(Old title “What would be the lowest quality of the character sprite drawings you would be okay with in a visual novel type game?”)
I’m trying to start making a game and I’m going to try and draw the character sprites myself. I was wondering what would the the lowest acceptable quality of the drawings for a game.
Here’s my first actual attempt at making fat art, tell me what you think, what you like about it and what would you change. I will be adding some shading, but for now here it is with flat colors.
It’s not about quality, it’s about style, what you can put out at a reasonable pace, and what you like, this isn’t some AAA game being sold for $60. Unless you’re in some kind of competition like a Jam, don’t worry about it.
Plus, “programmer art” is a thing, if it’s bad enough, whatever, you can always replace it later.
It’s best to do more low-effort art early on anyway, at least until everything in the game is set in stone.
What’s the worst thing to witness is when a new game comes along and the dev commissions someone for a bunch of the art, then a year later the game gets a rewrite, or characters get changed or whatever and all the art has to be replaced, commissioned again.
(Late edit: OP rewrote the post. Point still stands. Also, yeah, the art’s fine.)
Your example is OK. I wouldn’t pick up a game based on that art, but I might pick it up based on the story and enjoy it.
What I like: The overall body proportions. The limbs, torso, and head are all believably sized and positioned. I can tell you put effort into the “physics” of the clothing - those couple of baggy folds help the other tight bits shine. I like how the hair isn’t minimal.
Like you said, shading would help. Some other problems I can see:
Perspective - the face is positioned over the neck like she’s looking to the side, but the face itself is front view (except the nose).
The neck itself - looks too flat and simple. I don’t know exactly what’s wrong, but maybe check against a few real-life necks in a similar pose and see what the next line / shaded area would be.
The bane of every artist, hands. The one on the thigh needs a smaller wrist, and its pointer finger is too curled for just resting. The other hand should have at least some fingertips or a thumb showing, possibly both.
The cleavage has “now draw a Y” energy and her left (our right) breast looks kinda drawn on top of the other, making them look stiff instead of soft. There are a bunch of “how to draw boobs/cleavage” guides online that can give specific help.
Thanks for the feedback!
I really don’t know what I could do about the face. I see what you’re referring to, but I thought making the eye on our left a bit squished side to side and the pupils not centered on the eyes. I can try some things out and see what happens.
The hands I just put something there, I could take some more references if I wanted to get them right.
I tried to wing the cleavage but I couldn’t make it work with only that one line so I added the second one making it that generic Y shape. I should look at some guides for that next time.
Here are some quick tries at shading, I think it looks okay enough.
I think it looks fine and you’re probably too hard on yourself (as most artists tend to be) in regard to how something looks and the things that might be “wrong” if characters were drawn like this and in a VN it would be just fine on quality and style. I would be happy with art that looked like this.
I think the main issue comes of course as a solo dev on a project like a VN is it will be more than just characters. Backgrounds, CG’s, characters and details along with programming, coding, writing, etc by yourself. And it would make the most sense to make a smaller in scope project to practice how you want to tackle the approach rather then jumping into (to be fair like a lot of devs do) a larger project.
Something like @RoopsThe Breakfast Chub - Roops’ Submission - Gain Jam / Fat Fortnight 7/2019 - Weight Gaming is a smaller in scale tight little VN and it’s one of my favorites shorter games. It obviously was a lot of work and done by more than one person on a short time schedule (cause it’s a Jam game obviously.) Someone with less experience on the art side will obviously have a bit of time eaten up by that and maybe trying out a smaller scale format will give you the best idea if this is how you want to do something going forward.
Because quality wise your fine in my opinion and other factors of solo dev while trying to learn/perfect your own artist might influence you more than how people feel about the art (which like I said is good you’re being too hard on yourself).
Probably mercy from overwatch and overwatch “2”, is probably what you’re thinking of. I don’t know if that was the intent but that was my immediate association.
