Shook, I love your art so much.
I really really do.

Relevant pixelation thread, I used v19.

Last one for the weekend, back to kag:



You can play it when we make it when KAG is done. Light at the end of the tunnel and all that, though holy ♥♥♥♥ there's been so much rework. You ever rewritten a 200k LoC networked project in scripts? I'd suggest against it The scripting part is fast and great for modders, but it's been like 5 months of crunch time now, and sales have been slowing due to us spending less time on the version everyone can play now.

I guess I can mention it here though since it's not a public as kagforums: we're hitting the steams as soon as it's done, so we won't be so starving soon! Hooray!

All good. Honestly, it just comes with practice. I've made a lot of shitty art in my time, I've only been paid for doing it in the last 2 and a bit years (I've been drawing on and off for over ten years, and seriously for ~5).
The overdefinition thing is something that just happens when you're starting to draw muscles, because you haven't got the hang of suggesting them yet, so you go ahead and outline them all. Embrace that. Draw muscly chicks, or dudes if that's your thing If you want to keep your art relevant to that fantasy setting you seem keen on, draw warriors like that lizardman I posted (first ref).
posemaniacs.com can also help. Sadly, it doesn't matter how much you understand something if you still haven't gotten the hang of doing it. I understand how violins are tuned, but I sure as hell can't play one Get your hands dirty; good luck!



Neat. I get a really 90s PC game feel from it, haha. Probably all the scanlines and semi-dithering.
Looks fun, very glad to see you making something! That's exactly what you need to do when you're feeling demotivated or self doubting - noone else is gonna make your bullets-in-you-face game (or draw your lizard ladies) so the best thing to do is just do the best joy you can do.

What tech are you using to build it, Shook? I love the power up text, btw

Lizardheim, when you're reading this, you better start making something!

Alright, I'll keep that in mind.

Also I really have no intention or purpose with my art, I just draw what seems like a good idea at the time or what people request.

What are you talking about, that looks amazing.

What i'm talking about? My low self-esteem. :U
I'm glad you like it though, it bodes well for my inclusion of you guys into the few forums that actually know of this!


Can't help it, i'm a 90's kid. :U (so one should think i'd make a Doom clone, but NOT QUITE)
It actually spawned from my own frustration of a lack of games to play, so i was like "ok ♥♥♥♥ this imma make something for myself to enjoy" and suddenly 3 years passed, on and (very) off. That, and i always wanted to become a game developer. Childhood dream, much? c:

Also, the kicker: It's (still being) made with Game Maker (secondary kicker: it's going to be freeware). I bet there's a load of flak incoming now, but it's actually quite flexible when you get to learn its intricacies. The one thing that draws my ire is how terribly large the .exe files become when you include music, but at least it's still only around 45 MB (i believe 95% of that is sound files).
When i'm done with this, i'm probably going to start another game project with Java, but that is a different matter. The reason as to why i haven't made a thread here just yet is because i was inactive for a long time, and because i'm only a short while away from a pretty large update. So yeah, when that's done, you're getting a huge thread in the face.


D'aww, thanks brochaps. I'm really glad that i after approximately 4 years of doing spriting (5 if you count my pillow-shading era) can finally do things that don't look terrible. c:

I return with arms and a hand.


Most of these were drawn from mind, the bottom middle and bottom right things were drawn from observation of my own limbs.
In other news, my forearm is approx 1.25x as long as my hand is from palm to fingertip, and fists look retarded from the top. (never realized the thumb stuck out that far)

Couple of things I noticed.
With straightened out arms, the narrowness of the elbow compared to the thickness of the bicep and forearm seems to be the main determining factor in if it looks right.
With bent arms, The outside of the bicep flattens out, the elbow becomes quite defined, and the interior of the arm bulks up substantially.


Oh, and Geti, in that sprite image at the top of the page, the fence posts look weird because the bottoms are flat but the tops are rounded.

Re: First para-
Me too, on all counts, haha. I'm doing Uni alongside development so it's been a little more full on than I'd hope, but it's certainly enjoyable.

Nothing wrong with Game Maker. A lot of my favourite games have been made in game maker; spelunky, 0space, recently hotline miami. Java's not got a lot of framework support, and Scala is a much nicer language that runs on the JVM (-> can use all the java classes). I'm working on this framework to help improve the framework situation for wannabe java devs, but I'm thinking of porting to scala because I really do hate wrapping everything in trycatch blocks.
...That's beside the point though, best of luck binary bloat like that isn't so bad; you'd have to package it with the game somehow.

Gotta go, bombzero go to posemaniacs and do 1 hour every day of 5 min form studies. If you do, in 2 weeks you'll be way more on top of things, and very sick of drawing naked people. Those arms are looking a bit better anyway.

Scala, eh? Gotta check that out, thanks. c:
Also, the biggest hurdle with packaging the music is that i have 8 or so tracks that i'm not allowed to distribute, since i got hold of them with permission from the musician while they were still publically available. If i can somehow pack it in a file where it can't be retrieved, then i'd totally do that, though.

@bombzero: Upper arm seems a bit skinny in comparison to the forearm, it should usually be thicker. Your MANLY BICEPS tend to do more lifting than your forearms (if not only because they're lifting the forearms), which USUALLY leads to the upper arm being a smidge thicker. If it's not, you might want to accentuate the elbow, since i can see my elbow joints bulge out sideways (or up/down depending on direction) rather than being completely flat.
Other than that, pretty good!

In completely different news, i recently passed the magical 9000 pageviews on deviantArt, so i just had to do something special for the occasion.


STICKMANIMATION

and hatfish

Ah, yah, see I seem to have inherited my physical appearance from the scottish/irish (barrel chested, thick limbs, thick neck, broad shoulders, etc) side of the family, so my entire arm is generally quite bulky, making it a bit hard to compare to that of a skinnier person.

Thanks for the advice though, you too Geti.

1: Scala is very nice if you're thinking java might be a suitable platform for you, less exception nightmarishness, operator overloads (so your vector maths actually looks like maths instead of a series of operator functions), expression and statement equivalence, its generally a nice language; C++ is what we use for KAG in case you're wondering.
2: It's basically impossible to make a file that someone can use but not get the contents of. If you have sprites, to display them to people you have to turn them into the form people can see - where they can be captured by a screenshot, no decryption needed on the users part. If you have sounds, same goes for converting it to an audio stream - can be ripped with sound recorder or other myriad utilities, or even just with a mic pointed at the speakers. Just a heads up

Are we talking about programming?
C# and XNA are pretty good for people who are trying to learn their first programming language for the purpose of making games (fairly similar to Java actually, though it's more like C++ with safety wheels stuck on) although C# isn't going to run on anything that isn't Windows.
C++ is more efficient than Java and C# both by far, but also has infinitely more capacity to let you ♥♥♥♥ yourself over. If you prefer learning by jumping in at the deep end though then do that.

Unity works with both C#, Java and C++ (for when you want to move on to man programming) and is a good development environment in general... provided you're making something 3D. I imagine most people here aren't going to be doing that.
You can do 2D stuff in it too I am told but I'd really say XNA is probably better for that.

Well if you're going that route then there's no point to trying to protect any of your stuff at all. Anyone determined enough WILL hack ANYTHING. It's just a rule of life.
If you hide it, and preferably make it difficult/impossible to simply yoink the assets out the file structure, you've done your part.
If someone wants to jack the audio stream, well, that sucks, not a hell of a lot ANYONE could do about that.

Ok so I did a few sketches using posemaniacs.com today on the little 30 second timer drawing thingy app(technical language), these are the first 8 anatomically focused drawings I have ever done in my life.

(It's a 1600x4800 image for purposes of drawing it and clarity for anyone hoping to view it, just a friendly warning if you happen to still be on dial-up or somethin)


If you want to comment on a specific one feel free to refer to them in this order.
1, 2
3, 4
5, 6
7, 8