The power of a workflow

 

One of the most interesting areas of focus for me when drawing is on finding a powerful workflow for asset creation, that exists in the form of a deliberately delineated series of steps which I do to completion before moving onto the next stage. My idea is that each stage should address a specific problem, and solve it to full satisfaction, before progressing. That way I'm not thinking about colour when I'm trying to paint light, I'm not adding lightsources when trying to paint texture, etc. For an artist who is easily distracted this helps to maintain focus, and also stops me from being overwhelmed. The image above is an example of me trying to refine my workflow for background painting for Old Skies. While it's not quite indicative of the process that I use now, it was a vital step in finding that process, and you can see my basic notes that helped me to remember what I did when.

Today I was working on character design, and I realized that I have not delineated my workflow here sufficiently. I have it well defined for the stages of creating a final drawing - lines, colour, shadows, etc, and have very clear notes, palettes and brushes created for this section of the work. What I'm missing, though, is the construction phase.

The issue is that when constructing my characters, I'm still relying on a lot of guesswork. I should know how many heads my character's proportions are - if not from memory, from a set of notes that I can check. I should be able to break the process of drawing a character's line art down into a series of constructive steps that solve things like posture, proportion, volume and silhouette. I do not currently have this in place. That meant that today was a poorly directed series of re-drawings, never quite focusing on a single element at a time. To have a carefully designed dynamic silhouette that is badly proportioned is not very useful. The same applies to spending a lot of time detailing overlapping volumes over a stiff or awkward pose. Said pose should be completely solved before I even begin to think about those volumes - just as the proportions should be measured and decided before working on the silhouette.

Happily, well documented processes for constructing figures exist in bountiful quantities, are well described, and quite sensibly illustrated with examples. My issues lies simply in my inexperience drawing in this style, and my focus has been largely on trying to figure out what the style actually is. Now that I have a good understanding of that, I need to go back to the basics of how to reach it from a blank page. I should have kept this in focus from the beginning, but being foolish and lazy has served me reasonably well to date, and therefore it takes days full of poorly directed efforts like today in order to be motivated enough to alter my methods and do things right.

For me, though, this is one of the best things about being a working illustrator. Art isn't a magic skill. You don't have to be born with it to succeed. You just need to learn the steps, one by one, and practice them. How hard can it be, right?

Tinkering

 As I look back on Old Skies in its current state, and try to work out my strengths and weaknesses at the moment, it occurs to me that my favourite aspect of game development is the act of tinkering about with a project. For me, tooling about in an engine or a piece of pixel art software was a bit like messing about with an electronics set - a chance to connect things together and see how they work, try to fix things that aren't working, and the chance to see something come to life. That's what drew me into game development in the first place.

When my focus shifted from writing functions and designing interactivity to making art, I found other ways to tinker - trying to find new ways of making cool graphics, learning different processes that added things to my toolbox of skills. It's always satisfying to me to do something that I didn't know how to do previously. Doing something I already knew how to do is satisfying, too, but in a different way.

I never really enjoyed making background art for games until I managed to find the fun in it, to break it down like that electronics kit into a series of steps that eventually results in something that works. I firmly believe that if you take someone and get them to do the thing that they truly care about, you can get great work out of anybody. For me, I think I need to find out how to tinker with the areas of my current work that are weaknesses, because that's what drives me. 

It's important to me to produce good amounts of work, of course, one only has to peek at my todo lists to understand that if I didn't, things would very quickly be very bad for me. But I think if I can find that happy medium between tinkering and productivity in all current areas that I'm working in, the end result will be a better game. Can I make "character animations" part of that electronics kit? I guess it's something to work on!

Progress!

 

I'm approaching the 'complete' stage on the first section of Old Skies, and it's interesting to see what has changed in the process. In June of this year I spend the entire month just trying to figure out what was necessary to get this game made. I animated some things with far too many frames, with far too few frames, put too much detail into things and also not enough detail into things, and at the end of it all, felt like I had a decent handle on what looked decent, and what did not. I also felt like I had created a better workflow, to be more productive and get my todo lists done without being overwhelmed.

Since then, I've been knee deep in pure production. I also got a new PC, a few new pieces of hardware to make the job easier, and have done a few more bits of experimenting with style to make sure our close-up shots are still cohesive with the rest of the game, but mostly it's just been crossing things off the todo lists. What's interesting about this phase of production is that I feel like my standards shift a bit - I get less ambitious, and realise that I have to cut some corners in order to get everything done on the game in a timely manner. This always happens, but I'd forgotten it, yet again.

Looking at what we have now, though, I think we're going to have a decent looking game. It feels like we're doing what we always did - just now a lot higher resolution. My biggest fear, pre-June, was that the backgrounds and characters just didn't work together, and didn't look that good, individually. Since then this fear has changed, and I have new fears, new things I want to tweak, edit, adjust, redo. I never have enough time to do this, of course, but making something is meant to be a learning process. Of course I'd do it all differently in hindsight.

Overall, though, the response to how Old Skies looks now has been great. My animation still needs some work, my todo lists still feel enormous and there's still a long way to go before I can say I know how to do a game in this exact style, but we're getting a lot closer. Thanks for your support, all! I'll share some more detailed art thoughts soon!