Aesthetic Driven Development: Choosing Your Art Before Making a Game

[Music] hi everyone my name is Vladimir and I'm here to give you my dog called esthetic driven development or basically how we started making an art before we made a game how it worked out for us and how you can do the same so before we actually proceed I wanted to give you some background information or Who I am or rather who we are I run a studio of two people called cold wild games it is located in Riga Latvia and my partner Helen she does art and writing and I do pretty much everything else occasionally we hire freelancers to do the music for us we've been making games since 2016 and we also own a pair of cockatiels or we are birds for our Australian friends the cage is a metaphor for us working from home even though they leave it much more often than we do and offer their images and

tweets in this presentation we're made by Helen that's her twitter handle there below anyway so to give a bit more background before 2019 the game development processes for us was rather straightforward we would build a prototype that we enjoyed playing then we would start figuring out the graphics essentially turned out into the game we've made three smaller less serious games up to this point and they had a very moderate success for what it's worth our most successful game called laser galaxy has achieved 6000 sales over two years and I suppose some of you who might be watching this presentation they might cry over those numbers and that's alright actually I still think it's not it would not be enough to maintain the studio sustain the studio

by itself so the move was to change the approach and one of the things that we did in 2019 rather than start building a prototype with gameplay in mind we focused on aesthetics and art first and found out what our audience liked and to fast forward a bit the game has sold around 10,000 copies in seven months so the real bankruptcy that is threatening us is the moral bankruptcy probably and the only one so far so I actually believe this happened before because we focused on creating the attractive art first before we actually begin making the game and in this talk I'm I'll try to outline the process and approach of how we did it and how you can systematically try to do the same right so first of all in 2018 while I was boarding the game our previous game to consoles Helen did not

have much to do and I just essentially told her to draw in the October trend which started in October which basically involved environment as a subject and each daily image would require an artist to draw a painting using more colors than before so there was a color limit there was also a time constraint on one day to make an evening to make a posting and for most days she tried to post it on one time at once similar time it was in the evenings so that both European and American audiences would see it but since I treated the games as an art more than a business but at the same time I don't want to dry off conger I decided to approach this whole thing as an

experiment to see where it leads to us the idea is to make something that everybody likes us and people who would play our games and then to see if the game can materialize right so after this if we treat it as an experiment we need some sort of a criteria to evaluate the results and I think we've created while I've created four different things that I want to evaluate the games the art with first of all I think we both of us need to like something that has been created because as a studio of two people it makes sense that both of us would like working on something together and I think for the smaller indie Studios it's much easier to come to an agreement and to find something that everyone in team is passionate about afterwards we would

look up the response on Twitter how has the image being perceived at every slide I will try to give the amount of likes retweets and comments how about user reaction and how they would like the image or not overall these of creation also matters because if you think about it where are two people team so we would need a way to make hundreds of assets together either to establish a soulless acid production container or just to include our limitation to create the quality games pick whichever you like out of this tool so we really wanted to have a chance to create the art that looks decent but would not take so much effort that we'd never publish a game afterwards we would also consider the game design constraints because even if

the image is created it kind of implies the style of the game that you can come up with and not images are equally appropriate for different game types and we don't like all the genres so we have those four things but what are the baselines I think it's hard to measure liking or disliking images by themselves so to take it as a baseline our usual game related twits head maybe under 20 likes one or two comments mostly from our friends thank you and one to five retweets and I wish I'd say I was cherry-picking those ones here by to be honest this is what the usual twits look like I kind of like them but I'm the biased guy here so the idea is we would look for everything that is better than that at the time Helen had roughly 500 followers at the start of the experiment and close to thousands

were a bit more at the end of it so how did it go I'll try to give some descriptions of the images that turned out and why they did or did not work out and for example let's start with this one I call this the forest Hut let me move myself here so this is the forest Hut and I think both of us like this one the response was also pretty good with 72 likes and 12 retweets but if you think about it it's not easy to create something like this first of all first of all this is an isometric perspective and pixel art is kind of harder with isometric perspective and that plus the amount of details here is a bit well that's a lot of detail to be honest so even though we could imagine it being a part of some tactical RPG game it's ultimately a pass for us because we would not be able to afford

to create a game like this everyone's situation is different but this is how I would evaluate it then we had a story and personally I'm a huge fan of the birds I think Helen likes birds too and the stork had a good amount of likes and retweets but again this color palette was it was kind of tricky to make it right but even then the resolution is lower the pre than the previous images but what kind of game do you imagine would this acid maybe it would be a decent puzzle game but it's not really our genre and who makes non erotic puzzle games in 2020 so that's a no next the market so we liked it and I personally really liked the vibrant colors and overall it just seems aesthetically pleasing to look at plus it was not very hard to make but

what killed this one was the amount of attention because only 33 likes and one retweet completely comparing to what we've been getting before was clearly not enough for us to actually consider it as a possible game art even though both of us liked it next are the ruins and I personally did not like it that much so opinions were different but it had a lot of attention but I then again on the other side I don't think it would be easy to create this because of the higher resolution and the amount of detail so that's the best in the end of the experiment we had a few images that would fit as the game sprite and I wanted to go through some of those concepts just to show the way how I think first of all two of them are asymmetric which as you might have guessed from before is a point of skepticism for me but I'm not against asymmetric images per se if we look at

the windmill on the Left where is it water mill yeah this is the water mill if we look at the water mill on the left it still looks kind of generic despite the good reply and you would probably not remember looking at it the waterfall is a bit more appealing but again it's hard to imagine the type of game that I would put it into on the other end why we like the temple there are a few reasons for that first of all the temple offers the unique style and for the artists who only start to do something like this for us we're really struggling with the style for our games because sometimes you feel like you can draw but it's not really memorable enough we're distinguishable enough and finding the right style for the artist is the real struggle and we still haven't figured it out in the end but it felt like the

right step on the in the right direction plus if you think about it the temple consists of small replicable geometric shapes that you can use for other types of buildings or the world so ultimately I think in this case the temple was a go for this reasons so we like the floating temple and what do we do next for me I don't feel comfortable diving into the project right away and I think it makes sense to do some more experimentations without huge commitment and for us the logical step would be to take idea further and Hellen spend a few hours to just draw how the trees of this world would look like and she put it on Twitter again with more relevant tags like pixel art and gamedev at that point and it still got a pretty decent response where it isn't for us 105 likes that kind of validated the idea and

served as a positive sign to show us that we may need to pursue the idea further the next and somewhat a final step before creating the actual prototype for us is to commit even more our our time and resources and resources into this Helen drew ships and some more potential Islands how they would look in the game we combined them into small sequences of presumably gameplay gifts or concept art let me move myself and every one of them had quite a bit of attention I mail mostly made those gifts on my Saturdays and Sundays and posted them on screenshot Saturday just to see how people responded and response was quite well in total we spend roughly two months for this whole process it was at 25 work days before between drawing and choosing then roughly 15 part-time days

to validating our idea further with those gifts and I think overall those 40 days is a bit more than 25% of the time that we spent on the project together before the early access launch and I think I treated it as an investment and you should too if you do something like this because it allowed us to find the audience for the project before we actually started to working to work on it and in the end it just allows us to work on something that both we and audiences want of course if you can't afford it expanding this window of finding art is definitely worth it I think because the this can be beneficial and open open more options to you of course you'd still need some constraints to stay focused because for example I don't think I would do it more than three months in advance because there should be like the stop sign and

fine point where you decide I like this art and we should give it a go anyway so we have the art and it becomes clear that audience really likes this style and won't poor so what actually happens with the game and I think at this point you really need to acknowledge the potential art style effects on the gameplay right from the start because in our case like to see this horizontal building overlay and display I was maybe thinking of something like Kingdom at the start but I wanted to make a more complex building change and it becomes clear that you cannot have a lot of those buildings on screen at the same time so you cannot put a very complex production chain into the game with limited screen space because then player would need to scroll around the screen a lot and it definitely affects the gameplay experience and user experience

and I was against it if you think about we also wanted to create it as a non violent game just our preference but if you consider the combat based game prototype then 2d combat even if it is even if it is strategic game can become quite limited so overall I think hitting the right notes without might seem like a treasure but if you can find the gameplay ideas with it if we would not be able to find the fun gameplay ideas with it we would not continue it but limiting the amount of buildings to 6 where 7 per screen did wonders for us because that allowed us to look for other options so the constraint is what game would you make if you had six or seven buildings on the screen or on the level at the same time and I think it contributed to the next step for us so we can't have many islands those

small Isles on one screen and but we still want some sort of a management game what do we do in our case we added this map as a sort of a glue to connect the islands together and it really added this exploration aspect into the game which made the map exploration and trading way more fun because players would be able to find different spots in the map with different prices one on the goods and then sell them or buy them in a profitable manner the map with free movement also allow us to add more quests or just more memorable islands that would not serve a lot of the gameplay purpose but more of an experience purpose because we want players to experience the game and so overall I think this glue worked because of the constraints that we've set first from the art style and then from our own artificial constraints based on this island amount per screen and I realized

that if you look at this presentation you might think wow this have been easy like you can figure those things out and maybe you are right but for us it was a real struggle to come up with something that is both pretty and playable because I don't want to take away the fun from the gameplay but it sometimes is still very hard to come up with something potentially fun for other players anyway so you have something that people like and what happens next for us since it became clear that audience likes what we are doing we've tried to capitalize on those pretty graphics and we've created the steam page I think two or two-and-a-half months after we started actively developing the game at this stage we just made a simple 30-second trailer from all of the features that we had in the game at that point rather in the prototype and there were five screenshots but the point was to start gathering wish lists so we

published the steam page and as soon as we had something new we would post it on Twitter and update the steam page with screenshots thus it would lead people to Whistler as the game well just get us more attention of the game another vital point for me was the remake of trailers the first trailer was really very simple but then as time progressed I was updating the trailers reuploading them re-- announcing them and it also gave us a bit more media coverage if I can say the word media mostly people were retweeting it or just looking at on youtube so i think the innovations were a good thing on the downside i think we had some of the complaints that on game launch was that people have seen everything on our twitter before they've launched the game but it was the minority and actually that's a valid argument and we've tried to be more secretive about our development later on so we have a steam page with directed audiences from

Twitter from screenshot Saturday from pixel art tags to our game and also the weather factory studio helped quite a lot with their Twitter exposure so in the end when the game was nearing its launch we had five roughly 5000 wish lists in five months and we launched the game in early access what happens then there's also a quite good because we had close to 6,000 sales in first two months it hit 10,000 sales by January 2020 so we also got covered by some bigger youtubers which I had never dreamed to be covered by and our community has doubled in size which sounds way cooler than it is it was 150 more people who we all liked and I didn't run any paid marketing maybe now I've run some ads on Facebook and on read it overall it was under $20 total

so I mostly relied on organic marketing I think having a pretty style allowed for this because otherwise it never worked for us before in the same manner so you might be thinking about it and feeling like we've shot in the dark hoping that we would hit something and you might be true so these are not tested suggestions our improvements how I would try to adjust the process if I do it again when I do it again rather so first of all I think setting art constraints would make more sense for example if you ask your artist to only draw RTS units or if you're talking about pixel art you might also said the resolution maybe don't make sprites more than 64 by 64 and I'm stretching it that's too much actually but yeah it's really up to you also as I mentioned before the longer experimentation would probably mean a bigger pool of potentially successful

results but it also implies higher costs for you the other thing that was mentioned by me in the beginning I think it was the Kickstarter just to validate your idea but now if you asked me I never had a chance to run a Kickstarter from Latvia but if you ask me I think Kickstarter should be launched together with the steam page together with lists so Kickstarter is still a next step yeah a bit further after you validated your idea maybe if you want to clean have a cleaner results avoid tagging popular accounts like pixel dailies because our tweet by them would mean an influx of likes but it would also skew your data and statistics in not some favorable manner so you would not be able to make a good decision also the last slide is viewer discretion I was thinking maybe I should put it on the first one but I think it makes sense if I talk about it in the end when you know all the context so after I posted something similar on

Reddit there was a comment that I'm the manager type who don't know much and then I complained to my friend and then my friend said that it makes sense and I actually agree with it now because essentially what I'm trying to present you is the sample size of one which worked for us and what is the guarantee that is going to work again nonetheless here are my some of my arguments why which I would use to counter this argument first of all we've made the few games before that did not use this process and it did not work out as well for us this is somewhat different than just drawing concept art because with concept art you know what you are drawing essentially you know the ideas that you are going to have in your game here you just draw something and hoping that it would fit the game but it's not necessarily a bad thing at least not for us if you want to approach it in a more artistic way also I think David will I

hope I pronounce your surname correctly but in GDC 2019 he had a good presentation where he also focused on marketing using visual aesthetics of the game and I think it really worked for him so if you want to do something like that do your research and be careful that's all I wanted to say overall I think this will be it for me thank you very much I know you cannot ask the questions directly during this time or maybe you will can you will be able to but if you have anything try to leave them in the car we do comments and I'll try to answer them there's this artists Twitter handle if you have any questions for her just want to follow her plus my email is yeah that's my email if you want to know something try to write it I usually answer without within two weeks if I'm not super burned out so overall I want to thank you for watching this your

comments are critiques are welcome and I hope you have a nice year ahead of you and a nice life Vladimir is out bye