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.'"

Comments

Well, shucks.

[Samantha Wright]

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.

Re:Well, shucks.

[flibbidyfloo]

I think you are putting the emPHASis on the wrong word in the headline. It's "The VIDEO GAME drawn by Hand", not "THE Video Game Drawn by Hand".

Not even the idea of a video game drawn like pen on paper is original. I remember many years ago playing a game called "Pencil Whipped", which was a Doom-like FPS made entirely of hand-drawn figures on paper. It went one better though because all the sound effects were done by the creator making noises and onomatopoeia. It was awesome and hilarious.

Re:Well, shucks.

[Samantha Wright]

I think you've just fallen for some sarcasm—many, many games have been created by directly digitizing hand-drawn artwork, especially for backgrounds. In addition to the very prominent example of Don Bluth games that I gave (which are very literally traditional animation CELs played from a laserdisc), many LucasArts and Sierra adventures relied heavily on hand-painted backgrounds. A lot of fighting games were probably in this category, although I don't know the genre well enough to point out specific examples. Early sprite-based FPSes opted to go with photographs of clay models (Doom), 3D models (Duke Nukem 3D), or live actors (Rise of the Triad), which were then cleaned up in a graphics program (almost invariably DeluxePaint.) Image editing software just wasn't advanced enough yet to provide a worthwhile art medium unless you were already an expert at weaving tapestries.

Cool style, but the animation...

[Spy Handler]

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.

there are lots of games with hand drawn graphics.

[Khashishi]

for example, "And Yet It Moves"

Artists and programmers

[girlintraining]

'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.

Oh, come on.

[damnbunni]

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.)