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Majima Everywhere: a Goro Majima from Yakuza / Ryu Ga Gotoku centered Fanbook is now available for pre-orders!

First 25 physical copies come with a festive Majima sticker.

Stretch Goals include:

Hard Enamel Pins included with all Mad Dog bundles

Holographic or gold foil covers

🔪 Physical Copies 🔪

⚾ Digital Copies ⚾

👮 Contributor’s List 👮

It’s not a contest to see who can get by without them. It’s not cheating to look at a thing in order to know what the thing looks like.

USING REFERENCES FOR ART IS NOT ‘CHEATING’!!!

If you can draw/paint without references, great!  But if you need to use them, and feel that your art can be bettered by using references, please, use them!  This is one of the biggest tips I can give to artists, is USE REFERENCES! 

Anyone who would dare to attack someone for using references after ‘recognizing a pose’ is a dipshit, who doesn’t know a thing about art.

Do you know who else used references for their art?

Norman Rockwell

Alphonse Mucha

Gustav Klimt

Toulouse Lautrec

Vincent Van Gogh

Paul Gauguin

Edgar Degas

Gil Elvgren

Frida Kahlo

Pablo Picasso

Disney Studios

You can even use other artists work, it’s just a matter of respecting the artist. Just be very careful and ASK (if you can) before posting any art you made that directly references an artists work. If you cannot contact them, let people know or link to the reference you used. Do not claim the work is your own or let people assume it by not saying anything at all-that’s where the call out culture is. Emulating master works was REQUIRED for half my undergrad classes in painting- and my original work was so much better because I studied someone with more experience and knowledge of the craft.

Unless you have a very good grasp on your subject matter trying to draw everything from memory is just going to hinder and frustrate you.

Study the masters.

Study real life.

Practice. Practice. Practice.

Sure thing. The following games are all free or pay-what-you-want at the time of this posting:

Bear With Me - A point-and-click adventure game about a little girl and her teddy bear (who is also a burnt out film noir detective) searching for the girl’s missing brother. Has a cute gimmick where the descriptions of objects in the world vary depending on which character is driving.

Celeste Classic - The original game-jam title (coded in just four days!) that the full-featured game of the same name is based on. Playable entirely in-browser. It’s not very long, but if you’re going for 100% completion you could kill an afternoon this way.

Dead Horizon - A micro visual novel about a gunslinger’s final shootout with Death himself. The story is told entirely in flashbacks during the fatal confrontation. Some twitch gameplay, as you need to be quick on the draw to win several of the gunfights.

ERROR: Human Not Found - An investigative visual novel with puzzle elements about solving the mystery of a murdered AI. Some basic computer science knowledge is recommended, but not required – you just might have to hit up Wikipedia to read up on logic gates and such.

Heroine’s Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok - A point-and-click adventure/RPG hybrid where puzzles can have multiple solutions depending on what character class you’re playing. Some survival elements, though they can be toggled off via the difficulty setttings.

Her Tears Were My Light - A short, super-cute lesbian dating sim where you play as the anthropomorphic personification of Time courting the anthropomorphic personification of Space. Generally G-rated, though the implications of some of the endings are rather grim.

Hyper Princess Pitch - An arcade-style shooter/brawler hybrid about a pyromaniac princess with sick wrestling moves on a mission to beat up Santa Claus. Exactly as deranged as it sounds.

Khimera: Destroy All Monster Girls - A very good retro platformer in the mode of Shovel Knight, if you can get past the “all speaking characters are cute monster girls” thing. Not nearly as fetishy as that premise makes it sound (though it’s still a tiny bit fetishy).

Overclocked - A precision puzzle platformer with light transhumanist themes. It’s speedrun-oriented, though you only need to hit the time targets for achievements – you can take as long as you want otherwise. Includes buff cyborg ladies, which I know is a selling point for many!

Pink Heaven - A short side-scrolling shooter from the creator of Cave Story. Serves as a demo-slash-narrative-prequel for Kero Blaster from the same developer, which is not free.

Princess Remedy in a World of Hurt - An extremely retro shooter/RPG hybrid – think ZX Spectrum retro – where you magically enter sick people’s bodies to fight their diseases bullet-hell style. The ending lets you marry any NPC in the entire game.

An Untitled Story - An indie Metroidvania where you play as an egg. Minimal signposting and occasionally obtuse puzzle design mean you’ll probably have to hit up a walkthrough at some point, but the world design is wonderfully imaginative to make up for it.

Yume Nikki - This 2004 indie title is basically the grand matriarch of games that are so high concept they’re essentially unplayable. A fun time-waster, but don’t expect to make progress without a guide. Content warnings for self harm, body horror, and general freakiness.

In addition, if you can scrape together a buck or two, the following games have a regular price of $2 or less:

Cellar - An arcade-style puzzler about a girl exploring a dark basement while dodging various possibly-imaginary monsters. Each stage ends with running away from a giant monster to reach the exit, so fair warning if you’re not keen on time pressure.

Helen’s Mysterious Castle - It looks like a regular dungeon crawler on the surface, but the gameplay is very different from what you may expect. The combat system functions as a sort of puzzle framework, challenging you to figure out how to beat each monster with the tools at hand.

I Fell in Love With the Majesty of Colors - A lightly remastered version of one of the standouts of the mid-2000s indie art game boom, here you play as a Lovecraftian sea monster discovering the concept of colour. Short but replayable, with five different endings to find.

Momodora III - An action platformer with light Metroidvania elements, though it’s rather too linear to be considered a true Metroidvania. Prequel to the excellent Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, which doesn’t make this list on account of its price.

They Breathe - This action-horror game is basically a masterclass in wordless storytelling, pulling off what has to be one of the most striking narrative brainfucks I’ve ever seen without a single scrap of dialogue. Content warning for body horror.

Zenge - An abstract puzzler that starts out as a simple sliding tile exercise, and progressively introduces new mechanics to keep things fresh. Amazing soundtrack, which is a weird thing to say about a tile puzzler, but there it is.

Finally, here are a few regular-priced or forthcoming games that have good free demos available (for the ones on Steam, the demo link will be in the right-hand column; for the ones on itch.io, scroll down) – you can sink a couple of hours into any of these just with the demo version:

Baba Is You (forthcoming) - A block-pushing puzzler in the mode of The Adventures of Lolo. The twist is that the game’s rules – including each level’s victory conditions, and even which sprite the player is – are represented by objects that can be pushed around to change the rules.

CrossCode - A top-down action RPG with parkour elements and some truly devilish physics-based puzzles. The demo takes you to the end of the prologue, including the first boss fight.

Fortune Summoners: Secret of the Elemental Stone - A side-scrolling action RPG about a trio of young magic-users. Combat more closely resembles that of a fighting game than a conventional RPG, so maybe not the best choice unless you like combos and zone control.

Freedom Planet 2 (forthcoming) - Basically a Sonic the Hedgehog clone that does Sonic better than Sonic does Sonic. The demo version includes one stage, one boss, and all four playable characters.

Heartbeat - A traditional turn-based RPG with an all-girl party and light monster training elements; its style and visual presentation put me in mind of nothing so much as Pokémon crossbred with Earthbound. The demo covers a couple of dungeons and the first three towns.

Secrets of Grindea (early access) - A parody of Super Nintendo era action-RPGs that also happens to be a very good example of the genre it’s sending up. The demo version takes you to the end of the first major boss fight, with a miniboss or two along the way.