The Video Game Drawn By Hand

An anonymous reader writes "Interesting behind the scenes interview with the creator of Paper Sorcerer, the stunning hand drawn RPG video game that was successfully Kickstarted last year and is now nearing launch. Jesse Gallagher, the artist single-handedly creating the game in Unity, has painstakingly drawn out each character and environment across all 50 dungeons. He estimates he's gone through at least 600 pages of drawings in his notebooks in the process, and had to scan them all in — but he says it's worth it to give artists more control over the games they work on. 'I was disappointed with how little input the artists had into the overall game design, so I decided to go the solo dev route,' he says. 'Now I'd like to just continue making indie games until I fall over dead at the keyboard.'"

Re:Well, shucks.

[Samantha Wright]

I think you've just fallen for some sarcasm—many, many games have been created by directly digitizing hand-drawn artwork, especially for backgrounds. In addition to the very prominent example of Don Bluth games that I gave (which are very literally traditional animation CELs played from a laserdisc), many LucasArts and Sierra adventures relied heavily on hand-painted backgrounds. A lot of fighting games were probably in this category, although I don't know the genre well enough to point out specific examples. Early sprite-based FPSes opted to go with photographs of clay models (Doom), 3D models (Duke Nukem 3D), or live actors (Rise of the Triad), which were then cleaned up in a graphics program (almost invariably DeluxePaint.) Image editing software just wasn't advanced enough yet to provide a worthwhile art medium unless you were already an expert at weaving tapestries.

Oh, come on.

[damnbunni]

If you're going to talk about hand-drawn games drawn and programmed by one guy, and you're talking new games, you kind of can't ignore Dust: An Elysian Tail.

It's an exploration platformer with RPG elements, and it's all drawn, animated, and programmed by one person - Dean Dodrill - who had done some art for games previously, but decided it'd be fun to learn to program. And came up with Dust:AET.

I mean, finishing a game on your own at all is impressive these days, as is doing the art for it, no matter what technique you use. But compare the gameplay video in the linked article with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK8M70cKxXw [youtube.com]

It's in color, fully animated, and utterly gorgeous. And just came out on Steam. (I didn't intend this to sound like an ad, but it's a damned good game. Not perfect, but good.)