of their strategies and techniques. By study, I don’t mean to spend an hour looking at pictures… You need to invest a large number of hours into learning how other people do what they do.
Then spend a lot of time practicing. Draw something rough, improve it a bit, improve it again. Eventually you’ll get to the point where you decide it is good, or decide to try something different. I’ve put about 50 solid hours into drawing my little people sprites, they’re still nowhere near finished and I keep changing some part of them slightly every time I look at them. Most art is a process of starting with a base concept and gradually building it up and refining it.
First dream about your character, then use a pen and put it on paper, try and try and try and try to improve it. Then make a photo of it and edit it, giving it colors (colorizing) and removing transparency. It works for me.
If you don’t want to follow the annoying ‘indie’ cliche, don’t use pixel-art.
Be creative for once. It’s not that hard if you put even the tiniest bit of effort into it.
- Jev
I’ve tried making art the “conventional” way, but don’t have the motivation or time to make something decent looking. In my current project, I rely exclusively on procedural generation - one can get pretty far using only sine waves and splines. Not all types of games lend themselves easily to procedural graphics though.
I’ve also had some success using L-System.