Finding the Best Artstyle for Your Indie Game!

let's talk about how to come up with the best art style for your indie game I buy I'm by no means an expert on that but I want to share my thoughts anyway first of all I think about what really matters to me is on my top five points the I want our son to be attention-grabbing that means it needs to be unique there needs to be a lot of contrasts and it needs to be somewhat strange and memorable so basically what that means is it really has to stand out why do I put attention first because this is the easiest way to fail as an indie game if nobody notices your game game over so that's why I put it number one it's really important that the art style stands out that's really what makes or breaks the marketing success that you have obviously I don't have a lot of experience but sounds pretty logical doesn't it okay my number two is the art side needs to fit the game and the target audience and my target audience

is RTS players casual but hardcore my game is pretty simplistic there's not a lot you can do so casual players can definitely play it but I feel like it's definitely gonna be more suitable for the more hardcore casual player if that makes sense because it's definitely gonna be challenging game and it's still quite complicated because it's a new concept so people can't really transfer their knowledge about the game from a different game they have to learn everything from scratch that's what pushes it a bit more to the hardcore side and also the fact that it's a strategy game which is definitely not everybody it's same thing but in general does differentiate differentiation between casual and hard is honestly not that important so let's forget about that the art style should definitely reflect that it's a simplistic game so it attracts players

who like simplistic games and it should also look like a challenging game because it will be a challenging game and if somebody downloads the game and things it's gonna be super duper easy that person will not enjoy the game we better make it look difficult otherwise we attract the wrong audience and that audience won't like the game which means bad reviews which means lower sales so the art style has to fit the game that I'm making or that you're making and it also has to be suitable for your target audience and you need to know what you're talking target audiences sometimes you only figure that out later on so yeah but that's definitely something you need to keep in mind then my number three is it needs to clear and clean so I don't want to have a lot of clutter on the screen the information that you need to play the game should be instantly obvious yeah so this is something that can mess with watch ability so if you if somebody stumbles

across a let's play of my game I don't want them them to be completely confused by all the things that are flying around on the screen like ship ship ship ship and they're just okay I don't understand that and they click away watch ability nowadays is really important actually if a game is fun to watch on video more people will buy it a lot more that's how I think this world works maybe I'm wrong who knows nonetheless we can argue that a clear and clean look in a simplistic game is definitely something we need to shoot for so that means needs to be uncluttered there needs to be good color coding good silhouettes and simplistic shapes that you recognize then place for is it needs to be beautiful it needs are design good colors good atmosphere definitely super important because if it looks beautiful it's automatically more

fun to play you enjoy your time in that game a lot more but it's only on place for it's definitely Oh that's I feel like it's not the most important thing at least for my project okay you need to do a priority list like this for your project because maybe you will have different priorities but before you start to design anything you need to know what you want and as an end result so you definitely need something like this otherwise what are you designing what tell me what are you trying to achieve you need to know what you're trying to achieve so my last point is it needs to be self-explanatory that means when you see the place again it's about watchability and also about learning the game when

you see how somebody plays the game the art style should explain how the game works so for example I have these little objects that split after a couple of seconds into two new creatures and I call them X because that instantly makes it more understandable what they do people know and ik is usually something that aesthetic doesn't move it's vulnerable and after a while a living thing comes out of it so if I literally literally use X as graphics for these projects that's pretty self-explanatory because the objects behave exactly the same way in real life so what you're trying to do with self-explanatory art style or setting is choosing objects that behave in the same way in real life does that make sense yes I think it does then obviously to the extras

shouldn't be too hard to make because and just one person so it needs to be an art style that I can realize myself and it shouldn't be offensive to anybody so those are just two obvious things two additional limitations so that's the basic framework next up what I did is I made a list of settings and art size setting is basically where the game place doesn't play in space they're little creatures are there robots what is what is the game about it doesn't play in middle aged nights with sports or there are fantasy creatures or is it maybe completely completely abstract and there are just triangles and circles so what is the game about that's the setting the art style however is how you display or how you show your settings so

let me give you a couple of examples for both of these setting maybe I have a magical dark grassland or maybe place in space surface or I could have flying cyberpunk robot robots you see none of that is really specific it's really just a couple of ideas that dragons and eggs flying eyes turning into cross the eggs a couple of things mixed in there and then on the other side I have art styles these are all the ways I could use to create the graphics okay so I could draw them with pencils I could use vector graphics I could paint them with real paint with acrylic paint I could use digital painting I could mix acrylic paint and digital painting I could use a program like blender to mix to create 3d

objects and render them as sprites I could use pixel art I fought scribble with a pen and and then scan the stuff payment cut it out in Photoshop I could use colored pencils in combination with 3d rendered stuff so I caught something I drew by hand as 3d texture I could use stop-motion with modeling clay trashy objects what I mean by that is basically using random objects that I have in the house and turning them into little creatures so maybe I have a garbage can and I find some something that looks like eyes and I put it on the garbage can and then I can use stop-motion to animate the garbage can something like this could be really funny then you could also go for a really crappy style that can also work or just some random shader stuff so what I did is I looked

again at my requirements and chose four settings that I thought would fit my requirements in combination with four art styles that I think also fit my requirements so what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to create four complete art styles and that's definitely something I recommend to you as well you should try a couple of different things don't just choose one thing and then go with it experiment with a couple of things okay if you have a very minimalistic game like I do you can implement the art style into the game that's what I'm gonna do I will also implement all of those for outsells I create into the game and see how they feel if you have a little larger game and you can't do that at least make some sketches and try to create some fake screenshots some photo patching to see how those art sites would look in game but it's obviously better if you can bring them into the

game that way you get a way better feel how it's actually gonna work out yeah so now I always selected two of them here I have magical dark grassland and I want to realize this setting with acrylic paint and Photoshop that's gonna be pretty interesting then the next one is space creatures and I want to do that with modeling clay and stop-motion next one I need to try as flying cyberpunk robots I'll do that with 3d rendered sprites dragons and eggs with digital painting so those are the four combinations I will try then once you've tried all of them you can just choose the best one the most fitting one it's obviously perfect if you ask your target audience which of them they like best this way you get the best Intel I guess just keep in mind that the ideas I just

mentioned are pretty rough okay all of the settings and art styles I chose here could be either executed in a really really awesome way or they could also be executed and I really really put away the idea and the planning is one thing but what makes or breaks your art style is 90% the execution so yeah choosing choosing the right stuff and thinking about it beforehand definitely useful but you can still mess up or make a bad idea pretty awesome if you want to know how I executed the ideas I chose in this video stay tuned and maybe I will link the video somewhere here once they're out thanks for watching make the world your playground and see you tomorrow