What I have learned since I started with Game Development!

[@Juke172]

You learn by doing. iterating over to see what works and what doesn't. It takes time and not everything works like you would hope. It's like the challenge with spaghetti and marshmallow tower where kids are better, because they iterate and try out what actually works and what doesn't. Adults usually try to think ahead of building the tower and fail badly in when it comes to actually building the tower. Having those target goals helps you moving on a right track, but not to make it over-cumbersome, splitting the goals to smaller tasks that are doable in small time frames like days, weeks, months will help too.

[@zeta_cube]

The Path you has passei I've passed during the pandemic, I've learned a lot by mistaking and redoing a lot of projects, redrawing assets, etc. Now I'm so much prepared to work on a Brand New project inspired by Hollow Knight too. So I wish you the best on your gamedev jouney.

[@frizzlefry176]

My seven year old son enjoyed watching this video with me. He loves all of your art! He’s super inspired by Hollow Knight and asked me if he could make his own video game someday. That’s the reason I’m learning how to game dev! Thanks for your advice and tips!

[@nemo9396]

Nowadays there are visual scripting game engines (e.g. pixel game maker mv or rpg maker) that don't require any coding knowledge and are mostly based on understanding scripting logic. They are very easy to learn even for people with zero understanding of programming.

[@sosasees]

i did not know that we still have to deal with this limitation of very old game consoles on today's personal supercomputers: we no longer have to align everything to a tile grid, but we still have to break up the visuals into pieces that are only a few tiles big. thank you very much for this info. 1. i am already using repeated tiles because i like how it looks, otherwise i might have run into performance problems caused by too-big pictures. 2. the playground is only small repeated tiles, but the foreground and background have some big pieces (even if they're repeated often), so now i know it's a good idea to look for ways to break them up into small pieces, including old tricks like deleting half a picture and completing it with a mirrored copy in the game engine.

[@dondashall]

Another advantage of coyote time is that skilled/experienced players can take advantage of it to alter when the jump is initiated to not the end of the platform but actually where coyote time extends. It's something we expect and I feel that many platformers are working with that assumption as well, I've in-fact played platformers that require you to do this - this has its own problem in that if it's required than it needs to be taught. Ideally coyote time should be a buffer for inexperienced players and something experienced players can take advantage of.

[@Fareons]

Lots of things to comment here: -As always, this is great advice. You are building an amazing channel here -I personally struggle with how large I should draw my assets; I always go with “as large as possible” to the point where the procreate limit on layers comes into play. The question is, however: how much should I downscale them when I import them into unity? (I realize you use Godot, but I suppose it is not that different) -I had no idea that reusing assets would cost me less memory. Damn, that IS good to now. -I really love the dry humor you go for in your videos! -You have to show us your game at this point, man. I feel as if you are teasing us with it! Seriously, even if it is just a short part of a short level. I can tell it is a platformer, but there has to be more to it. -As a request, I’d love a video on particle effects; how much is too much, how to blend it into the parallax and so on. -Loved the mushroom at the end!

[@Nonsensical2D]

I appreciate it :) -I think when it comes to downscaling you kind of have to take into account that your screen will either display 1080p or 4k, if we suppose you have 1080p resolution, then an asset that is the size of 1/10th of your screen, would need to be something like 108x192 pixels in order to not require upscaling (or be blurred). But if the asset is say 500x500 pixels but it still occupies 1/10th of your screen, then its not really as if those extra pixels will be displayed anyway, so you might as well downscale. There is a bit more that goes into it, sometimes you don't really need the xtra performance, sometimes you can even have an asset really downscaled (technically too small and low res) because it might be behind a shader anyway. -You should be able to see the memory usage of each texture in your inspector or debugger. I think one of the more famous examples of reusing assets is from super mario bros where the clouds and the bushes are actually the exact same texture,from what I recall they had to do it due to memory limitations, there are quite a few articles on it so shouldnt be difficult to find if you are curious :). There is some tradeoff when using small assets, because you increase the number of draw calls that are necessary to display the scene, but it all kind of depends on the scene and you won't really impact performance unless you reach an immense amount of draw calls. -As for the game, I have been hesitant to show anything because I started it with two others, but the development has been really on and off and I don't want to showcase something that I don't quite have a timeline for yet. That is in part why I started the demon character, cause I want to make a small game alone where I can really show the progress completely. -Yes, I have a video on particle effects in the works, I still intend to do one on shaders, one on environment animations and one on particle effects. The thing that kept me from making it straight away was that I was unsure if I should just do a video on my current process for using particle effects, or if I should also look into some more advanced particle effects that I know of, but haven't yet learned how to do. -Haha :)

[@Fareons]

@@Nonsensical2D Wow, thank you very much for the thorough answer! Those are some great tips on the upscaling/downscaling!

[@greguar86]

i kind of like the frame by frame animation of the previous character

[@greguar86]

there is great talk about "coyote run" in dead cells - they help player so much with movement

[@Nonsensical2D]

Is it a GDC talk? I don't think I've seen it, going to look for it :)

[@greguar86]

@@Nonsensical2D you will love it! its called- "Dead Cells: What the F*n!?" and "How Dead Cells Cheated to Make the Game More Fun"

[@Abby-ug4xc]

I really like your old character, it's so cute!! What aspects did you dislike about Hoa? (It's on my list to play) Also, could you do a video on how exactly to avoid lag with larger assets?

[@Nonsensical2D]

Yes I will probably make a video on it in the future, I just haven't quite figured out how I would cover it, but I recommend that you read a blog post called "Choosing the resolution of your 2D art assets" written in 2018 on the unity blog. It covers quite a lot on the topic and is useful even if you don't use Unity (I don't)

[@Abby-ug4xc]

@@Nonsensical2D Thanks for the recommendation, I will!

[@greguar86]

good video as always! i hope for more indie game analysis

[@Nonsensical2D]

Ye, I like doing analysis videos, but they take an insane amount of time to do, mostly because I actually need to play the games first. I cant even do it on older games that I've finished, because I simply don't have any footage of it ^^

[@manuunaise]

Honestly I like the general look of the old version way more. But yes it has a lot of problems

[@Nonsensical2D]

Ye, I can kind of get that. It's one of the reasons I didn't really want to frame things too much in terms of me being a 'terrible artist', a lot of the assets look quite nice, even by my current standards. There are aspects of the old character that are quite cute and quirky too, but it is frankly a bit all over the place in terms of stylistic choices and it took me an incredibly long time to make, even though it is as unfinished as it is. It is why I so often stress the importance of keeping it simple but 'decent and coherent', because you have such a huge time-constraint when you are a solo artist or solo developer, as much as it is about making something look nice, it's also about getting decent results quickly.

[@blasterxt9]

Did you notice there is light circle follow the game character in Godot game engine . You can notice this in 0:05 to 0:07

[@Nonsensical2D]

the old game art is made in unity, but ye, I attached a light circle onto the character. You can see that they do this in hollow knight as well, it can potentially help with readability just a bit :)

[@blasterxt9]

@@Nonsensical2D I use godot so I also notice this that's why I asked i thought that It was a bug.

[@bluespider6537]

Any tips for the line art? I really like your line art it's so neat and fits so well with the background (the new game art I mean)

[@Nonsensical2D]

There are a few things that go into it. A lot of reasons why my lineart looks like it does is thanks to procreate to be honest. I use a standard brush called syrup which drags behind a bit when drawing, but it makes it just slightly smoother. I also sometimes (but honestly not that often, use procreates auto-adjust lines, to make smooth curves quickly). I would say that the main reason why it is quite 'neat' is that I draw quickly in one sweep. It might seem counterintuitive, but you do on average get quite clean lines if you just learn not to worry about it, your hands tend to be significantly more stable when doing quick motions vs when going slow and methodical. You could get similar results by just using a standard round brush with full opacity in most drawing software. A lot of how I've learnt lineart is actually by looking at traditional doodle-artists, especially those that don't do any sketching.

[@Fareons]

@@Nonsensical2D I hope you don’t mind, but I have another question: why do you use the syrup brush? I mean, you are probably aware that the “dragging behind” effect can be applied to any brush (streamline in the brush settings), but the syrup brush always looks too pixelated and rough for my taste. Why would you want these rough pixels shown? I assume it is a stylistic thing, but I don’t see the same brush used on your character (or maybe you did use the same brush and I just can’t see it, haha!) …I hope I’m not overwhelming you with questions

[@Nonsensical2D]

The character also uses the syrup brush :) I just kind of wanted a brush with 100% hardness for doing lineart and I got used to the syrup brush and the inka brush. The inka brush however does have very rough pixels and quite a distinct texture, and now I mostly use that one for texturing and syrup for lineart. So the truth is that I am not really into trying different brushes, I am more of a round brush type of person for the most part, so while I am aware that you can adjust the settings of brushes, I have never really played with it, I just tried some and found 10 that I liked, and now my style is somewhat reliant on those 10 :)

[@Fareons]

@@Nonsensical2D Thanks! That clears it up for me! I was worried that there was some benefit to using the syrup brush that I had no idea about!

[@babyl]

​@@Nonsensical2Dits kinda silly how u always avoid complimenting urself. u never call ur art good

[@costelinha1867]

Adding that variable jump height isn't that hard, you just check if the player released the jump button during the jump and if he did do so, you cut the jump velocity back to zero and let the game gravity do the rest. Wall jumps on the other hand.... those are the devil...

[@nemo9396]

3:36 I'm not going to say you're original because different people will approach the same problem with the same solutions (heck, I came up with the same moss solution too) because they draw experiences from generally very similar realities, but I can say some of those solutions are as believable as the function they serve. Players will normally stop for a few seconds at most to think about how much an asset makes sense in the game world, but if they're in the flow of the game they'll pass by it, question it and accept it, unless it's a really jarring example or it's not a case of an odd-one-out here and there but more of a case of it's-all-over-the-place. What I mean to say here is don't stress over it tooooo much, and not absolutely everything needs to make sense, because it might just be ignored altogether by the average player and won't detract from the gaming experience. Above all don't sacrifice function for the sake of form, that your world is so set into the natural laws that it restricts you and is dull.

[@Nonsensical2D]

Ye, I agree on both accounts. As I kind of hinted at in the video, I wouldn't make every platform seamlessly integrate into the background nowadays, i feel that it really restricts your level design and visuals. But even though It was what I actually wanted to do back then, I kind of failed at it :)

[@songediter9101]

what software do you use to draw your animation?

[@Nonsensical2D]

My old art used to be drawn using Krita which is a free drawing software, all my new art is made in procreate on the ipad :)

[@99JasonKim]

still better than me in 2 years😂

[@PHOBOS1530]

Keep it

[@d00mnoodle24]

And then toxic hollow knight fans will say you copied it's artstyle without even knowing why it looks similar. The HK fandom draws comparisons and conclusions to quickly, being overly rude to aspiring indie game devs. Maybe HK ran into the same issues as you and found this to be the best solution. That doesn't mean they own the artstyle

[@Nonsensical2D]

I think it is going to change with time, a lot of the time the comparisons being made aren't even for artstyles that are that similar. But as more games come out, people are going to get better at differentiating styles. No one really says 'doom or wolfenstein-like' to fps games. But ye, I think doing solo indie dev you will probably end up with either pixel art or a style that reminds you of hollow knight, it feels next to impossible to make an entire game with a complex art style on your own.

[@d00mnoodle24]

@@Nonsensical2D Even though the art style itself can be pretty similar, character designs and such can still vastly differ, even when they're in the same art style. Look for example at crowsworn, it uses a similar outline and shading aproach to hk but the designs are vastly different. Still some people out there acuse them of copying. It's a shame but i hope it's a vocal minority. Still it must suck having put in so much time and effort into your game only for it to be bashed as a clone when you finally share it with the world. Although i'm no game dev myself, I'll always try to say something positive. And if i can't find anything positive to say it's better to either give constructive criticism or nothing at all. Game devolpment takes a LOT of time and that deserves respect wether ot not they were inspired by another game or not...

[@vcdgamer]

1:15 In my game, I also didn't like having floating platforms for no reason because it felt mechanical or otherworldy compared to the natural world I was creating. So, the trick I used was what I started with in one of my game's earlier videos, i used that same tree branch anytime there is a grassy platform whatsoever, then i used a stalagmite or stone pillar for rocky platforms. And i arrange them in a way that feels random yet connected. But the consistent apoearance made people know that once they see a branch, there is a platform to land on, and it helped with contrast. Another game that seemes to use that principle as well was Ori too. Almost all their platforms had another asset linked to it. Here's my gane build in case you're.interested. I applied all I mentioned in its story mode section. :-) Love the analysis as usual, and surprised you actually roasted your own art. Not many devs have the courage to do that. vcdgamer.itch.io/the-inbetween

[@vcdgamer]

Realized I commented a bit too early and noticed you already talked about the solution to the earlier problem. My bad.

[@Nonsensical2D]

Ye, I was actually thinking of Ori as well, but it felt like I could recall some artificial platforms, but I wasn't really sure. The solution you are describing sound similar to what I did when I 'remade' this scene :) It's always fun to look back at your old stuff every once in a while :D

[@vcdgamer]

@@Nonsensical2D indeed. Also, the solution I mentioned, I actually learned that from you.😌