Make Games

Miyamoto once said that his childhood exploration of the Kyoto countryside was the inspiration for creating The Legend of Zelda, a top-down action-adventure game set in the fictional land of Hyrule. Recalling the time he discovered a lake while hiking, he explained, “It was quite a surprise for me to stumble upon it. When I traveled around the country without a map, trying to find my way, stumbling on amazing things as I went, I realized how it felt to go on an adventure like this." It’s the perfect way to describe my experience with The Legend of Zelda as a child, when my dad and I spent many hours meticulously exploring and mapping Hyrule. As I moved from screen to screen, slaying monsters and prodding the environment for hidden secrets, he would mark them down on our map with colored pencils.

It felt like we were Lewis and Clark trekking across the American West. I’ll never forget the first time I entered a dungeon and watched the bright greens, browns, and yellows of the overworld give way to ominous blues and reds—the sound of Link’s footsteps on stairs heralding the eerie dungeon music that still echoes in every Nintendo kid’s ears. It seems strange now, but in The Legend of Zelda no one tells you where the first dungeon is located. It’s possible to wander into the farthest reaches of Hyrule before locating it, and when you find the entrance—a gaping black “mouth” beckoning you into a giant tree—you may not necessarily know what you have found.

In a 2003 interview with SuperPlay magazine, Miyamoto recalled the day the game was released: “I remember that we were very nervous since The Legend of Zelda was our first game that forced the players to think what they should do next.” This bold and risky design, based on the joy of discovery, had a huge impact on me as a game designer. In Spelunky, as in all of my games, I wanted to capture the same emotions I had on that first adventure.

Unfortunately, that feeling about Hyrule waned with each successive game. Even as the worlds grew more beautiful and vibrant, a feeling of disappointment clouded my initial wondrous experience. Part of it is that I grew up. Zelda is 30 years old now, and in that time I’ve played 30 years’ worth of games and released some of my own. But while it’s harder to surprise me now, it also doesn’t appear that the series is as interested in trying. If the original Zelda game was made only for children, I might chalk it up to my age, but revisiting it as a “Classic Series” Game Boy Advance reissue, I was amazed at how strange and wild it still felt compared to the later games, and to modern games in general. It was like returning to the wilderness after a long hiatus, trying to get back in touch with senses that had been steadily dulled.

In Tevis Thompson’s brilliant 2012 essay “Saving Zelda,” Thompson likened modern installments of the game to theme parks, saying, “Skyward Sword, with its segregated, recycled areas and puzzly overworld dungeons, is not an outlier; it is the culmination of years of reducing the world to a series of bottlenecks, to a kiddie theme park (this is not an exaggeration: Lanayru Desert has a roller-coaster).” Gone is the wild frontier that I explored with my dad and the Kyoto countryside that inspired the series, replaced by something that feels too linear, too elegant, too smooth, too… designed? Quests have been turned into fun house games with obvious goals and rewards. “Secrets” are outlined with bright, flashing signposts. A theme park is exactly what it feels like.

Is a theme park necessarily a bad thing, though? I also have great memories of going to Disneyland, Magic Mountain, and other amusement parks. But leaving the park after a full day of riding rides and eating cotton candy, I’m not eager to go back the next day or even the next week or month. The thrills are garish and over-the-top, but also obvious and safe. Compare a theme park to that Kyoto countryside—Miyamoto purportedly came across a cave during his explorations and hesitated for days before eventually going inside. Why did that cave feel so dangerous to him, even though there was likely nothing inside? Why did my wife and I feel the same trepidation as adults in Hawaii, when we ducked into a little path carved into a bamboo field off the side of the road?

Thompson continues:

Hyrule must become more indifferent to the player. It must aspire to ignore Link. Zelda has so far resisted the urge to lavish choice on the player and respond to his every whim, but it follows a similar spirit of indulgence in its loving details, its carefully crafted adventure that reeks of quality and just-for-you-ness. But a world is not for you. A world needs a substance, an independence, a sense that it doesn’t just disappear when you turn around (even if it kinda does). It needs architecture, not level design with themed wallpaper, and environments with their own ecosystems (which were doing just fine before you showed up). Every location can’t be plagued with false crises only you can solve, grist for the storymill.

It’s easy to mistake Thompson’s assertion that “Hyrule must become more indifferent to the player” for an assertion that game developers shouldn’t care about the player or shouldn’t guide the player toward their ultimate vision. What it means is that the guides must be a natural part of the world, and the world, like Miyamoto’s cave, must simply exist. If a world is independent and self-sufficient, so are its inhabitants. If every part of a world exists only for the player, both the world and the hero will feel artificial.

Nintendo wasn’t the only developer to lose sight of that cave in Kyoto. All game creators must control the player’s experience to a degree, and it’s easy to take it too far—this is particularly true of large studios with bigger budgets that they have to recoup from audiences that include many casual players. Designers often mistake intentionality for good game design: We think that a cave must have a treasure chest in it, and if there’s a treasure chest it must be guarded by a monster, and if there’s treasure in the cave, then the player must find it, and if the player must find it, then there has to be a map that leads the player to the cave. That feels like good design because we took the time to plan it out and in the end the player did what we expected. But it doesn’t guarantee that the player will feel like they’re on a true adventure, making genuine discoveries.

Creating Spelunky was the perfect project to help me think about what a true adventure meant to me. Working by myself on a small freeware game made it easier to focus on my personal vision instead of what other people wanted. Using Game Maker allowed me to focus on game design rather than technology. And then there was the randomization of the levels, which made it impossible to fully control the player’s experience. All I could do was create the building blocks of the world and set them in motion—what came out could be as surprising and indifferent to me as it was to the players.

INDIEPENDENT

So yeah, what does being "indie" even mean? Is “indie” short for independent? Is this game “indie”? Is “indie” a genre? IT’S CONFUSING - WHY DO WE NEED THE WORD “INDIE” AT ALL.

To answer the last question, I offer the following scenarios. Scenario 1: a person wants to make games, and perhaps start their own studio. They type “game development” into a search engine. The results, to say the least, are underwhelming. Dry. Academic. Programming-centric. (Try it yourself and see.)

Scenario 2: the person instead types “indie games” into a search engine. Instead of pages upon pages of conferences, bachelor’s degrees, and programming tools, that person is met instead with pages upon pages of games to play and vibrant communities filled with people who are doing exactly what he or she wants to be doing. Some of them went to school, but many did not. A wealth of different ideas and tools are used. There are even documentaries about making games! It’s not just something where you get a degree and wait in line for a job. You can start making games RIGHT NOW.

The word “indie” is more than just a way to describe a type of developmental process... like any label, it actually provides an avenue for people to explore that process and then flourish within it. It has a real purpose. It serves real lessons on game creation and entrepreneurialism. It offers real motivation!

Of course, it can be irritating to see the term misused, or become a vehicle for pretentiousness and arrogance. Like any label, “indie” also breeds a certain amount dogmatism, croneyism, and other -isms. But the net result is really worth something. As someone who once gave up on professional game-making because I thought it meant a 9-to-5, I can tell you that it’s genuinely valuable.

As for what games are “truly” indie, we’ll never fully agree, and that’s probably for the best. But I can tell you the criteria I’ve devised for The Independent Gaming Source to determine whether a game is fit for coverage:

1. "Independent", as in no publisher.

2. Small studio (roughly 20 members or less).

I choose that definition because it's the most useful one. Someone who is looking to become an "indie" game developer is interested in what is possible under those constraints and how those types of studios operate. It excludes companies like Valve and Double Fine, which are certainly independent but too large to be "indie". It also excludes "feels indie"-type games that are not self-published.

Under that definition you still run into gray areas, but hey, just because we don't know when "red" turns into "purple" doesn't mean the words aren't useful. Just think about someone who wants to make a game with a small team and self-publish it... what should they type into Google for inspiration, advice, community, etc.? "Indie" is still as good a word as any, in my opinion.

So, should I go to school to learn how to make games?

The most important thing to know about video game development and schooling is that no one, whether it’s an indie studio or big company, cares about degrees. How could it, when some of its most prominent members are drop-outs or never-beens? John Carmack, Cliff Bleszinski, Jonathan Blow, and Team Meat are all prominent members of this club.

A degree is a piece of paper that says you can do something in theory - game developers want to know that you have enough passion to do real work, regardless of whether you’re being graded on it. And if you’re thinking of going indie, it won’t matter what other people think - you’ll simply need that passion to succeed or else you won’t. You’re the only one holding the door open in that case.

This isn’t to dissuade you from going to college, per se (I studied computer science in college, and while it was far from a perfect experience, I also gained a lot from both the curriculum and the friends I made there). The point is make something - games, mods, art, and music. If school helps you with that, great. If it doesn’t, then you need to rethink how you’re spending your most valuable resources: time and money (both of which can be exorbitant costs for schooling).

If I go to school, what should I study?

At a regular university, I would suggest majoring in computer science, even if you "just want to be a designer". The design of games is very much tied to how they are made.

At an art school, illustration, concept art, and 3d modeling courses are probably the most useful for games. This Polycount thread has lots of advice for student artists trying to get into games.

At a game school, they will hopefully try to involve you in all aspects of game creation, from programming to design. I would stay far away from design-only schools or curricula - those are either scams or are better suited to academia than actual game-making. Also, it’s worth finding out whether or not the school owns what you make while you’re a student there.

See also: Jonathan Blow - How to Program Independent Games (read the comments as well as watch the video)

Okay, you say make something. How do I start?

My best advice for those starting out is not to get ahead of themselves. It’s easy to start worrying about tools, teams, platforms, deals, marketing, awards, and whatever else before you’ve even gotten a sprite moving around the screen. Those stars in your eyes will blind you. They’ll freeze you up. You need to be actively making games all the time.

If we were talking about painting, I’d tell you to pick up a painting kit and a sketchpad at your local art store ASAP and just have at it. You’d proceed to put absolute crap down on the pad and get frustrated. But it’d also be kind of fun - so you’d keep doing it. Along the way you'd read some theory and study other people's work. With good taste and under a critical eye, you would keep doing that until the day you painted something good.

We’re talking about games, though. I recommend Game Maker and Unity as two all-purpose game-making suites. They both have a good balance of power versus ease-of-use; they’re both affordable or have free demos, and they both have a wealth of tutorials and plug-ins online. Both are used by professional developers (Unity in particular). Grab one of those and start running through the tutorials. When you run into trouble, ask for help. Give help back when you begin figuring things out. Get active in a game-making community.

But above all else, keep making games. It’s the only way to truly answer all of those questions in your head right now.

Also, watch this:

LASTLY, MY TOP 10 TIPS

1. Finish your games.

2. Don’t skimp on artwork. It's easy to underestimate the importance of artwork to a game. And even if you don’t, it's easy to underestimate the importance of having a unique style of artwork. The result is that there are many ugly or generic-looking (i.e. "clip-arty") games failing to capture people’s attention.

If you have no artistic talent, go for style and coherency as many successful indie developers do. And even ugly is probably better than generic, all told. Remember: this is most people's first impression of your game.

3. Don’t blame marketing (too much). In the indie community it's become popular to write “how I failed” articles where the screenshots and comments tell the story of an ugly, boring game and yet the article itself tells the story of bad marketing decisions. Let’s face it, no one wants to admit that they lacked any amount of creativity, vision, or talent. It’s much easier to put the blame on release dates, trailers, websites, and whatever else.

This is the internet, though. A good game will make its way out there. Marketing will certainly help, and hype may get you quite far in the short term, but it’s not going to make or break you - it’s only a multiplier of however good your game is. Saying otherwise is only hurting your ability to self-criticize and therefore improve your craft. It's also encouraging others to do the same.

4. Indie is not a genre or aesthetic. Make the game you want to make, not what you think an indie game “should be”. Recently, the very small and very independent team behind The Legend of Grimrock announced that their very traditional first-person dungeon crawler sold over 600,000 copies. Don’t feel pressured to be dishonest about what you’d like to do - after all, what is independence if not freedom from such pressures?

5. Build yourself a working environment that's healthy for you. Are you introverted and lose energy around other people or are you extroverted and gain energy that way? Or something in-between? What do you want your average working day to be like?

You'll want to focus all of the energy available to you toward creating, and it's amazing how much of it can be lost to seemingly mundane things. Figuring out your physical working space as well as your personal support system is a key part of the solution to this problem, and its vitally important to you as an independent creator.

6. Stay independent! To be sure, going indie can be daunting. There is always going to be the temptation of selling yourself or your ideas to someone else for a bit of a feeling of security. But honestly, once you go down that road it’s hard to come back - every moment you're simply securing may not be a moment you're progressing. I’m not recommending recklessness, but it’s important to stay committed and focused on the task at hand. Life is short.

Also, don't give up your IP or in any way limit your opportunities long term. Keep exclusivity timed. When Aquaria released we weren't aware of Steam. The Humble Bundle did not yet exist. iPad did not exist. Being on all of those platforms has been great for us. You need to keep your hands untied to take advantage of what future will bring.

7. Create your own luck. As an artist, I owe a lot to the people around me - my family, friends, peers, and idols. I accept that a lot of my success was simply the luck of being born with these people in my life.

But it's important to realize that you create many of your own opportunities, too. For example, I met Alec (my friend and Aquaria co-creator) because he offered to help work on I'm O.K. I'm O.K. was a game started on the Pix Fu forums. The Pix Fu forums were part of my personal website and its members were friends of mine I'd made much earlier during my Blackeye Software/Klik n' Play days.

You could trace a similar path from the XBLA version of Spelunky to the original PC version and the TIGSource forums.

The point is - put yourself out there. Make things (I can't stress that enough!). You never know when serendipity will strike, but when it does it will likely be related to situations in your past when you chose to actively engage someone or some idea.

8. Avoid “business as war”. As a professional you’ll need to do business and make business-related decisions at least occasionally, and as a creative type you might not be that interested in that stuff. Hell, you might even be downright scared of it.

Well, I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to be Gordon Gekko to make it as an indie. And please, don’t try to be. In fact, avoid the Gordon Gekkos. Avoid the people who try to confuse you. Avoid the ones who try and nitpick. Avoid the ones who try and rush you.

If you have a great game, there is no distributor you will absolutely have to work with, platform you have to be on, or person you will have to team up with. Always be willing to walk away from a bad deal, especially if it's to maintain your independence as a creator. In turn, be a direct and generous person yourself.

People get defensive when they’re scared. Don’t sit at the table with someone like that or as someone like that and doing business should be fairly pleasant! This isn't Wall Street!

9. No gimmicks. Simply put, focus on making a good game - a deep, interesting, unique game - rather than devising cheap tricks to grab people's attention. Whether we're talking about clever-sounding-but-ultimately-shallow game systems or off-the-wall marketing ideas, a gimmick is a gimmick. And you should stay away from them because they're short-term, high-risk solutions that ultimately cheapen you as an artist, perhaps literally as well as metaphorically.

Certainly, one should take risks in game design as well as in life. My point is that they should be honest, worthwhile ones - those tend to be less risky in the long run.

1. TOOLS

One of the nice things about pixel art is that you don’t really need any fancy tools – your computer’s built-in paint program is probably good enough! That said, there are programs made specifically for pixel pushing, like Pro Motion, or, for Mac users, Pixen. Can’t say I’ve actually tried them, but I’ve heard good things. For this tutorial, I’m going to use Photoshop, which is an expensive beast, but it’s good for all kinds of art and it’s numerous features are pretty useful for pixelling.

USING PHOTOSHOP FOR PIXEL ART

When using Photoshop, your main weapon is going to be the pencil tool (shortcut “B”), which is the alternate for the brush tool. The pencil lets you color individual pixels, without any anti-aliasing.

Two other tools that will come in handy are the marquee tool 

 (shortcut “M”) and the magic wand 

 (shortcut “W”) for selecting and dragging or copying and pasting. Remember that by holding “Shift” or “Alt” while you make your selection you can add or subtract from your current selection. This comes in handy when trying to grab areas that aren’t perfectly square.

You’ll also use the eyedropper 

 (shortcut “I”) to grab colors. Color conservation is important in pixel art for a number of reasons, so you will want to grab the same colors and reuse them.

Finally, make sure you learn the shortcuts. They can save you a lot of time and energy. A good one to know is “X”, which switches your primary and secondary colors.

2. LINES

Pixels are essentially little blocks of color. The first thing you need to learn is how to use these blocks effectively to make any kind of line that you want. We’ll discuss the two most basic types of lines, straight and curved.

STRAIGHT LINES

I know what you’re thinking – this seems too easy to even bother with! But with pixels, even straight lines can be problematic. What we want to avoid are “jaggies” – little breaks in the line that make the line look uneven. Jaggies crop up when one piece of the line is larger or smaller than the surrounding pieces.

CURVED LINES

For curvature, make sure that the decline or incline is consistent all the way through. In this next example, the clean-looking curve goes 6 > 3 > 2 > 1, whereas the curve with the jaggy goes 3 > 1 < 3.

CONCLUSION

Being comfortable making any line in pixels is crucial to doing pixel art. Later on, we’ll learn how to use anti-aliasing to make our lines look really smooth.

3. CONCEPTUALIZING

The first thing you need is a good idea! Try to visualize what you want to pixel, either in your head or on paper. A little work in the pre-planning department can let you concentrate on the actual pixelling.

THINGS TO THINK ABOUT

1. What will the sprite be used for? Is this for a website, or a game? Will I have to animate this later, or is this it? If the sprite will be animated later on, you may want to keep it smaller and less detailed. Conversely, you can pack as much detail into a static sprite that you will never have to deal with again. But think about where the sprite is going to go, and what will work best.

2. What constraints are being placed on me? Earlier, I had said that color conservation is important. One of the reasons is that your palette of colors may be limited, either by hardware (less likely these days) or for coherency. Or accuracy, if you are emulating a specific style (C64, NES, etc.) Also, consider the dimensions of your sprite and how it will fit with its surroundings.

LET’S WRASSLE!

For this tutorial, I didn’t really have any constraints, but I wanted to make sure the sprite was large so that you could clearly see what was happening with each step. To that end, I decided to use the Lucha Lawyer, the ass-kickin’est wrestling attorney around, as my model! He could be in a fighting game, or something, with moves like the “Habeus Corpse Blaster”.

4. THE OUTLINE

A black outline will provide a good, basic structure to your sprite, so it’s the perfect place to start. The reason we choose black is that it’s nice and dark. Later on, I’ll show you how you can change the color of the outline for more realism.

TWO APPROACHES

There are two ways to approach the outline. You can draw the outline freehand and then clean it up, or you can start by placing the pixels as you want them from the start. You know, like, “click, click, click”.

I think which approach you should use depends on the size of the sprite and your skill at pixelling. If a sprite is very large, it’s much easier to sketch the outline freehand to get the general shape and then clean it up later than to try and get it right the first time through.

In this tutorial, we’re creating a fairly large sprite, so I’ll demonstrate the first method. It’s also easier to illustrate with text and pictures.

STEP 1: CRUDE OUTLINE

Using your mouse or tablet, sketch out a crude outline for your sprite. Make sure it’s not TOO crude, though – it should resemble more or less the final product that you want.

In this case, I’m basing my outline almost entirely on my sketch.

STEP 2: CLEAN UP THE OUTLINE

First, crank up the zoom to around 6x or 8x magnification so that we can see each pixel clearly. Then clean up that outline! In particular, you want to trim away stray pixels (the outline should only be one pixel thick all the way through), get rid of any jaggies, and add any small details that were passed over in Step 1.

Even large sprites never usually exceed 200 by 200 pixels. The phrase “doing more with less” never rings more true than when pixelling. And you will soon find that one pixel can make all the difference.

Keep your outline simple. The details will emerge later on, but for now, concentrate on defining the “big pieces”, like muscle segmentation, for instance. It may not look like much now, but be patient.

5. COLOR

With the outline done, we have a coloring book of sorts that we can fill in. Paint buckets and other fill tools will make it even easier for us. Picking colors can be a little more difficult, however, and color theory is a topic that is beyond the scope of the tutorial. However, here are a few basic concepts that are good to know.

HSB COLOR MODEL

HSB stands for (H)ue, (S)aturation, and (B)rightness. It’s one of a number of computer color models (i.e. numerical representations of color). Other examples are RGB and CMYK, which you have probably heard of. Most paint programs use HSB for color-picking, so let’s break it down:

Hue – What you understand “color” to be. You know, like “red”, “orange”, “blue”, etc.

Saturation – How intense the color is, or how intense the color is. 100% saturation gives you the brightest color, and as saturation decreases, the color becomes more gray.

Brightness (or “luminosity”) – Lightness of a color. 0% brightness is black.

CHOOSING COLORS

What colors you choose is ultimately up to you, but here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Less saturated and less bright colors tend to look more “earthy” and less cartoony.

2. Think about the color wheel – the further away two colors are from one another, the more they will separate. On the other hand, colors like red and orange, which have close proximity on the color wheel, look good together.

3. The more colors you use, the more distracted your sprite will look. To make a sprite stand out, use only two or three main colors. (Think about what just red and brown did for Super Mario back in the day!)

APPLYING COLORS

The actual application of color is pretty easy. If you’re using Photoshop, you want to first select the area you’re going to fill with the magic wand 

 (shortcut “W”) and then fill by pressing “Alt-F” (primary color) or “Ctrl-F” (secondary color).

6. SHADING

Shading is a crucial step on our quest for pixel demi-god status. Here’s where the sprite either gets some pop, or it devolves into a horrible mess. Heed my words, however, and you’re sure to succeed.

STEP 1: CHOOSING A LIGHT SOURCE

First, we have to pick a light source. If your sprite is part of a larger scene, there might be all kinds of local light sources (like lamps, fire, lamps on fire, etc.) shining on it. These can mix in very complex ways on the sprite. For most cases, however, picking a distant light source (like the sun) is a better idea. For games, you will want to create a sprite that is as generally lit as possible so that it can be used anywhere.

I usually choose a distant light source that is somewhere above the sprite and slightly in front of it, so that anything that is on top or in front is well-lit and the rest is shaded. This lighting looks the most natural for a sprite.

STEP 2: SHADING

Once we have defined a light source, we start shading areas that are farthest from the light source with a darker color. Our “up and to the front” lighting model dictates that the undersides of the head, the arms, the legs, etc., should be shaded.

Remember that the play between light and shadow defines things that are not flat. Crumple up a piece of white paper into a ball and then unroll it and lay it on a table – how can you tell that it’s not flat anymore? It’s because you can see the little shadows around the crinkles. Use shading to bring out the folds in clothing, and to define musculature, hair, fur, cracks, etc.

STEP 3: SOFT SHADOWS

A second shade, lighter than the first, should be used for soft shadows. These are areas that are indirectly lit. It can also be used to transition from the dark to the light, especially on curved surfaces.

STEP 4: HIGHLIGHTS

Places that are being hit directly by the light source can have highlights applied onto them. Highlights should be used in moderation (much less than shadows), because they are distracting.

Always apply highlights after shadows, and you will save yourself some headache. Without the shadows already in place, you will be inclined to make the highlights too large.

DO’S AND DON’T'S

Shading is where most beginners get tripped up. Here are some rules you should always follow when shading:

1. Don’t use gradients. The ultimate newb shading mistake. Gradients look dreadful, and don’t even begin to approximate the way light really plays off a surface.

2. Don’t use “pillow-shading”. Pillow shading is when one shades from the outline inward. It’s called “pillow-shading” because it looks pillowy and undefined.

3. Don’t use too many shades. It’s easy to think that “more colors equals more realistic”. In the real world, however, we tend to see things in big patches of light and dark – our brains filter out everything in between. Use at most two shades of dark (dark and really dark), and two shades of light (light and really light) on top of your foundation color.

4. Don’t use colors that are too similar. There’s no reason to use two colors that are very similar to one another. Unless you want really blurry-looking sprites!

7. DITHERING

Color conservation is something that pixel artists have to worry about a lot. One way to get more shades without using more colors is to use a technique called “dithering”. Similar to “cross-hatching” or “stippling” in the traditional art world, you take two colors and interlace them to get, for all intents and purposes, an average of the two colors.

SIMPLE EXAMPLE

Here’s a simple example of using two colors to create four different shades using dithering:

ADVANCED EXAMPLE

Compare the top picture, which was made using the Photoshop gradient tool, and the bottom, which was created with just three colors using dithering. Notice the different patterns that were used to create the intermediary colors. Try experimenting with different patterns to create new textures.

APPLICATION

Dithering can give your sprite that nice retro feel, since a lot of old video games relied heavily on dithering to get the most out of their limited palettes (look to the Sega Genesis for lots of examples of dithering). It’s not something that I use very often, but for learning’s sake, here it is applied (possibly over-applied) to our sprite.

You can use dithering as much or as little as you want. Honestly, it’s a technique that I’ve only seen a few people use really well.

8. SELECTIVE OUTLINING

Selective outlining, or “selout”, is kind of like shading the outline. Rather than using black all the way around, we apply a color that is closer to the color of the sprite itself. Also, we vary the brightness of this outline along the edge of the sprite, letting the light source dictate which colors we apply.

Up until this point, we’ve kept the outline black. And there’s nothing wrong with that, really, since it looks pretty good and it keeps the sprite well-separated from its surroundings. But by using black, we are sacrificing more realism than we might like to, since it gives the sprite a “cartoony” look. Selout is a great way to get around that:

You’ll notice I also used selout to soften the folds of his muscles. Finally, the sprite begins to look like a coherent whole rather than a whole bunch of separate pieces.

Compare this to the original:

9. ANTI-ALIASING

Anti-aliasing works under a simple premise: add intermediary colors to the kinks of the line to smooth them out. For example, if you have a black line on a white background, then you would add gray pixels to the edge of the line to smooth it out.

TECHNIQUE 1: SMOOTHING CURVES

Generally, you want to add your intermediary colors at the kinks, since that’s where the line breaks and looks uneven. If it still looks too uneven, add another, lighter layer of pixels. Have your intermediary layers flow in the direction of the curve.

I don’t think I can explain it any better than that without complicating things. Just look at the pictures, and I think you will understand what I mean:

TECHNIQUE 2: ROUNDING OUT HUMPS

TECHNIQUE 3: FADING THE ENDS OF LINES

APPLICATION

Now let’s anti-alias our sprite. Keep in mind that if you want your sprite to look good on any color background, do not anti-alias on its outer edge. Otherwise, you will see an unfortunate-looking “halo” of your in-between colors around your sprite and it will look nasty as hell.

The effect, as you can see, is subtle, but it makes a big difference.

WHY DO IT BY HAND?

You may ask why we don’t just apply a filter from our paint program to the sprite if we want to make it look smoother? The answer is that no filter is going to make your sprite as clean-looking as if you did it by hand. You have total control, not only over the number of colors you use, but where they get used. And you know better than any filter what areas need to be smoothed out and what areas are going to lose their pixelly quality if you anti-alias them.

10. FINISHING UP

Whew, it’s about time to turn off the computer and grab a cold beer. But not quite yet! The last part is what separates an enthusiastic amateur from a hardened professional.

Step back and take a good long look at your sprite. Chances are, it’s still a little rough. Take the time to refine it and make sure that everything is perfect. Give or take how tired you are, this can actually be the most fun part. Add little details to make your sprite more interesting. Your skill and experience with pixelling will show through here.

You may have been wondering why the Lucha Lawyer’s eyes have been missing this whole time, or why the supoena he was holding was blank. Well, it’s because those were small details that I wanted to save until the end. Also take notice of the trim I added to his armbands, the fly I added to his pants, and… well, what would a man be without his nipples? I also darkened the lower half of his torso so that his left hand would stand out more against his body.

You’re finally done! The Lucha Lawyer weighs in at a relatively light 45 colors (or perhaps ultra-heavyweight, depending on your palette restrictions) and has dimensions of approximately 150 by 115 pixels. Now you can have that beer!

THE ENTIRE PROCESS

This is always fun. Here’s an animated .gif that shows the evolution of our sprite:

CLOSING THOUGHTS

1. Learn the fundamentals of art and practice with traditional mediums. All the skills and knowledge involved in drawing and painting will apply to pixelling as well.

2. Start with small sprites. The hard part is learning how to cram a lot of detail into a few pixels, not making huge sprites (that just takes time).

3. Study the work of the artists whom you admire and don’t be afraid of being unoriginal. Biting off other people’s work is the best way to learn. It takes time to find your own style.

4. If you don’t have a tablet, get one. Repetitive stress injuries from clicking the mouse are no fun and will not impress any ladies or gentlemen. I’m using a tiny Wacom Graphire2 that suits me just fine – I enjoy how little room it takes up on my desk and how portable it is. You may feel more comfortable with a larger tablet, though. Test drive it first!

Here's why:

- The visuals are great, but hard to parse

Probably the most obvious clue that Earthworm Jim is a "visual artist's game" is that the graphics looks fantastic but it's very difficult to tell where platforms begin and end, what can hurt you, and what's simply background art versus something you can interact with. It shows in level one, but it's particularly obvious in Heck, where walls and platforms sometimes support you, giant spikes sometimes hurt you, and leaps of faith are often necessary because the relevant graphics are too large to fit on the screen all at once.

- Awkward controls

Action video games need to react quickly and precisely to your inputs, so the animations have to be fairly snappy. Guess what happens when you put overzealous animators to the task? Lots of lag as you wait for long animations to finish (terrible when dealing with fast enemies with small hitboxes), as well as the almost Uncanny Valley-esque feeling of watching a complex sequence repeating itself over and over again.

- Design led by jokes/situations

"Oh wouldn't it be funny if..." is a bad method of designing games, and it's obvious why: instead of Earthworm Jim having any kind of discernable rhythm to it it feels more like you're traveling awkwardly from one compartmentalized joke or funny situation to another. Even with such large graphics you often get the sense that you're a hamster in a maze that has little purpose except to dump you into the next quirky scenario.

Movie-licensed games often have the same problem when they follow the movie script too closely - movies are never intended to be made interactive, and shoehorning some interactive sequences into one feels clumsy.

- Simple and unfair design

Because the artists had little experience with games, they opted for simple mechanics and levels (simple game design also fits more easily into overwrought artwork and themes). But because games need challenge, they compensated by adding cheap hits, mismatched hitboxes, and hard-to-kill enemies. Then, because the game got too cheap, they gave the player 100 hitpoints and scattered random health pickups around the levels. And so on. Many of the tropes of inexperienced game design are on display from the very get-go, and you can see the layers of fixes that were applied to make it playable.

- Too many games in one game

Lots of crazy things happen in cartoons and we expect a certain amount of randomness when we watch them. In a cartoon it might be great to see an earthworm in a spacesuit bungee-jumping with a booger monster after he wins a space race or escorts a werepuppy through an asteroid field. In games, however, it's more fun to play as a plumber who pretty much just jumps and takes you through every permutation and extension of the idea of jumping. Not that Mario games don't have a lot of variety - it's just that the variety blooms very elegantly from the core concept of the series.

Sid Meier described this with his "Covert Action Rule", named after his 1990 spy game:

"Don't try to do too many games in one package. And that's actually done me a lot of good. You can look at the games I've done since Civilization, and there's always opportunities to throw in more stuff. When two units get together in Civilization and have a battle, why don't we drop out to a war game and spend ten minutes or so in duking out this battle? Well, the Covert Action Rule. Focus on what the game is."

The thing is, Covert Action is still a rather fun game, because Sid is a rather good designer, to put it lightly. Earthworm Jim... is not really a fun game (although it remains a charming one!).

Conclusion:

-Behind the Scenes at SEGA: The Making of a Video Game

The credits of Earthworm Jim, which are dominated by talented artists and animators, reveal that the game was designed by "many, many Shiny meetings" (literally, that is the only designer listed other than the level designer). As players, we imagine that meetings started with a bunch of drawings of silly characters and situations, continued with "oh, wouldn't it be funny if...", and ended with "hey, we're running the show here... let's just do it all!" The result is an ambitious stew that smells great but doesn't have the satisfying taste of other games in its genre.

1. CHOOSE AN IDEA WITH POTENTIAL

I've found that there are three types of games that pique my interest: games I want to make, games I want to have made, and games I'm good at making.

Games I want to make are games where the process itself seems really fun. Maybe the mechanic seems really fun to experiment with, or maybe there's a character I really want to animate.

Games I want to have made are games where I'm more interested in the result than in getting there. Maybe it's a "no-limits" concept ("OMG, GTA meets Final Fantasy meets Starcraft meets...") or just a neat idea that's not necessarily any fun to implement.

Games I'm good at making are games that are suited to my personality and which I have experience in making. Perhaps there's a certain genre that you naturally gravitate towards and which you understand the rhythm and flow of very well.

In my opinion, the ideas with the most potential (to be finished, at least) fall into all three categories and also satisfy the requirement "I have the time and resources to actually make this".

2. ACTUALLY START THE DAMN GAME

Writing your idea down is not starting the damn game. Writing a design document is not starting the damn game. Assembling a team is not starting the damn game. Even doing graphics or music is not starting the damn game. It's easy to confuse "preparing to start the damn game" with "starting the damn game". Just remember: a damn game can be played, and if you have not created something that can be played, it's not a damn game!

So dammit, even creating a game engine is not necessarily starting the damn game. Which brings me to the next tip...

3. DON'T ROLL YOUR OWN TECH IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO

There are pros and cons to writing your own engine. But ask yourself, do you really have to? Is what you want to do impossible to do with what's already out there or would you be reinventing the wheel? Of course, if you write your own engine you can make it just perfect the way you like it. But be honest, how often do you ever get past the engine to the game itself? Do you find yourself making game engines more often than you do games?

I made the original version of Spelunky in Game Maker, and it's that "finished" game that eventually gave me the opportunity to work on an Xbox 360 version. So don't ever feel that game-making software or other simplified tools are somehow illegitimate. The important thing is the game.

Link: The Independent Gaming Forums Technical Forums

4. PROTOTYPE

This goes with #2: prototype first with whatever you have available. Sometimes you find out right off the bat that it's a bad idea. Sometimes you stumble upon an even BETTER idea. Either way, I usually find it difficult to figure out what I want to commit to until I actually start making something. So make something!

5. MAKE SURE THE CORE MECHANICS ARE FUN

Find core mechanics that are just fun to play around with. It should be fun to execute the most basic interactions, because that's what players will be doing the most when they play your game. Ultimately, you want this core to drive your development. This will make it a lot easier for you later on when you have to cut out parts of the game (#13) - you'll always have this core to fall back to.

It's possible, while prototyping, that you discover a mechanic that's MORE fun than what you originally thought the core mechanic was - consider making that the new core mechanic!

6. CHOOSE GOOD PARTNERS (OR WORK ALONE AS LONG AS YOU CAN)

Finding a good game-making partner is like dating in a lot of ways. You may think that all that matters is skill: "Oh cool, I'm a programmer, and this guy's an artist... let's DO THIS!" But no, there are other things to consider, like personality, experience, timing, and mutual interest. Like a romantic relationship, you don't want to be in a position where either you or the other person is far less dedicated. Test each other out a bit with some smaller projects, because it can really be devastating when a key person drops out after months or years of development.

Another great thing about having finished projects is that your partners will know what you're capable of and will feel more comfortable working with you. It's hard to convince anyone experienced to work with you on an idea alone, considering how few ideas actually see the light of day (and how hard it is to see the value in some ideas until they've been executed). Good partners will want to see your finished games. So finish them!

Alternatively, find free graphics and music to use online, at least as placeholders (at The Independent Gaming Source we had a competition in which a lot of free art and music was created). Use ASCII if you have to. As an artist, I know I'd much rather contribute to a project that is already done but just missing art. And if you need a coder... consider learning to code yourself (if I can do it, you can, too!) or picking up some game-making software (see #3).

7. GRIND IS NORMAL - FACTOR IT INTO YOUR PLAN

A lot of game-making is tedious and downright unfun. It's not play, it's work (and this is why you should choke out ANYONE when they joke about you "playing games all day"). At some point you'll suddenly realize that there's all this stuff you never thought about when you were planning your project and prototyping - stuff like menus, screen transitions, saving and loading, etc. "Shoot! I was imagining this amazing world I was going to create, or this fun mechanic I was going to experiment with... I didn't think I'd be spending weeks making functional menus that don't look like crap!" Or, you know, there's stuff that's fun in small doses, like animating characters, that becomes nightmarish when you realize you've set yourself up for 100 different characters.

Once you go through it a couple of times, you'll realize how important it is to scale your project so that you don't spend too much time in this inevitable quagmire ("too much time" being however long it takes before you quit). You'll also realize that a lot of this boring stuff is what makes the game feel complete! A nice title screen, for example, does wonders to make a game feel legitimate.

8. USE AWARDS, COMPETITIONS, AND OTHER EVENTS AS REAL DEADLINES

When Alec and I were working on Aquaria, the Independent Games Festival submission deadline forced us to make hard decisions about the direction we were taking and it also forced us to look at our schedule more realistically. Had we not had that deadline, I'm not entirely certain we would have finished! Competitions are great to participate in because the deadlines are very real and because the rewards (recognition, awards, possibly money) are very real. Also, they can give you a way to connect with a community of like-minded people.

Links: Independent Games Festival, Ludum Dare

9. PUSH FORWARD

Feeling stuck? Push forward. Start working on the next level, the next enemy, the next whatever. Not only is it helpful for motivational purposes, but you want to get a sense for how your whole game will play out. Just like writing - you don't want to go through it sentence by sentence, making sure every sentence is perfect before you move on. Get an outline down.

10. TAKE CARE OF YOUR MENTAL AND PHYSICAL HEALTH

It can be surprisingly hard to take care of yourself when you're focused on finishing a game. But honestly, you're only doing your game-making a disservice by not sleeping, exercising, or eating right. At best, you're preventing yourself from working at your full potential and making it more likely that you'll quit. Having some doubt about your project is perfectly natural, but getting depression or falling into illness is not. It's amazing how much you can not want to work on your dream project when your mind and body feels like crap!

11. STOP MAKING EXCUSES FOR STARTING OVER

"My code's a mess. And I've learned so much already. If I started over I could do it a lot better and faster, and then the rest of the game will go a lot faster, too!"

STOP. NO. This is true at some point during every game's development. Your code will always be a mess. You will have learned a lot. It will never be perfect. And if you start all over, you'll find yourself in the exact same situation when you get to this point again. It's a terrible trap to think like this.

Here's a joke: a man spends his entire life working on a game engine so perfect that all he has to do is press one button and the perfect game will come out of it. Actually, it's not much of a joke, because the punchline is that he never finishes it! No such engine or game exists.

If bad organization is really slowing you down, go back and do some surgery on it so that you feel better. If it works but it's a bit hacky, then be brave and press on!

12. SAVE IT FOR THE NEXT GAME

So partway through development you have this great new idea that's going to blow everyone's mind, but you'll have to redo your whole game to implement it? Save it for the next game! Right? This won't be the last game you ever make, hopefully. Save it for the next one... but finish this one first!

13. CUT. IT. OUT.

Oh shit, you're way behind schedule. You have all these ideas but they'll colonize Mars before you have a chance to implement half of them. Oh woe is you... BUT WAIT!

Well, that's great, actually! Because now you're forced to decide what is really important to your game, and what you could cut. The fact is, if we all had unlimited resources and unlimited time, we'd all make the same crappy, meandering everything game and there'd be no reason to play at all. It's our limited resources and time that forces us to make tight games that feel like they have a purpose.

If you've been building upon some core concepts that are provably fun, just keep cutting until you get to the very edge of that core. Everything else is probably just fluff you could do without. Or worse, it's fluff that's preventing people from seeing the best parts of your game.

14. IF YOU DO QUIT, SCALE DOWN, NOT UP

Okay, sometimes it is time to call it quits. Maybe there's just no way you'll ever finish, and what you have is too big a mess to cut anything out. Maybe the rest of your team has quit already. My hope in writing this list is to help people avoid this possibility, but hey, maybe you're just coming off of such a project. And sometimes... shit just happens.

If there's no salvaging it, at least make sure that you scale down your next project. It's easy to set your sights higher and higher, even as your projects become less and less finished. "My SKILLS are improving! I'm learning from my failure," is a common excuse. But I think this is why it's important to treat finishing as a skill, too.

So go back down, down, down, down to a point where you may even find it somewhat beneath you. For example, instead of jumping from your 4x space sim to your 4x space sim IN 3D, try making a great game that focuses on one small element of space sims. And if you can't finish that, try something more like Asteroids. It's very possible that it'll still end up being a bigger struggle than you thought (and/or more fun to make than you thought)!

15. THE LAST 10 PERCENT

They say the last 10 percent is really 90 percent, and there is truth to this. It's the details that end up taking a long time. Sure, maybe you coded a competent combat system in a week... but making it great and making it complex (and bug-free)... these things can take months. The honest truth is that you'll probably do a "final lap" sprint many times before you get to the real final lap.

If this sounds discouraging, it shouldn't. While the last 10 percent is harrowing, I've also found that is an enormously satisfying time in the development. Because more often than not, stuff really does seem to "just come together" at the end if you've been spending your time properly, and turning a jumble of mish-mashed ideas and content into sweet gaming manna is a magical feeling.

It's all about the details.

AND FINALLY... RELEASE!

Holy crap, you released a game! Congratulations, you just leveled up, big time. Benefits include: increased confidence, a reputation for being able to complete projects, and an understanding of the entire process of game creation! The best part, though, is that you have a nice little game that I can play and enjoy! And I do like playing games, almost as much as I enjoy making them.

In The Technopriests, the mutant Albino wants to become a game creator for the Technoguild, to make "fabulous adventures in virtual worlds". His mother admonishes him, "Ha! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to break into that industry? Millions of young people want to be game creators -- but how many actually succeed?" However, with some persistence, Albino convinces his mother to send him to a Technopriest training school.

Albino is a gifted game creator, but soon finds out the harsh reality of the Technoguild - although they have access to the best equipment, they are corrupt power-mongers who are more interested in selling games than making them. In the words of Albino, "I want to be taken away from this penitentiary school and assigned to manufacturing games! I'm not a salesman, I'm a creator!" Later, he finds himself on the Games Planet, the heart of the Technoguild, where he is introduced to the "Fifty Morons", who are, according to his coaches, "a representative sample of our public, like the lambda consumers, with their neuroses and cherished complexes, who wish to be entertained, without ever rising above their feeble mental capacity. [...] A perfect cross-section of average consumers, drawn from all planetary systems, who will contribute their greed to your games. Any game which doesn't please them will have to be remade, until they consent to enter your creations, which will be their creations more than your own, for they will be conceived specifically for their limited souls".

After reading this, it's obvious that Jodorowsky has had some repulsive personal experience with the games industry (perhaps this is why we never saw a Metabarons video game?). His feelings about games themselves, however, are much more hopeful. Tinigrifi, Albino's pet and best friend, tells him, "If the Fifty Morons are bothering you, just open their minds!"

Albino then proceeds to create what must be Jodorowsky's vision for a great video game: "Overflowing the connection, I sent them all the wisdom, all the love, all the new and unknown splendors which were now theirs to attain. I transformed those limited individuals -- those living organisms who didn't know how they lived, why they lived, or where they were going -- into real beings. Thus I created my first game, just as I had envisioned it, without the constraints of mediocrity. Sick of the endless battles, I conceived telepathic heroes who rode on wise insects as they embarked on a quest for the source of eternal life, flying over a sea of deadly blood. After they overcame their worst enemy - themselves - they could awaken their seven sacred nerve centers and discover the miraculous energy that flowed from their hearts. The fifty former morons played with great enthusiasm, opening the seven shining flowers within their own bodies. They all loved it! That night, deliciously spent, I slept like a paleo-log. An initial release of eight hundred million copies of my game would soon transform the minds of children across all planetary systems."

Jodorowsky must have felt a great disconnect between the business of games and the art of game creation, the latter which I am now certain he holds in high regard. This comic book came out in 2004, which makes it seem prescient in light of the burgeoning indie games scene. Why have I never heard of this before? I'd be very curious to know what Jodorowsky thinks of real-life Technopriests like cactus, who, in my opinion, are making the kinds of games that he could only describe in comic books back then.