Art, as a Developer

  • Created 14 January 2025
  • Updated 14 January 2025

As a developer, learning art has been a struggle. I’m used to approaching tasks in a by-the-book method, and a lot of art in my experience has been “try it and see what works!” which has never sat right with me. I need structure and guidelines, I need consistency, I need to know what’s going wrong so I can guide myself towards the correct way.

Some artists may cringe at my implication that there’s a “correct” way to do art, so I’d like to clarify; I understand that art is incredibly subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and some art styles fit well with some and not others. I get that. My goals are not to appeal to the masses, my target audience is myself. I need to figure out what’s correct to me what looks right to me and stop handling this sort of problem on a case-by-case basis.

A few artists out there have suggested I follow artists that I may want to emulate, and I think that’s a great first step. Figuring out what style I want to emulate has got to be the first step. So how do I do this?

Figuring out a Target

There are some big choices I can get out of the way easily, as I’m learning this skill for game assets, meaning I can rule out some medium that may not be easy to implement in games, like paint.

Medium? 3D Modeling.

Because almost every game I’d like to work on has some modularity to it, I feel 3D art is the way to go. When I speak of modularity in games, I’m thinking of a character that can equip multiple weapons, armor, outfits, different colors, etc. This extends to other non-character things of course.

This eliminates a requirement to learn proper perspective techniques, but there are some exceptions to that, for cutscenes and such, I may want to learn how to “cheat the camera” which may be interesting.

Where this may become difficult is special effects. Thankfully I have some experience working with shaders. I need to work on that a bit more to really bring out a unique style, I think.

Realism? Not for me.

I’ve never really liked realism in 3D. It works well in certain genres, such as FPS, or gritty stories, but generally those aren’t what I intend on making, at least not right now. I’ve always loved games with that arcade-feel to them. Function over form, every time.

“Stylized” characters have always been really cool to me, exaggerating some feature to make them unique. To be super specific, Panty and Stocking Character designs have always seemed really cool to me, their legs and arms are lengthened, which allows for a lot of expression in their poses when fighting. Some Megaman characters also follow this sort of style, which is neat. I think this sort of style allows for good silhouetting of the character which should translate to good readability for games.

I’ve done a tiny bit of work towards characters, and I always seem to gravitate towards this sort of chibi-style.

Pasted image 20250114145539.png Pasted image 20250114145644.png

Colors? Limited.

Something I’ve enjoyed about pico-8 when I was using it, was the limited color palette. This forced me to stop thinking about color choices, as at most I had to chose between like 2 colors when it came to the color “brown”. It made things simple.

Pixel Art tends to make the most of this limitation, and I think it’d work well at higher resolutions as well. Usually this manifests in Lowpoly art, or pretty much anything with a “toon shader” I don’t know if I’d really want to go for the vibrant toon look, as I think they feel a bit too flat. Something I’ve found interesting in pixel art is the use of shading to imply distance – something I think could be achieved using a depth shader in conjunction with a toon shader.

Outlines? Necessary.

In video games, there’s a concern of “readability” that I feel is incredibly important. The player should always know where they are in relation to hazards. In pixel art cases I’ve always handled this through outlining. It clearly separates moving objects from the background – and in addition to that, I’d make certain to not outline background details, ensuring the background colors have less vibrancy. There’s of course exceptions to these rules, but I think they help for gameplay, and could potentially be adjustable options, if managed through something like a shader.

References

I may make a specialized loader for these links in the future and note what I think is interesting about these later, but for now I want to keep these around.