my name is eros (aka Luna_Midnights). (they/them) i am a newbie game dev, traditional & digital artist, and a writer. i am fond of all things horror and all things artistic :)
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i work mostly solo. i’ve got a few projects to my name, but below is my current pride and joy:
cakewalk
A short, vulnerable, story/psychological horror game about making cake and learning to accept that your friend is not who you thought he was.
hello! ive finally finished my flappy bird like game where you are the milk from blur’s coffee and tv music video!! here is the link so you can play on your browser: https://campanariaa.itch.io/milkys-way-to-heaven
For this request I thought I’d do something different than drawing, maybe a bit of insight into game dev would be more interesting
The thing that strikes me as odd is how much the way people think changes - programmers who aren’t trained artists, when on a tight budget and short time frame, you start asking things like ‘does this look good? no? change it.’ and 'can you see the player model? no? change it’
All this talk about fundamentals and value balance, contrasts, colour palettes, all this stuff gets thrown against the wall - there’s literally no time for that - that’s why it looks unique. You aren’t a AAA studio that can afford to hire someone to plan out perfect shape design and silhouettes. You’re drawing assets as you go and dragging them together in the game engine because your ass needs to focus on trying to make the jump work when you got some random input from an unbranded controller or praying that the code someone uploaded 6 years ago is still compatible enough to work.
You notice how sequels of games usually look like they had some sort of graphical upgrade. It’s cause they’re now no longer making everything from scratch, there’s a workflow and more time can be spent planning the exact look.
Art needs something to sit on - you can’t have game art unless there’s a game. Small teams that can’t afford a dedicated artist? They make it in house for a phenomenon called programmer art.
Anyway that’s neither here nor there, let’s talk about HK (it’s illegal for me to admit that I haven’t played it, so out of fear of assassination) here are my credentials
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(images stolen from SteamDB) Working in 3d - layers
As a digital artist you will be familiar with the concept of layers - organising your line art, flats, background.
Here we’re dealing with something similar - just in a 3d environment
How we break this down is going to be important, in gameplay you need things to be visually easy to read at a glance - HK is fast paced? Either way if someone can’t tell what killed them in the moment, they’re going to be annoyed. “I died because I didn’t dodge the big sword swing” is a lot fairer than “wtf even got me that time”. Souls like games might be a good example to bring up - you die a lot, but you learn how to recognise attacks from visually telegraphing what they’re doing
Chaotic right?
You can’t get this look outside of a game engine - a lot of what you’re seeing is done from within the engine itself. Multiple sprites stacked on one another, but if you looked at it from the perspective of someone who hasn’t seen that working environment before it might look like everything get’s hand drawn (technically yes, but the way they get put into the scene is what makes it look the way it does)
Different elements come into the game in different ways, we want to be able to work out the distinction: When an enemy stomps the ground - particle system that triggers on a cue
To parallax-Ing backgrounds as you move - multiple sprites moving at different speeds
2d animations for the characters - tile set and animation cycles
Multiple layers for the backgrounds - foreground, middle ground, blurred background
Metroidvania Hollow Knight isn’t procedurally generated, due to it’s room like structure it means essentially each room can be treated as it’s own illustration - then splitting up the pieces to be brought over into Unity as assets.
Key part, what’s reusable between screens. The player character, within a biome certain enemies, particle systems, effects like the water, dust
what’s fascinating is the light - this is 2d, your light system in unity won’t have any effect on the sprites themselves, so what, did they make the illusion with a semi transparent sprite or something?
This isn’t the art of a game dev though, this is an artist at work. Lemme check. Ari Gibson, William Pellen, small team, drew all this? Isn’t that inspiring? Oh man makes me want to work harder
Art fundies Each of the zones looks colour coordinated
Even the style huh, the midground is saved for the action, contrasting the detailed backgrounds. The characters have thick outlines and are drawn in this flat cartoony way.
Come to think of it, multiple games do this sort of thing, Terraria comes to mind, Cuphead, ok tbh there’s a lot. Either way, I think they would’ve planned out all of these zones early on to be honest, you don’t really get this level of theming unless you plan to have it in advance
I wonder how many layers there are in the end, it looks like a lot. It’s kind of impressive that someone didn’t get lost just managing the work environment.
I know 3d uses something called normal maps to dictate how light impacts a model, don’t really know that yet, I wonder if there’s some equivalent for 2d… idk that procedural light ramps up technical requirements right, given how many sprites there are in HK that’d likely make it unplayable hm? How fast can I learn blender, I’ll try it at some point
(Parallaxing is parts of the environment moving at different speeds - it gives a cool visual effect. Terraria also blends this with a gradual transition when you switch biome)
Conclusion Where I was going with this, uh, right, if you want to make game art, how you think will need to change depending on the project, how you approach the art will change drastically depending on what you are trying to do. It’s not about the result. It’s how you think about what you’re doing. This focus on getting perfect silhouettes, pixel perfect renders, idk it just feels like the world is missing the point. Make a cool game, the art is what it is, make it better along the way. You can always upgrade the art, but you need fast placeholder art so the devs have at least something to see and work with while they sort out the mechanics.
I’m being naïve about this, but I see so much tunnel visioning on competing to be the world’s best splash artist, but honestly I don’t think many people are actually going to enjoy that process. It’s super impressive yeah, but there’s so many types of art, it’s kind of frustrating reading comments of people saying they feel like a failure cause they can’t do it after drawing for like, a week?
Small team of people, each accelerating in their respective fields, come together and create, Hollow Knight. It’s not a fluke, they planned everything and they worked hard and practiced a tonne. idk, it’s not just some dream, like you can make it real, but you got to work for it. Really work for it.
Just rambling into the void, maybe I should make game assets, hrm
Teammates must work together to defeat end-of-level bosses and solve puzzles across a range of natural-world environments! River Tails: Stronger Together!
Hi there! Just dropping in and sharing some recent screenshots from the game, since I’m happy with how the character expressions/acting are coming along. :) Aleth, Blossom and Aleth are already done, now I’m slowly working my way through the routes of the others!
I can also feel myself coming more to life now that spring has arrived. Have a good one, and take care of yourselves out there! - Dev 🌻
so occasionally, when my physical and/or mental health is bad enough that a Victorian rest cure starts to sound like a good idea, I’ll binge a horrid little Match-3 game with a vaguely 1920s setting.
I don’t pay much attention to the plot of this thing, because it really is beastly, it’s about 25% vaguely defined spyjinks and 75% the most tedious love triangle ever put to pixel, but it follows the general Match 3 structure of having a series of 10-ish levels per ‘page’ that must be completed to reach the next 'page’.
And the thing is, in this game, each of these 'pages’ is another globe-trotting location. There’s no real difference between a level in London, Bangkok, or Tahiti. Normally, it just kind of feels like a vague bit of questionably-appropriate theming for the backgrounds of the level hub pages.
….Unless they decide to, say, send our globe-trotting 1920s English heiress heroine to Leningrad. To go to a museum. For no reason.
I start to have questions. Questions that I’m not sure if anyone on the dev team really thought through. Questions like “hey, are UK/Soviet diplomatic relations even stable enough to allow a random British heiress to traipse about museums and tamper with the artefacts there?”
“Why has no one noticed that this girl is regularly swanning around with UK intelligence agents?”
“Fuck, where is this girl’s handler on either side? Someone from one of the like three Soviet intelligence agencies that existed at this point should be keeping an eye on her?”
It’s a sad state of affairs when this plot would make more sense during the Cold War because they could be trying to convince her to defect, or something.
I’m sure I’ve put way more thought into the geopolitics of this than anyone except maybe, maybe the original writer- but come ON, you can’t just tease me with Soviet spyjinks and then not deliver.
crushing him once again. They were right, the star particles feel a lot better for a bonk-type move.
Core Feature Implemented - *Dialogue!*
Interacting with an NPC while in activation range starts a dialogue string. The player can’t move during dialogue (for the most part), and dialogue can only be started while on the ground.
The main character speaks in images and animations, while NPCs will have a visual signifier - in this case the character’s eyes - on their text boxes so more complex dialogues won’t get confusing as to who is talking. I’d like to use visual cues more often than text-based cues in this project, as a matter of feel.
(Note: Filverswish’s opinions on raisins and the colour purple in this gif are not canon, the text used here is purely for testing. He’s probably okay with raisins tbph.)
Also, if the characters are not facing each other, they will turn to do so once dialogue is activated (unless one is busy or has beef, probably).
As the project goes on I will probably make the text boxes look better or add more bells and whistles (half-done is an indicator telling you whether the current dialogue box is the last one in the string or not). Though, honestly, I like the simplistic speech bubbles for now. We’ll see!
college been taking up my time cause a levels are creeping up but i’ve programmed (basically) all of day 1! woooooooo!
can’t get the bloody poem minigame to work but i’ve got the text for day 1 coded. ui keeps crashing it though I’ll have to figure that out eventually too but technically it can be played in all of its placeholder glory.
I’m really not a character designer and rarely use my own character art as a reference for things (since I am bad at it) but when @sulli-villain finished the 3d model of the slimelings I was like “dang it looks so good” 😭
met with my team yesterday and it went so well??? everybody likes the structure I have going for this script and the tone and dialogue is a hit so far, which feels awesome!
we’re doing it! i’m writing a game! cool to finally see this dream through.
