The Video Game Drawn By Hand 55
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.'"
Well, shucks. (Score:5, Funny)
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No sprites or background graphics ever drawn, scanned in and digitized. They are all written in assembly, usually.
This idea of having artists create artwork for video games just might catch on.
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This is not entirely true. Many graphics are also procedurally generated. But I agree, I've never heard of anyone drawing graphics by hand and scanning them in.
I have started working on my own game as well. I worked in film, and am using story boards to design the game before I have my programmers do the graphics in C and assembler. This is the first time a story board has been used in game development, as far as I know.
Re:Well, shucks. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Well, shucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you are putting the emPHASis on the wrong word in the headline. It's "The VIDEO GAME drawn by Hand", not "THE Video Game Drawn by Hand".
Not even the idea of a video game drawn like pen on paper is original. I remember many years ago playing a game called "Pencil Whipped", which was a Doom-like FPS made entirely of hand-drawn figures on paper. It went one better though because all the sound effects were done by the creator making noises and onomatopoeia. It was awesome and hilarious.
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Everything old is new again. (Score:2)
Yeah. It's impressive that he's gotten this far, but the credulous, easily-impressed headline (and story) left me similarly annoyed. It's basically some manga nerd remaking the classic 80s graphical adventure games. Instead of calling it what it is, they decided to run it as some kind of revolutionary, radical new approach to video games. The guy himself isn't necessarily responsible for that, though. He has no control over how the media present his story. Sounds like an decent guy with a decent proje
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It's basically some manga nerd remaking the classic 80s graphical adventure games. Instead of calling it what it is, they decided to run it as some kind of revolutionary, radical new approach to video games.
Whatever, man. I'm just happy that hand-drawn games are back... and at a higher resolution than ever. Gonna play some Quest For Glory now, seeya in a few weeks.
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Can't we just appreciate this post for the blatant slashvertisement it is? There is literally nothing that's special about this game.
Mechassault (Score:2)
I dunno, but as a gamer, it's my firm opinion that the right ideas are under-represented in gaming. The right ideas being embodied in Mechassault v1, and to a lesser extent, v2. They had *everything* right in v1, based on the tech of the day. Redo it with no changes except more polys and perhaps some additional environments and put the damn online gaming system back up... I'd pay $500 f
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Personally, I like games that are entirely abstracted down to strategic considerations. Art makes games worse. Chess doesn't need art. Go doesn't need art. Crap games need art.
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So I assume you only play chess on lines scratched in the dirt, using rocks and leaves as pieces?
Because if you have ever played with anything like an actual chess set, you're contradicting yourself.
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I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned The Kingdom of Loathing [kingdomofloathing.com] web RPG.
I think an image search [google.com] would be better suited for the uninitiated.
I signed up about a decade ago, and this thing was a huge time sink every day at 4pm at work for a good three years.
Being turn based and turn limited, like the old school BBS door games of yore, one always seems to end up having 5-6 accounts just to get more play time.
Curse you interwebs, my old account still works!
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To remove kickstarter advertisements, I mean, news articles, from Slashdot?
Maybe they can create a kickstarter.slashdot.org channel so those that like it can keep it (or go right to it), and the rest of us can exclude it.
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i second the use of a kickstarter group.
Cool style, but the animation... (Score:4)
is a bit lacking. Actually there is no animation, it just shows you a still picture of a monster and when you attack it or it attacks you, red X's flash on the screen and hit point numbers change.
At least that's the impression I got watching the video in TFA.
there are lots of games with hand drawn graphics. (Score:4, Insightful)
for example, "And Yet It Moves"
As a game developer of 17 years (Score:1)
There are good reasons not to listen to artists in game design. There are often excellent suggedtions on the look from the artists so I don't want to sound like I don't think they're valuable but most of their game design ideas ore not well thought out.
In the end, programmer art is better then artist code.
Artists and programmers (Score:4, Interesting)
'I was disappointed with how little input the artists had into the overall game design,
Most people who program the games are also artists in their own right. Yes, on the Venn Diagram of games, "Good programmer" and "Good artist" is a thin sliver, but this isn't news to anyone -- there's a reason that despite so much money being in entertainment, only a small fraction of games achieve wide-scale success -- you can't force more people into that sweet spot.
That said, the industry would benefit from being able to isolate the programming/engineering aspect of the video part of video games from the creative aspect of its design; But to do that you need tools that are sophisticated, highly adaptable, constantly maintained, robust, and yet capable of being used by a non-programmer. In short, what you need is the gaming equivalent of the Linux Desktop.
The Year of the Linux Desktop hasn't come for the same reasons the Year of the Artist-friendly Game Development hasn't happened; The outlay of resources, coordination, and project management skills needed to build what would essentially be an operating system for video game design, dwarfs what any amateur community can do; And even professionally, organizing it all under one roof is still prohibitively expensive. It would be on the same scale as the NSA's current data center build project -- it would need hundreds of millions in capital, cooperation from a half-dozen competing industries and technology, and fundamentally goes against the current market paradigm.
Nobody wants this because if it actually succeeded, it would rewrite all the rules of personal computing, and our entire industry. A lot of people would lose a lot of money because they're invested in the current state of affairs... which is keeping supply scarce to keep prices high. Injecting artists who do this for fun, and have plenty of free time and energy to devote to quality games, would utterly destroy the bottom lines of companies like EA Games that depend on locking you in and squeezing every penny out of you in DLC and DRM.
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Well there's that, but there's also the fact that just because you're good at making pretty art, doesn't mean you're also good at making a fun game experience.
I personally would rather play a fun ugly game than a beautiful boring game.
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But not enough to not be an anonymous coward about it? :p
I am also a huge fan of KoL, and admit it fully (to the tune of having a couple characters worth over a billion meat each, and no, I wasn't playing back in the bugmeat days.)
Misleading a bit (Score:3)
I was honestly intrigued, but quickly disappointed. It seems to be running on a 3d engine, with the textures "drawn by hand." Interesting style, but claiming the game is drawn by hand isn't really selling the truth. At least add some hand-drawn animations or something. Right now it looks like a cross between Wolfenstein 3d and a random flash game, with textures that are "drawn by hand."
Pencil Whipped? (Score:2)
Anyone remember Pencil Whipped?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy_tEPkvYhU [youtube.com]
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Similarities between Indy and EA? (Score:3)
That's interesting...because it seems EA would like their employees to continue making EA games until they drop dead at their keyboards!
Take my paper money already! (Score:2)
Oh, come on. (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
Aren't most games are drawn by hand? (Score:1)
Take a look at the art books behind some of the big titles, especially the Japanese ones. Squaresoft has published some stunning art books. Lucasarts (back in the day) had some brilliant artists at work, pushing pencils or styluses. There's tons of concept and finished artwork produced by artists. There has to be.
There's no button on your keyboard which says, "Create cool picture".
I mean, I get it, this title *looks* like it was drawn by hand, but still... A Wacom tablet and a sheet of paper aren't ter
Not that new (Score:2)
Recommendation (Score:1)
Dude, you could have saved a bunch of time with this neat software called photoshop...
there isn't even a wow factor (Score:1)
I don't get the appeal. He could have achieved the EXACT same effect by just using a digital medium and drawing. After all, he just scanned them in and used a digital medium to clean them up anyways... Just because it took him a lot more work to achieve a simple outcome, does not make it better. Drawing digital textures, in color, would take a lot more skill and time. So this isn't even about skill. It is about doing a bunch of needless work just because he could. Nothing is wrong with that, but emphasizing