Tuesday, February 28, 2023

On art being the weakest link

 


Hai hai~~~TEOL Dev aka nihilloligasan here with another blog post on the hit visual novel in development, Breakfast for Dragons. In this post, I will be whinging about how shitty I am at art.

But before we get to the whinging, I will say that I have been improving slowly but surely. I'm still not at an acceptable level of quality to make assets for the game, but I'm getting a bit closer. As long as I keep a regular practice/study schedule, I should eventually get there. I'm not sure how long that will take, though.

Here's the problem: the year of the dragon is going to be in 2024, and the year of the snake is in 2025.

Why does this Chinese astrology bullshit matter? Well, I thought it would be fun to release the game sometime in 2024 since, ya know, it's about dragons. This is what I thought back in 2019. Of course, snakes have been pretty integral to the history of dragons, so I'd be willing to push the game's deadline to 2025 if need be. The thing is, my artistic skill is still not good enough, so I might have to delay the game even longer. That is, of course, unless I become godlike at digital art in a suspiciously low amount of time. I'm not even afraid of making pacts with the Devil at this point if it means I have acceptable art skills.

Specifically, digital painting is kicking my ass right now. Well, pretty much all aspects of art have been kicking my ass, but painting is my current focus, and I suck at it. Actually, the picture I used for this post was recently subjected to my terrible painting skills. I would've posted the final result here, but I was so sickened by how garbage it was that I deleted it as soon as I was done. Plus, if you thought that sounded bad, wait til you hear about my attempt at painting an environmental piece.

So, what should the 2 people who read this blog take away from this whiny little post? Namely that the game is going to take a while, and art will probably be the main prolonging factor. Yeah, the other assets are taking a while as well (I'm still not done with the first drafts yet?!?!?!?!), but this game is going to take like 10 more years to make because of the goddamn art, and the worst part is, I think I'm okay with that.