About Art
I will readily admit that I am no artist - it is not a skill I have. Also, art is one of the things I’m really hesitant to generate with AI. I know AI is pretty good at that today, but there’s still a lot of process required to make game-ready assets out of AI art, and it just hurts my soul, you know?
I certainly know plenty of great artists out there who could make some artwork for this game, but I also have a thing about asking my artist friends to do work for me for free. Call me crazy, but I think artists should be paid for their work. And sadly, this little project is still running on a budget of nearly zero.
Penzilla
Enter Penzilla, a lovely artist I found on itch.io that sells some pre-made art assets dirt cheap. Penzilla’s work stood out to me as having all the pieces of the puzzle I needed - hex tiles, isometric tiles, animated characters, and even a layered protagnist sprite to allow for dynamic changes based on equipment. Fantastic.
Except… not quite in the style I was expecting? I was originally targeting a gritty pulp-fantasy feel to this game, much like my original vision for Road of Kings. These guys are, frankly, down right cute.
Art’s Influence on Design
I decided to roll with it. What the heck, let’s start pushing the game into a more cute, cozy feel. What could go wrong? Honestly, nothing went wrong, and I’m digging it. I think if/when I ever change the art for this thing, I would like to keep the aesthetic. It’s just lovely.
Sprite Packing
One downside to using prepackaged images is that they don’t quite get you 100% to the finish line. I’m using Phaser for my client, and I needed to pack up the sprites with animation data in Phaser’s format. The good news is, this is definitely something AI is pretty good at. I was able to quickly whip up a tool to pack my sprites that was completely customized to my specific needs - no more, no less.
Honestly, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written some very half-baked tools for art and design to use in my career. The fact that those folks can now self serve to create highly customized tools is a serious boon. I suspect gone are the days of giant swiss-army knife tools for game making, as devs figure out how to use AI to generate highly specialized tools for each individual job.
The Future
Eventually I’m certain I’ll hit the other major limitation of using pre-packaged assets – there’s just not enough of it! Penzilla’s enemies comes with only six animated characters. I’m sure eventually I’ll want a lot more than that.
But I think this is good enough to go on for now, and I feel good at having spent a little cash on some pretty great art to get me to vertical slice. If this little project ever gets real funding by any means, you can bet hiring some of my very talented artist friends will be at the top of my todo list.
Full Disclosure: There Is Some AI Art
I want to be up front here - I did end up having to use a few pieces of AI generated artwork on this thing. Most notably the splash screen was AI generated. A couple minor icons for buttons as well. It’s not what I wanted, but I couldn’t find anything else to fit the need. Again though, should this project go anywhere you can be damn sure those will be replaced with some quality hand-made work.