I'm not an artist, but... (Patreon)

Bit of a different thing this time. Maybe a bit of a ramble, but I dunno. It feels like there's a lot of strangeness around artistry and my relationship to it isn't quite how I expected when I first got started with this whole game thing. You'll have to let me know if this kind of thing has any value vs more technical sorts of devlogs.

but let's talk about art

If you take a look at the credits window from the title screen of the game, you'll notice that it's actually pretty short. At time of writing, I am the only person directly doing any work for the game. Anyone else mentioned on the credits page is someone generous enough to put their assets (of whatever type those might be) online. Some of them are free, some of them less so. Most of them are distributed with a CC0 license that doesn't explicitly require attribution or much of anything else. Essentially, when you're looking at the game as a whole, you're looking at a whole bunch of different things from a whole bunch of different people that I've figured out how to at least semi-coherently put together.

I do a lot of art production. I make a lot of artistic decisions. I still don't say I'm an artist. It's a weird sort of situation. I don't think that I should downplay the work that I've already done, as it's decent enough. Rather, just with my not having any training in a creative field, my relationship with the label of artist or anything similar has always felt kind of off. There's a whole lot of overlap, but with what I'm doing now and art, but I've always been more of a technical, science, math, etc. type of person. 

I'm not entirely sure if how or when that will have officially changed either, especially since it seems like I'm doing a decent job already.

Originally when trying to figure out how this whole making a game from scratch thing would work, I had figured that one of the first things I would do was offload the production of art to an actual artist. Some number of people would become supporters of the game once it was out there in the public, and I'd be able to have supporters vote on what kinds of art they think would be more important. From there I could use the funds raised to commission art that would go in the game. Simple enough. 

Technically this is all still on the table potentially, but I'm a lot more skeptical about it now after the six or so months that the game has been public (and the year or so I've been working on it in total). The game isn't making all that much money currently (there are a lot of reasons for that, and it's not exactly a PROBLEM at the moment even if more would always be better for my mental state if nothing else), but even if I were to take the money being made and reinvest it into art over other options (personally I would rather prioritize offloading some of the writing work rather than art at the moment), it wouldn't be that simple. 

With the nature of how events and such have come to be in the game, there is less of an emphasis on big, dramatic pieces of art. I've started experimenting with making some here and there, but often times it doesn't feel like they're necessarily that worth it. The CGs (if you would call them that) already present are fairly small, which matches well enough with the individual scenes they're tied to. The setup of the game allows for a whole lot of variety and breadth of content. I don't want to say quantity over quality because of the negative connotations, but considering how many individual encounters could be squeezed into even a single dungeon floor, quantity needs to be at the very least present.

Still, even with those constraints I'm sure I would be able to work something out with an artist in theory. Like I said it's still on the table depending on how things develop. I am, however, much more skeptical about completely outsourcing all of the EVERYTHING that I have to do art-wise though. CG is one thing. There would be a whole lot more holes beyond that which I've already gotten used to covering by myself.

but I do know about image manipulation

If possible for you to do so, try and remember back to the early to mid-2000s, when online forums were a more popular way to communicate and discuss things online than they are now. You may recall the area below any given forum post where a signature was automatically appended. The place where people could insert whatever text or bbcode nonsense they wanted and take up page space for the purpose of individual expression. 

And if you liked a thing, you could have some kind of image banner in that signature field, forcing everyone who views your post to be aware of your like for that thing. Eyecatching, flashy! The best way to do individual expression!

I liked a lot of different media. I had free time. I picked up signature banner creation as a hobby. I'm not actually sure where most of the files for old sigs I've made are. Probably on an old computer. I happened to find this one, and it's a good enough example, though I think some of my other ones were probably better.

Thing is, even as just a hobby, creating something like this requires at least some level of skill with image manipulation. As it turns out, image manipulation is a VERY useful skill to have for a whole bunch of different things. I don't make sigs any more (and online forums are substantially less prevalent now), but I've definitely used the skills that I learned from previously doing so for a whole lot of other areas in the mean time.

Was I an artist when making these kinds of things? Not sure. I never really thought so, but I could see an argument for it. On the one hand, you're mostly compositing different assets that you didn't originally create together. Yeah, there are some brush strokes I'm making and whatnot, but the art contained in the image isn't mine. On the other hand, you're also making a huge amount of decisions about the composition of the end result. Still wouldn't really call it "my" art, but it's an unclear distinction entirely dependent on where you draw the line personally.

Since we're talking about compositing things together though...

but there are a lot of resources online that give away art to use

There's that one Carl Sagan quote of "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" and yeah, maybe I mostly remember it because of A Glorious Dawn, but it calls to mind the absurdity of doing anything truly from scratch. There has to be a point where you're taking and using resources that have been previously created by someone else.

Putting aside the programs and tools and stuff and just looking at the assets, did I technically start from scratch? Not really. But does anyone really? I don't know how much you might have looked into game creation, but it turns out that the subcommunity of asset creation, entirely independent of GAME creation, is rather large.

Even if you haven't looked into anything personally, I'm more willing to be that you are at least vaguely aware of the concept of royalty free music just through streamers or content creators or whatever. The Kevin Macleod or Audiostock or whatever else, putting up music for people to use. That's not exclusive to music. (Also yes, I'm aware there are differences between public domain, royalty free, and CC0. Not the point here)

You can easily go somewhere like OpenGameArt.org or Itch.io's game asset section and find entire UI themes, spritesheets, soundtracks, and more than enough other stuff that you can put together a game. That's without even bringing up how many options open if you're willing to drop a few dollars here and there too!

From the start, a huge amount of decisions about the user interface assets of the game were decided simply by my picking up a UI pack by kenney and running with it. That link is only to the free expansion, which I've used somewhat. There's more in the paid version, but even if you were to look at it right now, you would only have a base that I worked from. A lot of what is in the game now is only using that general theme, building on it to work into what I want it to be.

So yeah. I didn't start from scratch, and how much of the UI is made by me and how much of an artist I am is entirely dependent on where you draw arbitrary lines of distinction.

but I still have to do art direction anyway

The engine I'm using for the game is Godot. Godot certainly has its own set of default properties on its UI out of the box. As this is my first major project with the engine, and it isn't that popular of an engine in the first place, I could probably get away with using more of those defaults than I do. 

You're not going to see much of this kind of stuff in the game though. I could have, and it would have been a lot easier, but it wouldn't fit with the game's art direction. I've played a lot of games. I used to do test automation for web UIs as my career. I've seen a lot of UIs that do a lot of different things. Does that make me a master of user experience? No. 

It does help me make a lot of decisions though.

I don't have any pre-made RPGMaker or Ren'Py menu systems. Almost everything in the UI has had to have been made with conscious decision making. If I want things to feel coherent and consistent in both the look and feel, I have to make it that way myself. Even if you count using and editing premade assets as a shortcut to art, there aren't any shortcuts to art direction. Everything that goes into the game has to have been chosen to do so. Nothing shows up by accident, for better or worse.

As a result, the UI, UX, and art direction all mesh together into the pile of work, again muddying the distinction between art and non-art tasks that I pull from as I go along. Maybe some people are better at distinguishing and organizing the types and categories of tasks that they do, but that's a brain thing I guess. Either way, it's all me. At the end of the day, everything has to go through me deciding if it fits with the style of the game as I want it displayed, which is important for the next section especially.

but I'm not afraid of using AI

There is a lot of discourse around AI right now, and honestly, I do get it. A lot of different art posting sites have already banned the use of AI generated images flooding up their galleries. I constantly see AI generated game assets filling up itch.io's asset search area. The whole field of AI content creation continues to get bigger and better and it's going to continue to cause disruption for people in creative fields.

And regardless of how you or anyone else feel about it, it's a tool that exists now. The genie isn't going back inside the bottle.

For my own work flow, I've talked about this plenty of times before in different places. AI is often a part of the process for creating CGs specifically. When dealing with the knights, I have a base model for each of them that I pose as needed, screenshot, then run through AI for variation/improvement. The AI step is not technically necessary. The game could still have CGs without it, it just wouldn't look quite as good, at least in my opinion.

That doesn't sound as evil as the most staunch anti-AI people would have you think, but maybe it's just me.

Of course, that's only the workflow for the knights. Maybe the bigger problem is other CGs. I will openly admit that a lot of the monsters and traps are purely AI generated or composited from several AI generations of the same concept. Yeah, there's image manipulation and work done after that to make them match the art style of other game CGs, but it's still using AI. If you're really against the whole idea, you could argue that isn't acceptable, but... Why?

I've already talked about the whole idea of what constitutes making something "from scratch" being entirely arbitrary, but it feels like people have the bar much higher when AI is involved. Game creators that use koikatsu or daz3D or honey select 2 aren't making their own models. Almost nobody creates their own engine for their porn game. But these things are already normalized and so they get away with less scrutiny. 

I think, more than anything, when people complain about AI art, they're really complaining about laziness and poor quality work being thrown at them. When someone slaps "huge breasts" in an ai image prompt, takes whatever anime girl pops out, and throws it around expecting to to be praised or for people to give money to their patreon or whatever, yeah that's kinda trashy. Even worse is the people who in any way imply that artists are being made obsolete. I don't like that kind of behavior and neither should you.

I'm not using it lazily like that. I would love to have an artist that I could properly pay if the logistics/money were there, but they aren't. Not using AI doesn't improve the game, nor does it do anything about the existence of AI image generation. I'm not afraid of it, and I'm not bothered by it, but I do kinda get the people who are.

but it's hard to nail down what an artist is

I'm in this weird situation where I'm not sure how much humbleness is the right amount to have. I'm very proud of the game as I've put it together, and will defend it to an appropriate degree. Even if someone doesn't like the gameplay or the art or the writing or the pacing or WHATEVER ELSE, it's still quite an accomplishment to have gotten the game to the point it's at. 

This game is already quite fun to play, with a lot of content and depth even with so much more to be added. Self-deprecation is a popular style of humor these days, and I dip into it from time to time as well, but I do still try to remind myself that I'm a reasonably talented individual. I have done, and am doing something impressive, artist or not. 

However much of a success the game ends up being, and even if many elements were simply artistically composited together rather than created from scratch, it's still something to be proud of.