Progress Report 1/12/2024 (Patreon)

Oh boy do I have a story for you! But first, here's what I got done this week:

• Made a grass texture for the Grasslands background
• Created five different rock sprites to serve as small obstacles
• Created four different boulder sprites to serve as large obstacles

Not a lot, right? Ha ha ha WRONG!

While I don't have a lot to show in terms of game progress, I've made HUGE headway into developing my art style. Buuuut I'm getting ahead of myself, here. Let's start at the beginning, back during my week off.

I did my best to relax, but something kept itching in the back of my mind. This grass texture is gonna be really difficult to make. I've gotta get a head start on it somehow...

So, the first place I went was to Bing's Dall-E 3 AI image generator. Now before you break out the torches and pitchforks, let me just say that this thing has helped me tremendously with references that I otherwise would never have obtained. I used it to help with the water droplet textures, and without it that would have taken me three times as long! It really is a great tool! (You know... when it actually gives you an image 2% of the time.)

After using it a bunch, it gave me one grass texture that I absolutely loved!

Ignoring the, uh, Children of the Corn thing going on, this is exactly what I was looking for! It's got excellent colors and the grass blades aren't actually blades of grass, per se.

They're more of a seashell shape.

This taught me valuable lesson #1: All a grass texture needs is the suggestion of grass, not necessarily exact shapes.

Now I'll admit, I tried to cheat a bit here. I took this texture and ran it through a different, inpainting AI that would remove the creepy characters and give me just the grass. After a few runs and cherry picks, I ended up with a nice grass texture! Of course, since it had hues of green and yellow that wouldn't tile well, I decided to shift it to greyscale and recolor it all as one color.

This was as close as I could get to a seamless texture with all the inpainting. Even if it was perfectly seamless, the texture itself is... kinda gross compared to how it started.

Feeling defeated after hours of toying with it, I decided to abandon my AI-reliance.

In its place, I decided to delve back into the world of custom brushes. This has always been a pain for me since I could never get Paint Tool SAI (my main drawing program) to work with them. So, I fired up FireAlpaca.

With a bit of work, I managed to isolate the shape of the AI-generated grass texture and turned it into a brush. Even with the brush, however, things weren't looking quite right.

I decided to take a detour towards getting custom brushes in SAI again (I do this about twice a year), and... I actually got an answer this time. I just need SAI 2020 or later, and I could use custom textures! This is gonna be great!!

I'm gonna give you the abridged version.

I uninstalled my current version of SAI, downloaded the most recent version (2023) and excitedly opened it up. I wanted to use the giantess as reference for the art style, so I opened up the giantess body scene for testing.

...

I opened the giantess body scene...

...

What do you mean "The contents of this file are broken"?...

Wait, why are all of my color layers gone?!

Yup, that's right. Paint Tool SAI is not always backwards compatible with saves. But it's fine, I'll just go back to the Systemax website to download an older version.

...

Why aren't there any older versions here?...

Yup, that's right. The archive of older versions is severely limited!

Long story short, there was panic, there was anger, there was depression, and finally I found old versions of SAI on archive.org THANK FREAKING GOODNESS!

If I hadn't found these older versions, I would have lost access to every drawing file I've ever made, including all the ones for Run From Me. It would have been absolutely devastating to me. Thankfully, all is well now and I've made numerous backups of this particular version of SAI in case something like this ever happens again.

Valuable lesson #2: Make backups of programs in addition to saves!

I should specify that this happened over the course of an entire day. One day is a loooong time when your entire life's work is on the line.

So, now that my lifespan was reduced by 10 years, I decided to set SAI aside and try something I'd never tried before: commissioning. If I could find a dedicated texture artist that could match the art style I was looking for, I could keep them around for the whole game! With that hope in mind, I hopped onto Twitter and made a quick ad with the #GameDev tag.

I honestly wasn't expecting any replies, but much to my surprise I got several within the first hour! Unfortunately... the whole commissioning process is much more muddled than I thought it would be. Some didn't have any kind of portfolio for me to look at, one person rapid-fired their portfolio at me with wildly different art styles (I'm pretty sure it was AI-generated...), and out of everyone who replied to my ad, only one actually sent me examples of seamless textures. I actually made friends with that one -- they're quite nice. ^^

Sadly, none of them had the art style I was looking for, and after a lot of interesting back-and-forths, I decided to delete my ad as quickly as possible and never try this again. ._.

Valuable lesson #3: If you're looking for artists, look for artists that you like and message them directly; do NOT advertise a paid commission to the public!

By this point my week was nearly over, and I knew I had to hurry to get something done. Reluctantly, I downloaded the 2020 version of SAI (which I also found on archive.org), placed it somewhere separate from the 2019 version, and nervously tried opening some older drawings.

...It worked. I let out the biggest sigh of relief, knowing that my files are safe and that I can now use custom brushes in SAI! I did some searching and downloaded these grass brushes from DeviantArt by alexa223344. After some tinkering, I ran a quick test with the brush called "grass04", my personal favorite of the bunch.

Even as a mere test, this is immediately better than that AI-generated seashell brush I was trying to work with in FireAlpaca! There may be hope for me yet!

However, while I had the tool, I just couldn't quite get the technique. I needed to somehow learn how to make stylized textures. Fortunately, I already had a source of tutorials to do just that! Kairosmith on YouTube has some really nice tutorials on how to make toon, hand-painted textures -- a style that has quickly become my favorite in the texturing world! Similarly, this tutorial by Paintable helped me understand the importance of the details.

Finally, I sat down, threw caution to the wind, and just started making. No rules, no time constraints... just make grass, you fool!

And you know what? I did! And it turned out better than I could have imagined! Oh, and get this: I made it seamless!

I made the pattern repeat right where the invisible walls are. Can you tell where they are? I couldn't! :D

Obviously it can use some extra details like dirt patches and flowers -- those are on the to do list. But as it stands now, I'm really proud of myself!

Valuable lesson #4: Sometimes you've just gotta trust yourself to get better at the thing you're not good at yet!

Thankfully I used up all of my bad fortune on the grass texture. The rocks were nice and fun to draw, and I'm starting to feel more confident in my ability to make hand painted textures!

Now then, either you've skipped to the end or you're as maniacal as I am for reading all of that! Either way, I sincerely thank you for dropping by! I'm gonna go eat some celebratory Taco Bell before getting back to work. Maybe it'll be gameplay, maybe it'll be more background stuff... I'm not too afraid either way, now! :)  I'll see you guys again next week!

Oh, and if you hear anybody say that art isn't hard... slap 'em in the face with a burrito for me. Bean. Extra cheese.

Encore: Shortly after I learned my lesson from the Twitter ad, I did one final search for textures for sale, and I actually found some at Oleekconder's itchio shop! He has a lot of textures for sale! 884, to be exact, and at 88% off with just a few hours left! What luck! I quickly broke out my wallet and made the purchase, knowing that even if the textures were unusable, I could still use these as reference for the art style!

It turns out there was no rush because the next day, they had the same 88% off sale, still with only hours left, so it's one of those "hurry but not really" business tactics. A lot of the textures also have shading or patterns on them that, while seamless, makes the squares they were built in somewhat noticeable. Still, worth it for the references alone! I don't have buyer's remorse! :,D  (But seriously, it is a very good deal. It could be very useful for stylized 3D games in particular!)

The funniest thing is that I looked at the grass textures in pack #3, and they looked awfully familiar. Turns out, Oleekconder is actually Kairosmith from YouTube! Funny how things can go full circle like that, isn't it? :P