itch.io

I think it’s blatant enough that it probably goes without saying but this is like, 1000% AI-generated.

Alright, this might be a bit of a long post but I’ll see what I can do:

The Basics

I’m going to assume the aim here is pixel art, and (since it’s in your asset pack) it’s intended to be used as a game asset, something like an inventory icon or weapon sprite for a character to hold. A few starting notes on the game side of things:

• It helps a lot to give your assets a transparent background, or at least always use the same background color in them so that devs can easily remove it. Some types of assets like character portraits can have a custom background more easily, but with item sprites and the like you can’t really know in advance what background they’ll need to have.
• Another thing that helps is to use consistent sizes, I think most devs grabbing an asset pack expect to be able to use most of the included assets together and it’s gonna be a lot harder if they’re drawn at different scales. This is even more important with pixel art, since it scales quite badly. Ideally you want to make your item images all the exact same size (and maybe even look up some standard sizes for sprites and use those, since there’s a good chance the people using your asset pack will be using other people’s assets as well).

Now, on the pixel art side of things there are a few guidelines I’d recommend following. There are no absolute rules in art, but if you break the “rules” of a medium without understanding them it will usually make the result worse than if you’d followed them. You can find a much longer list over here, but I’ve pulled out the couple that are most relevant to the piece you posted above:

• Unless you’re very deliberate about it, you really want your pixels to all be the same size. I don’t know what your workflow looks like right now, but generally when making pixel art you want to be working with a very low-resolution image, zoomed in, and never scale the image while working (unless it’s to make a bigger copy that you can show people, or you know exactly what you’re doing). From the fact that the rectangles often line up exactly but are all different sizes, I get the impression that you might’ve scaled the image up a few times while working…but frankly I think it would’ve looked a lot nicer if you hadn’t (and it would’ve been a lot easier to put in a game, at that)
• Setting the scale aside, the image is also really heavily dithered (that is to say, you’ve used a checkerboard pattern all over). I would describe dithering as a spice: A little bit goes a long way, and too much of it can make the piece feel messy. While it was more heavily used in old media, this is because screens used to blend pixels together in a way that would make it more effective as a way to ‘mix colors’ like you would with paint. In modern times, that’s no longer possible so while you can still use it to mix colors you need to use much smaller amounts or the image will start look grainy.

The Sword

So, one thing you did well was giving the image the impression of a flaming sword. I didn’t check the name of the image at first, but I could tell what it was and that’s a good sign! I do think you could make it better though, by either giving it more form or less form. In other words, make a well-rendered sword with fire / flames as a part of it, or make a sword that’s more of a flame on a handle than a blade. Right now you’ve made something shaped like a pretty typical sword, but the pixels are just a bunch of messy red, orange, and yellow like a flame might have.

I did my own take, which I’ve broken down step-by step:

• The first thing I did was ‘block in’ the basic shape of the sword’s hilt and blade. You can freehand things with shading, but it usually helps to get the basic shapes in place first so I’d recommend trying that while starting out.
• Next, very basic shading. I noticed that your sword had one slightly lighter side, so I decided to go with a simple split down the middle. The light is coming from the left, so one side of the blade gets more, super simple, you probably don’t need to hear that bit :D
• The 3rd step is where it starts to be interesting, because you’ll see that the base of the right side has some orange to it now. There’s a reason! When looking up references for blades, I found this photo which I really liked. It showcases how metal, being reflective, will often get some reflected light on ‘dark’ side of the blade. While the main light source is coming from the left, and I detailed that slightly with the highlight on the edge of the blade, I gave it a little bit more light on the right to help create that feeling of a reflection.
• Lastly, we have the final details. I felt that the highlight along the edge felt too flat, so I expanded it to cover the full width of that side of the blade (but notice the hard contrast between the two sides–this is helps makes the blade look sharp). You can also see that I added some dithering back in…you could do more than I did, but hopefully this shows how just a little bit helps add interest without detracting from the overall piece. For the hilt, I tried to create some contrast in terms of both the lighting and the overall colors, to make it feel like this hot sword’s handle is made of some other, less flaming material. I also added a little bit of a notch at the bottom of the blade, because I think it looks cooler like that.

Aaaaand, that’s probably where you want to stop if the sword is supposed to be held by characters in a game. Your sword had a bunch of sparks / embers around it, which is nice on its’ own but would look really weird in the context of a guy holding the sprite while running around. Those kinds of effects tend to be handled by the programmers, adding in particles that appear around the weapon rather than being pre-drawn in a static position like you would for a normal piece of art.

Of course, if this is more like an item icon that you’d put in the character’s inventory then you could add some effects like that. So I sketched in some flame effects too:

You can see that I’ve got a couple of embers around the sword, but even here I’m relying more on clusters of same-colored pixels to create the flames around the blade. It’s not perfect, but hopefully it gives you some ideas on how you could improve your sword (or make new ones!)

Resources

I wanted to leave this off with a source you might find useful on your journey: Right here

Lospec’s list is pretty comprehensive, and while the quality of the tutorials in there varies there are some very good ones to be found.

If I had one recommendation though, from my experience learning pixel art a while back: ‘How to draw X’ tutorials are not really worth your time in the long run. Instead, I would look more at the tutorials that cover more general skills such as lines & shading. Once you get your fundamentals to a certain point, you become able to draw literally anything without instructions so building those skills is more useful than following instructions on how to make something specific.

This is kind of my point actually: If you’re asking for feedback on the whole set, but only a few of them reflect your current style / skill level, then there’s a good chance you’ll get useless feedback on because the people trying to help are looking at an old piece.

Yes, I looked at the pack yesterday. What I mean is, it’ll be easier for folks to give feedback if you pick out one or two specific assets from it instead of just linking the whole thing.

Is there a specific asset you’d like feedback on? The art style isn’t consistent across the pieces, which makes it a bit hard to comment on as a whole.

If you’re the type that’s gotta keep themselves busy, this is a pretty good way to think about it. I had a lot of hand/wrist issues for a few years (still do, but fewer and less severe) and finding new ways to work on my stuff while minimizing the impact on my health was a huge help.

One specific thing you can do if you’re working on a narrative-heavy game is use dictation to transcribe your earliest, roughest drafts. The average dictation tool won’t get every word you say right, but the errors are pretty easy to fix and it’s not like your first pass on a piece of text is likely to be what goes in the game anyway!

With that said, I will note that OP’s case sounds pretty temporary so it might be easiest just to think of this as an unexpected opportunity to rest.

I believe so, yes. I’m a Blender guy myself, but I’ve seen some folks who use it and from a quick test run I saw export options for both FBX and GLTF which should be sufficient for indie gamedev purposes.

Right, that complicates things. If it’s a problem of lag, you might be able to turn down the graphics settings…but honestly I’m surprised to hear of a computer that can run Unity but not Blender.

Anyhow, maybe give Blockbench a shot then? I’m not sure if it runs any better, but it’s worth checking.

If by ‘3d editor tool’ you mean 3d modelling / animation software, you’re in luck: Blender is both free and quite actively used at all levels of the games industry.

Dang, that’s too bad. It’s not uncommon to be able to recover your files after the PC itself dies horribly, last year I had a laptop spend the night underwater and the drive’s still working great

So did you get the file back?

I bought it, and it seemed to be using the hiding feature as the previous mega-bundles I’ve bought.

And you know what, coming back to your original post: I think this is exactly the sort of scenario the AI checkbox is trying to avoid. If they had imposed similarly strict tagging requirements for types of NSFW content (one of many possible ‘measures’ I’ve alluded to in my past post) the number of games brought down by this would’ve likely been far lower.

I agree that AI being treated as copyright infringement is unlikely at this stage (I think it should’ve been, but that’s neither here nor there), but with the number of lawsuits flying around in different jurisdictions it’s not a settled fact yet either. If even one of those went a certain way, itch would be in a similar bind as today–just with ‘everything from the past 2-3 years’ instead of ‘everything with NSFW tagging / matching a couple keywords in the description’.

Yeah, like I don’t want to pretend that it’s gonna be over in a jiffy or that the situation doesn’t extremely suck.

At the same time, as much as I’d love that visible genAI labeling I doubt it was actually that high on their priorities list–more of a declaration that they’re going to do it as part of their ongoing work on the site. By contrast, I’m pretty sure this mess is priority #1 for Itch right now since it represents a major threat to their business (for both market share & PR reasons).

It’s still going to take a while, way too fuckn long, just due to the volume of work–but I don’t think they’re being actively deceptive or acting in bad faith here, which is a vibe I kinda read from your OP. It seems more like they got taken by surprise and are trying to simultaneously deal with the immediate PR fallout from their base while also sifting through thousands of games by hand.

The far better option would’ve been to leave them all up while going through them rather then taking them all down before doing so.

This kills the website

I mean, far as I understand it’s not actually at the cost of that pervy segment. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that every game that was delisted is gone forever, when from the start itch has indicated that it’s a temporary measure to avoid having a financial nuke dropped on them while they review the games one-by-one.

I don’t want to completely downplay the fact that some portion is likely to stay down…that still sucks. But from where I’m sitting, it sure seems like Itch is doing their best to preserve as much as they can with the extremely limited resources they have. I think some people are forgetting that Itch has a massively larger library than steam, while operating with a minuscule fraction of the resources & workforce–it takes them forever to do shit because they’re way overstretched.

I think it’s reasonable to say that this is hurting a ton of people, or that Itch should’ve planned for this situation better in order to minimize the damage (this happens to every platform that hosts adult content, sooner or later). But it feels like most of the folks I see talking about this mess are just yelling “HOW COULD YOU!” at Itch as if it would be better to ignore an existential threat to the site and immediately destroy every developer’s livelihood, and I don’t really see the point of that.

Yeah… I wish I could make BGM like that but ain’t mine. I’m glad you liked the use of sfx though, that part was all me (including the lil “Waa!” death noise)

Beat it, had a great time!

Only thing to mention is that the control to switch characters is missing from the game page right now–if you’re reading this and stuck in that, it’s space :)

Thanks! The sound effects were a lot of fun to make, I basically spent 3 or 4 hours on Sunday morning making weird grunts and whacking objects of various materials together in front of a mic :D

I really should’ve saved the outtakes for the death sound lol

I’m not sure how this happened, I played the game a bunch of times and then it started a new wave every frame…

Game’s neat though, I played it more times than I had intended

Just beat it, truth in advertising. Game is either very bad or very clever, and I choose to believe the latter :D

Note to reviewers: Music was not created during the jam period / for the jam. As such, I’m opting out of Audio ratings.

Fonts aren’t mine either, but that’s allowed per the rules…all other assets were created by me during the jam period.

To head off any questions of “why didn’t you partner with any of the composers who posted here?”

I’ve had some bad experiences collaborating in the past, and I have some chronic health troubles that make it difficult to work in a team to begin with. For this reason, I only partner with people on jams if we already know each other very well–but sadly, I know almost no composers and the ones I do know are usually too busy. Such is life!

Hello, asking for a small rules clarification:

Assets must be made during the jam. You can opt out of this rule and the Graphics rating by stating your game uses pre-made assets and > giving credit to the author. Fonts, Logos and Intros are exceptions to this rule and can be made before the jam regardless. People voting should encourage assets made during the jam. PS: Having an artist in your team is encouraged, AI art is not.

Let’s say an entry has stock music assets rather than producing it within the jam period, but the graphics were drawn during the jam–is it possible to do what’s noted above, but opt-out of any audio rating rather than graphics?

imagine trying to sell a youtube video downloader in a world where yt-dlp exists

Hold on–I’d urge you to stop and consider the implications of your last sentence.

creators like this shouldnt be punished over some moralistic nonsense.

This is about disclosure, and allowing people to select what they want to see and not what they don’t (after all, games with and without AI content are all visible by default).

Yes, personally I don’t want to see games made with AI content. I’ve given my reasons, and I assure you that a couple of fangames that couldn’t be arsed to even come up with an original setting aren’t going to sway my opinion. It’s your right to argue about whether you feel that’s unfair, try to change people’s minds, etc. But at the end of the day, it should still be peoples choice to make.

In short, contrary to what a shocking number of people in this thread seem to think this isn’t a fucking punishment–it’s about letting people decide what kinds of content they do or don’t want to see. And look–if you still feel like it is a punishment because people don’t want your content once they find out it’s got AI stuff in it…maybe stop and think about the implications of that fact.

EDIT - Just realized you’re in this thread not advocating lying about this so I guess you not only have thought about the implications, you came to the conclusion that ‘it means you’re lying to your players’ was cool and good. Christ.

Sure you could. You could draw some crap art, plenty of fucking fantastic RPGs have taken this approach in the past and it didn’t hinder them at all. Working with and around your limitations is part of the craft.

I can only speak for myself, but I find projects with visuals that have poor technical quality significantly more impressive than ones with AI art–regardless of how you feel about the financial aspect, in the former case it’s immediately clear that the creator actually gave enough of a shit to try.

Personally, I don’t fight it. If I can’t bring myself to touch something, I do something else for a while. For literal writer’s block, I might spend some time on code or art for parts that are written…or I might pick up a side project for a day or two and come back with fresh ideas.

Forcing yourself to work on a particular creative project can lead to burnout, so I prefer to wait until I’m ready to get back to it. Of course, I have the benefit of my creative projects being a hobby so it’s a lot easier to take breaks.

I’d like to get that RPG of mine finished one of these days :D

One man’s slow descent into madness in the quest for an adequate tileset

Overall, I like it. The one thing that bothers me, at least in that screenshot, is the fact that the furniture at the back of the room isn’t actually flush with the back wall. I’m not sure most people would notice, though.

Yup, seconding this. It’s 100% legal to make a game with the same basic mechanics if you don’t use the same name, textures, specific character designs, etc–all the trademarked & copyrighted bits–but if you do you can expect a Cease & Desist if the game ever gets big.

(also not a lawyer, the above is not legal advice, if you have legal concerns contact a professional to be sure)

If you’re a complete novice, I wouldn’t worry too much. But you could take a look at early arcade games for inspiration–many of these games were very simple (and thus, not too hard for a beginner to implement) and since the medium hadn’t really ‘solidified’ there were lots of concepts and ideas that didn’t stick around. Some of those ideas disappeared because they were shit, mind you, but I reckon there’s still untapped potential to be found.

I’ve done it before and have no qualms doing it if it’s a paid gig. It’s expected that not all jobs are gonna hit your interests, after all.

But if money’s not changing hands, I’m not gonna bother. I’d rather spend that time on projects I’m actually passionate about.

Love the texture on that ’stache!

Agreed! Although I could pick out a few examples from the past the whole latin chanting thing is not actually common overall.

Also, just to tack another note onto your comment:

Serious as a tone can be reinforced in a variety of ways beyond just increasing the intensity of music. While it’s uncommon, some boss fights in games deliberately use a slower, less up-beat tone because it resonates thematically with what’s happening in the narrative. In the right circumstances, an unexpected choice like this can be much more powerful.

I agree about not forming a team with friends, but I would tack a couple of things onto that:

• Doing (short) game jams with friends is actually a very nice way to get into jamming and learn together, since you already know your team-mates well and the project has a very short timeframe
• Likewise, comparing notes / sharing progress casually with friends who are working on other game projects can be (from my experience anyway) a very good source of motivation