3 Years Learning Pixel Art | GODOT DEVLOG

you know I've put this off for so long but I think it's finally time for me to start doing devlogs for the main project for some reason your first devlog on a game always feels like it's big and impactful and part of me just wanted to push that off until I got a game name and some other core ideas but it's anticlimactic as it seems this will be devlog number zero the big number zero I feel like these are the videos that people always want devlog zero where it starts although maybe the blog negative one in some ways because I'm gonna explain how I got here [Music] [Applause] so I was always a music person growing up and then art when I went to college but in terms of video game design that sort of started around 2020. this is actually before I was using Discord so I don't have logs of this but a friend of mine who's a programmer reached out for me to help with his art the game was in outer space and then I remember you played as a ship and the first enemy we had I think was a sun probably gonna say this a lot through this video when we look back at old art but it's amazing to say how proud I was of some of that old stuff that I think now was really bad but I think if you're not proud of it you lose interest pretty fast at one point I took it upon myself to make my own boss so I drew all this stuff and animated and showed to him and he's like I just don't have time to do all that so the project ultimately fizzled out and enough time passed that he reached out again for a new project this one involved a third friend but I don't think we got very far in this one either we're all inspired to do different things I remember thinking I really wanted to do like something Diablo e or loop-based but I can't remember what everyone else wanted it was so long ago now I remember going long fish at the time but not really sharing what I was working on it must have been really frustrating and then it would come out of the woodwork and be like hey look I have rooms look at this and doors that open I think like oh okay I don't even know if that was the type of game we're doing like it was not very smart so needless to say eventually that ran out of steam and when that ended I thought for sure this was going to be a break for a while but sometime near the end of 2020 his friend reached out to me again for a third time to work on a new game a multiplayer Arena shooter called lithium I remember we got me in a Discord room with a bunch of other friends we played this early version of the game and from that point on I was in this is weird to say I thought we worked on it for a year but it looks like it was almost two years from 2020 to the end of 2022 and I remember my Pace back then was really slow uh I'll show some of the art here but especially early on I would spend almost a month without saying what I was working on and then I'd show him something it was basically what I could have done in like a week now maybe less honestly this was one of the biggest growth periods for me yeah for art but also a little bit for game design I can look back to on some of those arguments or conversations we had about where the game should go in what direction and I just made so many bad arguments but you never know at the time until you make the bad game and then you can look back and go this is why it's bad and so now just for reference at this point I've done zero coding I've only ever used Photoshop I've never used a Sprite I've never done tile map I've never done Sprite sheets so I have no idea what I'm doing but like when it comes to anything man there is so much art from this time and I'm gonna dig a lot of that up but one of the things that I worked on for the longest time was the environment because it was all this one multiplayer map I was trying to draw this detailed City and for reference I would never draw this this way um I would just draw a tile map and then put objects in and he even told me at the time he was like you should just draw a tile map and I was like I don't know what that is so I'm gonna sit here for a month or three and just draw this map I have this pattern and we'll see it in this is when there's a problem there's something new that you need to learn instead of learning the new thing I'll just take some of the old things I know and then shove them in as a solution and just try to force it and it's especially true now for code I try to fight that so I work on this map for a really long time and then at some point I also start working on characters and guns and it's kind of funny the process that I use to draw an anime guns back then is still the same exact process that I use now so it's a slow process but we work like this for probably around a year where I just do the art and he does all the big brain coder stuff and near the end of that year we reflected on what the game might need and unfortunately we landed on and I really pushed for this adding a single player aspect to the game [Music] it uh it did not need that and it really hurts to say that now because I was really spearheading this I was really pushing for it but it was the last thing the game needed there were some upsides though in the sense that I got to work on art for enemies and bosses level design tile Maps a lot of things that I know now I learned in this period it was also earliest time that I started documenting the work so I'd have this folder my desktop called work history and every week I put all the art from that week in the folder it was helpful to keep me motivated but now it's nice just to look back on because I can see how long it took me to make things which is kind of funny I have some suspiciously slow weeks where it's like they only worked on a bullet this week that's seven days for this one bullet I don't know kind of a weird coincidence that the stuff that would take me the longest would come out around the same time Elden ring did and it's sort of interesting to note here that I think this is the dynamic sort of shifts between needing way too much art and having too much art for the whole entire time we worked on the multiplayer section it was always we needed more art because a lot of the game had already been coded we just needed to put Assets in now I felt like the opposite where we had to code so many new things and the art just sort of had to wait and as that grew and grew it sort of felt like this was the fizzling out of this project we bit off more than we could chew and the game was turning into something it was sort of never meant to be I think we both felt it but we tried our best to make it into something and to keep pushing but games are hard and this one did fizzle out for us too while we were taking breaks with that I worked with a separate friend on another game called Billy the cursed and looking back I definitely forced myself onto that project he was just sharing where he was making a fun little game and I was like let me do art I want to help and that turned into maybe the game should be this so the game should be that and I should not have done that I wish I had the same wherewithal then that I do now after doing the game jams because I just want to turn that project into another big thing the more you work on games the more it is true what people say that you will over scope everything and you want to make everything bigger and better than it needs to be I probably only worked on art for it for about a couple weeks and the idea was just to be a side project and then go back to lithium but things sort of fell apart on both ends then I sort of felt like I was left as an artist with no means to actually make a game and no coding experience that's when the friend that I worked on below the curse with suggested that I get into Godot oh boy was that a process let me tell you I hate learning stuff as I said before so that first month was probably pretty brutal I would say well I shouldn't say I hate learning stuff but there's definitely a process where you're trying to learn and everything fights you like it isn't just learning how to code it's learning the programming language it's learning the program itself I just felt 100 out of my element and I'm sure a lot of you guys can relate to that and my mindset back then wasn't even make a game it was so small it would always be like can we get a bullet on screen like not even shooting can we just make a bullet spawn like it was very basic stuff and I come back to this a lot with the art too if you can take that small into stuff and get some motivation or meaning from it it makes a world of difference in the timeline here we're about in 2023 so that sort of sums up the path that I've taken on figuring out that I really want to work on video games and there's still a lot to cover between then and where the game's at now but that's why it's called devlog negative one it's just nice to take a step back and reflect on all the ups and downs over the past couple years it's kind of weird too to think about how I jumped in and helped as an artist because I never view myself as an artist I always grew up with music but I think I really just wanted to be a part of working on games maybe without even realizing it honestly hopefully let's keep going eventually I'll get somewhere but for now it's pretty fun to make these videos and talk to you guys so thanks for watching I'll see you guys later [Music] thank you

Channel: mz_eth

Views: 33,776

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Id: TDh0ytGtJzE

Length: 6min 52sec (412 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2023