After years of programming "things" that were always too ugly to show,

after countless friends I had asked for help but never had the time,

after those who had time but left the work undone...

I said to myself: am I that bad at drawing?

Is there any chance I could make the art for my own games?

So in June 2016 I picked up the pencil and started to follow some tutorial on youtube. Unexpectedly I found myself drawing portraits of friends (the good ones) instead of game art. That was a phase I think. At some point I decided to give it a try and design some characters. (if you are curious about my art progress check out my instagram..you will find pretty embarassing things)

If I compare my work to that of a professional... there's a long road ahead, I don't have the technique and the experience yet, but

* my challenge for Ludum Dare 38 was exactly this: to produce all the graphics, trying to do whatever I had in mind without fear *.

Set no limits

What I learned is that weather you have plenty of time or just 3 days it's always a good idea to let your imagination go at first , without setting any limit, as you were capable of doing everything comes into your mind (this applies to coding as well) and THEN sift through what you imagined and think about things like: the time you have , what makes sense and what doesn't. This is where you "kill" ideas

There are rules though:

The reason for setting a limit can't never be: I'm not good enough or I don't know how to do this. It's for this very reason that why we decided to put ourselves outside of our comfort zones by using a new environment (Unity) (this doesn't apply to @jabba: Jabba was in his super comfort cozy zone in his Tokyo living room, eating sushi and making music :D )

Anyway: the thing is: I had no idea how to animate a sperm tail, let alone drawing llamas in love. Mi first attempt looked more like a cow-bear :D

This is what ludum dare is about : having the chance to try something new, to figure out how to do something you never did before, to learn new skills.

So, we decided to cut many things , but never the challenging bits.

We left the gameplay pretty basic because we wanted the game to be as complete as possible. We decided to spend our time more in the enhancement of the second gameplay , we completely reworked it in the last hours. We did this just because it made it more consistent with the rest of the game. For the same reason we focused a lot on the story: we strongly believe that is the story that provides context to a game and gives the player a reason for his actions. We cut some extra feature that would have been nice, we know. but we thought: if we have to implement them sloppy because of the short time, then better not include them at all.

Back to the artists part:

what I want to say here is: give it a try. Maybe you are not a Picasso, but now more than ever there's plenty of resources online to help you on the way.

Here's my process:

I realize I don't even know how game artists really work.

True game artists out there, I would greatly appreciate your advice!

*ok don't play the game below, really, just give me your advice! :D *

Spermicorn Game