Slashdot Mirror
The Video Game Drawn By Hand
An anonymous reader writes "Interesting behind the scenes interview with the creator of Paper Sorcerer, the stunning hand drawn RPG video game that was successfully Kickstarted last year and is now nearing launch. Jesse Gallagher, the artist single-handedly creating the game in Unity, has painstakingly drawn out each character and environment across all 50 dungeons. He estimates he's gone through at least 600 pages of drawings in his notebooks in the process, and had to scan them all in — but he says it's worth it to give artists more control over the games they work on. 'I was disappointed with how little input the artists had into the overall game design, so I decided to go the solo dev route,' he says. 'Now I'd like to just continue making indie games until I fall over dead at the keyboard.'"
Sorry, Don Bluth, but this is the hand-drawn game. Despite being much-loved classics, Space Ace and Dragon's Lair will just have to hand over their crown, along with who knows how many other titles, to this one game. Because a Slashdot headline said so.
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Lots of video game artwork is drawn by hand. Just because they don't look like the Paper Sorcerer doesn't mean they're not drawn by hand.
To remove kickstarter advertisements, I mean, news articles, from Slashdot?
I'd like to see a game where the player gets to draw the sprites of the hero; similar (but more complete and professional) to this:
http://www.drawastickman.com/
is a bit lacking. Actually there is no animation, it just shows you a still picture of a monster and when you attack it or it attacks you, red X's flash on the screen and hit point numbers change.
At least that's the impression I got watching the video in TFA.
Meh... I was expecting something more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owQg9CRJgN0
for example, "And Yet It Moves"
There are good reasons not to listen to artists in game design. There are often excellent suggedtions on the look from the artists so I don't want to sound like I don't think they're valuable but most of their game design ideas ore not well thought out.
In the end, programmer art is better then artist code.
Yeah. It's impressive that he's gotten this far, but the credulous, easily-impressed headline (and story) left me similarly annoyed. It's basically some manga nerd remaking the classic 80s graphical adventure games. Instead of calling it what it is, they decided to run it as some kind of revolutionary, radical new approach to video games. The guy himself isn't necessarily responsible for that, though. He has no control over how the media present his story. Sounds like an decent guy with a decent project, but it's not really all that interesting to me. Aren't most indie games made by guys who think their ideas are underrepresented and underappreciated in mainstream gaming?
'I was disappointed with how little input the artists had into the overall game design,
Most people who program the games are also artists in their own right. Yes, on the Venn Diagram of games, "Good programmer" and "Good artist" is a thin sliver, but this isn't news to anyone -- there's a reason that despite so much money being in entertainment, only a small fraction of games achieve wide-scale success -- you can't force more people into that sweet spot.
That said, the industry would benefit from being able to isolate the programming/engineering aspect of the video part of video games from the creative aspect of its design; But to do that you need tools that are sophisticated, highly adaptable, constantly maintained, robust, and yet capable of being used by a non-programmer. In short, what you need is the gaming equivalent of the Linux Desktop.
The Year of the Linux Desktop hasn't come for the same reasons the Year of the Artist-friendly Game Development hasn't happened; The outlay of resources, coordination, and project management skills needed to build what would essentially be an operating system for video game design, dwarfs what any amateur community can do; And even professionally, organizing it all under one roof is still prohibitively expensive. It would be on the same scale as the NSA's current data center build project -- it would need hundreds of millions in capital, cooperation from a half-dozen competing industries and technology, and fundamentally goes against the current market paradigm.
Nobody wants this because if it actually succeeded, it would rewrite all the rules of personal computing, and our entire industry. A lot of people would lose a lot of money because they're invested in the current state of affairs... which is keeping supply scarce to keep prices high. Injecting artists who do this for fun, and have plenty of free time and energy to devote to quality games, would utterly destroy the bottom lines of companies like EA Games that depend on locking you in and squeezing every penny out of you in DLC and DRM.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I still Like Kingdom Of Loathing better.
http://www.kingdomofloathing.com/
Wasn't Braid also done by hand?
There's a lot of JRPGs with hand drawn art and much better animation.
I was honestly intrigued, but quickly disappointed. It seems to be running on a 3d engine, with the textures "drawn by hand." Interesting style, but claiming the game is drawn by hand isn't really selling the truth. At least add some hand-drawn animations or something. Right now it looks like a cross between Wolfenstein 3d and a random flash game, with textures that are "drawn by hand."
Anyone remember Pencil Whipped?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy_tEPkvYhU
That's interesting...because it seems EA would like their employees to continue making EA games until they drop dead at their keyboards!
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I dunno, but as a gamer, it's my firm opinion that the right ideas are under-represented in gaming. The right ideas being embodied in Mechassault v1, and to a lesser extent, v2. They had *everything* right in v1, based on the tech of the day. Redo it with no changes except more polys and perhaps some additional environments and put the damn online gaming system back up... I'd pay $500 for that game. Hell, I'd even buy the new XBox POS to play it, and literally NOTHING else could make me do that.
I own all manner of mech games from Steel Battalion (the one with the mongo controller) to Japanese manga weirdness, and Mechassault is the one that nails playability to the wall.
Can't say I'm in the least tweaked by hand-drawn stuff, though. The more real it looks, the better I like it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Where and when can I play? I can't be bothered to RTFP.
The G
If you're going to talk about hand-drawn games drawn and programmed by one guy, and you're talking new games, you kind of can't ignore Dust: An Elysian Tail.
It's an exploration platformer with RPG elements, and it's all drawn, animated, and programmed by one person - Dean Dodrill - who had done some art for games previously, but decided it'd be fun to learn to program. And came up with Dust:AET.
I mean, finishing a game on your own at all is impressive these days, as is doing the art for it, no matter what technique you use. But compare the gameplay video in the linked article with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK8M70cKxXw
It's in color, fully animated, and utterly gorgeous. And just came out on Steam. (I didn't intend this to sound like an ad, but it's a damned good game. Not perfect, but good.)
Take a look at the art books behind some of the big titles, especially the Japanese ones. Squaresoft has published some stunning art books. Lucasarts (back in the day) had some brilliant artists at work, pushing pencils or styluses. There's tons of concept and finished artwork produced by artists. There has to be.
There's no button on your keyboard which says, "Create cool picture".
I mean, I get it, this title *looks* like it was drawn by hand, but still... A Wacom tablet and a sheet of paper aren't terribly different in terms of how the artist gets the idea across. One just translates more easily into the computer environment without needing a scanner.
We need a slashpot/slashstarter fund, not for hand drawn games though as thats just backwards and wrong but for the gazzillion ideas that crop up on a daily basis, kickstarter my hairy hoop, all please rise and contribute to the slashpot. Or just trickle a bit in to it.
Some of Exile 1, 2, and 3 from the 90's (Spiderweb Software) and almost all of the main artwork in the Avernum sort-of-sequels was hand-drawn by artists.
Dude, you could have saved a bunch of time with this neat software called photoshop...
I don't get the appeal. He could have achieved the EXACT same effect by just using a digital medium and drawing. After all, he just scanned them in and used a digital medium to clean them up anyways... Just because it took him a lot more work to achieve a simple outcome, does not make it better. Drawing digital textures, in color, would take a lot more skill and time. So this isn't even about skill. It is about doing a bunch of needless work just because he could. Nothing is wrong with that, but emphasizing that the game has more value because he did this does not make sense.
How about a link to the game, moron? or is it because they're not paying you?