itch.io

Take this with a grain of salt, as I’m just a hobbyist and haven’t done any professional work. But from what I’ve heard from other artists, social media success is not really necessary to be a successful artist unless you want to get all of your work / do all of your advertising from social media. For instance, I know there are a good number of artists who make their money from selling pieces irl rather than online–in that space, being big on social media isn’t gonna be a major boost.

With that said, art is a tough career in general. I know a lot of newer artists who have difficulty finding consistent work. I nevertheless wish you the best of luck!

Definitely feel this, as someone who has a hard time drawing female characters… Sadly I don’t have any examples to post in the thread since I have a bad habit of simply throwing unfinished pieces in the trash if they’re not working out :/

Take this with a very large grain of salt, cuz I haven’t released any of my pixel art assets on itch. But being both a programmer & a pixel artist, here are a few things I’d consider when releasing an asset pack:

• Do the assets have one or more shared palette(s)? If so, including the palette(s) would be very helpful for anyone who has to make alternate versions or edits of the assets.
• If we’re talking sprites rather than tiles, I’d consider including them as both individual textures and as spritesheets. And in the latter case, providing some text or markdown file that serves as an index of where all those sprites are located (ie. separate asset filename, position in the sheet / pixel dimensions) would be especially helpful for programmers
• If you’re shipping the images as RGBA or similar rather than indexed color, make sure the fully-transparent regions are all the same RGB value, and that color isn’t part of the palette. While they’re no longer common, some indexed-color tools still exist and they usually ignore the alpha channel.
• Also consider pre-optimizing the files if applicable, PNGs in particular can be made much smaller while remaining lossless. There are tools you can find that do this for you.

While I have no real need for a rug asset (mostly because I’m a pixel artist myself), I still wanted to chime in and say that these look really nice! Good work and bad pun (my favorite kind of pun)!

Working on trying to nail a particular vibe in my head. Still not quite hitting it, but I’ll keep trying…

It’s a cool challenge, definitely recommend trying it out!

There was a pixel art challenge posted on Mastadon the other day, to recreate one of several photos as a 1-bit piece. I sat down and just kinda zoned out for an hour, and when I woke up this was on the canvas:

For comparison, the original ref is here

Nice! I especially like the astronaut

Wow, that’s one heck of a transformation!

Playing around some environment ideas for my rpg. This first attempt is a little too generic I think, but I’ll get there in a few more tries no doubt!

Itch reads the greater than sign as a quote so you only get one set of whiskers: owo<

Nice! I especially like the rendering on the top-right one

Nice! That cupcake looks tasty :D

I meant to post the hires version of the 2nd as well, but I guess I clicked the wrong file! I guess you can use that to see what resolution the final version will be at :D

I guess these would fit in here. These are some initial planning sketches for a (not game-related) commission I’ve started working on this week:

The final piece will be pixel art, but it certainly faster to lay things out with my tablet. I’ll probably keep using this hybrid approach in future pieces as well.

I didn’t start the thread, but I think it’s ok if it’s the finished version of an earlier sketch post. Especially since folks were looking forward to it!

Looks like some good refinement!

These are great! I love the structures in the second two, even rough they still have a very strong sense of form.

That’s how it goes sometimes! I like it when you start doodling a little and a piece just comes out on its own

Surely they could just comment “ “ though right? Or some keyboard-mashed letters? I don’t see how requiring a comment would change anything at all.

My background is pixel art, so I’m still finding myself when it comes to digital painting. That’s where a lot of the hard-edged brushwork and solid colors come from, in a sense you could say it’s me leaning on my strengths :D

Here’s one from earlier in the week, as I’ve began to recover more concretely from my wrist issues I’m finally able to mess around with my tablet again. The piece itself didn’t turn out so good, but I had fun with it and that’s what matters!

For sure, Georgie looks like he’d be a good buddy. That chalkboard look is really neat, I should try that myself!

I don’t see anything in the OP about making it work just like real life. The mechanics you’re describing aren’t even known to most regular folks anyway, I suspect the average understanding of the tide ends at “water goes up or down at some interval” and that’s totally doable in a game.

I think the styling and text of your page are fine–the biggest concern from me is how those juxtapose with the screenshots.

Having a description that talks about ‘awe-inspiring landscapes’ and ‘breathtaking vistas’ next to screenshots of relatively flat green land with samey low-poly plants and what appears to be a very sharp edge of the world with a default Unity skybox in the back is not a good look for your product, and I think if you want your game to stand out more your best bet is to make it visually stand out more.

I suspect you might realize this already, at least subconsciously, since you tossed a caveat at the top of the page about coming updates. Imo it’s going to be tough to sell users on a promise of what you want the game to be, I’d still advertise (you can never start too early) but focus on making sure those updates that complete your vision actually land before worrying too much about downloads.

Sorry about the long delay, I had some stuff come up and completely forgot to check back in…

So, some thoughts from the demo:

• Initially I had a bunch of critique about the lack of prompts, controls, etc in the game. Then I noticed that there’s a manual so now here’s just this one crit instead: It’s too much. I’m assuming that this is just because it’s a demo, and the final game will space out the mechanics, but 25 pages of instructions is a daunting proposition for any new player. That doesn’t mean you have to simplify the game, just that you have to keep that in mind and be careful with how you present what’s there.

• Movement feels off right now for two reasons–first, it’s just too slow. It feels like I have to hold down a direction and wait for a long time before I really get anywhere, and in a genre that has increasingly moved towards ‘run is on by default’ I think you could do with just letting the player move at ‘sprint speed’ all the time. But there’s a second factor that I think is more subtle, and it’s the momentum. Movement feels slower because the player takes a second or so to get up to speed, and it feels slightly slippery when trying to turn or stop for the same reason as well. I think you could probably remove that entirely, and maybe repurpose it for an icy area later.

• The area you start out in has really poor value contrast, which imo makes it a little tough to see where you can walk. Judging by the trailer it might just be that area, but I think if you better visually differentiate ‘layers’ of ground it could help a lot. To show what I mean, here’s a quick color edit I did of a screenshot:

• I feel like right now, the character art is falling into the uncanny valley. I’m still not very good at analyzing these kinds of things, but my best guess is that it’s the level of detail on the faces. You’ve got something that feels kinda halfway between a chibi anime look and a more realistic (but still stylized) human design, and I think pushing more towards either end would help alleviate that.

Hope that isn’t too much, and the feedback helps!

Also–biting the console until it breaks is always a top-tier strat ;)

Oh, that’s a fun idea for a thread!

My art process is 100% line-less, so my sketches tend to look a lot more uhhh… polished(?) since they naturally have some degree of rendering in them. I made an effort to find a particularly rough page though, and remembered a good one from 2021:

I did all of these pretty quickly in a drawpile session, I was using photrefs ofc but they still have that rough vibe since I was working quickly with unfamiliar tools :D

Yeah, that describes what happened to me pretty well! I’ll try to write up some more general feedback a little later

I ran into a softlock during a fight, while I was messing around with the various skills. This happened after casting the ice spell… it’s not a 100% repro though, as it didn’t happen the first time:

I also have some crits, but I don’t critique other people’s work without permission. If you’re interested in hearing that, let me know.

Well, you could start by fixing the issues that were pointed out. That’s why we pointed them out after all!

Agreed, Itch can be a hard place to get views but this is a pretty cunt-and-dry case of poor presentation.

Moreover, going by the filenames listed it looks a little…weird? Suspicious? Why are there two copies of “chrome.exe”? Which of these 4 files and a zip is the game? Is this even safe to run?

These questions and more are what you get when you present things in a way that’s pretty weird and has little to no detail, if you want people to buy your game then make them want to buy it.

Personally, this may be a hot take but… analytics, in general, aren’t good unless you need to care about them to support your livelihood. Outside of that they tend to have bad psychological effects on people, regardless of whether the numbers themselves are high or low.

In other words: I don’t think it matters, and in the long-term you’re probably better off ignoring the analytics tab entirely.

That’s a good idea actually, pre-made singleplayer scenarios could also be a good way to introduce mechanics one-by-one as a tutorial that slowly transitions from teaching mechanics to introducing the player to common situations and strategies that appear in multiplayer matches.

Make what you will of this, but my first gut reaction seeing the screenshots (before even reading the text!) was “Oh this feels Earthbound-y”. Given that the Mother series is known to have a lot of humor and oddities, I think that’s a good thing for your game’s aesthetic.

Beyond that, the art is serviceable. I think the best thing you can do to sell the vibe is to keep putting in fun little elements to your maps, like that sign with a cow painted on it and the peeing statue (Is the pose on that a reference to Calvin and Hobbes? If so, well played).