How do programmers like myself meet decent pixel artists with common interests? Art has always held me back in gamedev. I imagine there are people with the opposite problem?
Make the common interest a contract that pays the artist for their work. The trope of an 'ideas guy' who wants a programmer to build their idea is a pale shadow of the designer/artist experience of strangers and acquaintances who want free design/art. Finding things to work on for free is not a problem for artists, the problem is finding work that pays well.
One reason for the asymmetry is that volunteering to work on an open source software project often produces systems or tools that make a programmer's job easier (i.e. they scale), for example algorithms or frame works or functions created while developing a game can potentially be reused by the programmer and their friends and associates many many times. On the other hand, the nature of art and design is that it is a one-off and creating art for the game doesn't make creating art for another game easier for the artist, their friends or their business associates.
The closest analog in programming is writing documentation and tutorials.
> On the other hand, the nature of art and design is that it is a one-off and creating art for the game doesn't make creating art for another game easier for the artist, their friends or their business associates.
I have noticed this too. But why is it this way? Couldn't the process be made more modular?
The artist sometimes gets tool proficiency and workflow improvement out of it but the gain and reusability is not nearly as important as with programs.
I think that's only possible if the baseline aesthetics of a graphics pipeline are good, which is definitely not the case today. The shift toward realism is driving things down the same dead-end path that fine art found itself at the end of the 19th century. Most games today are the aesthetic equivalent of Orientalist paintings - technically accomplished depictions of exotic scenes that are vapid and crassly seductive.
An emphasis on reusability only hastens this trend. To get the kind of modularity your after, you'd have to develop a system that's premised on an alternate set of aesthetics. Japanese games of the 80s and 90s were so successful because they took as their basis the broader artistic culture of anime and manga. The tools for creating games followed suit.
One way of looking at it: The programmer above isn't looking for an artist who needs tools and offering to team up to build them. Nor is the programmer looking to team up with someone with an idea for a game and to make it a reality.
Another way of looking at it: The benefits of experience that accrue to the artist from working on a game are the same as the benefits of working on their art in any other context including a paying context. Reusability of software is a proxy for time and time (in the form of less effort on future work) is what programmers tend to get from free software...a function that takes two days to develop can reduce that two days to twenty minutes five times a year for five years. And it comes in the form of an artifact rather than a process.
broadly speaking, the more generalized an asset becomes, the less expressive it is. things that do allow for a degree of modulation like headswaps are often frowned upon or seen as cheap by the consumer. this is the key difficulty: making assets that are economical without feeling cheap.
The problem is that, unlike programmers, artists generally want to get paid (insert here the millions of complaints about having to do a logo for free, etc.). So that's a no-go for most free software which don't have the means to pay anything or don't want to introduce a schism between programmers who gave hundreds of hours for free and a graphic artists who'd get paid for a dozen hours of work.
I disagree and it's a complaint I have heard a lot and simply can't understand. I have worked with a lot of coders and it was always a "joined venture". We worked on the game for the same reasons - if it was for fun only, we both knew it was for free and if the game turned profitable, it was to be shared.
A lot of artists do provide free art (e.g. kenney or the huge community at opengameart or myself with the tutorials and the freeart (http://2dgameartforfree.blogspot.de/).
Step 1. Open an account on itch.io
Step 2. Join an online or local game jam https://itch.io/jams
Step 3. Introduce yourself in the forums of said game jam and you are bound to find artists looking for programmers.
Our solution has been to raise them. My 8 year old loves drawing and enjoys Minecraft, so I taught him how Minecraft is mostly just pixel art. Now he's into drawing pixel art. And he's getting better every week! In just a year or so we'll have an excellent pixel artist for our games, for free :D
Yup, the disparity in pay when I was in the game industry[1] was always frustrating. They worked just as hard as we did if not more and the prospects outside of the industry are a lot worse than for developers.
It is not enough if you have a decent pixel artist who is interested in games. For example I have one but he has zero ambition even if he gets paid for his work.
Very nice introduction. I find it especially interesting to see that in graphics design, simplicity is almost as important as in software development - and moreover, for very similar reasons: So it is easier and faster to change, so you can faster try more variants.
I'm guessing that's because games and animations are created using 3D tools today almost exclusively because everything else is prohibitively expensive.
While every fool (even me) can create/CAD-out a 3D model and then render it (and there are spectacularly bad specimens out there even I would be ashamed of publishing), 2D is an artistic interpretation of reality and takes real craftmanship. Far as I know, most animation is produced in Asia in huge studios and the workflow is such that you record the audio (voices), and draw some key frames after the voice timings by chief artists. The intermediate product is then called a "Leica". Then the artists of the big producers "ink out" the rest.
Personally I can't stand the animation of the 3D variety; it might have been fun/innovative back when Shrek came out, now its just stereotypical and cheap.
I'm not sure if OP is owner of the site, but the BlockBuddies download doesn't seem to be working. I click 'download for free' and nothing happens. Very generous giveaway however.
