Welcome to my Game Art blog
Where I apparently cry about being a broke-ass games artist
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So I’ve decided to write a development blog about my game art process. I make game art in a kind of old-school retro way. My goal is to research different retro art techniques and document my process as I go, partly to help other devs who are in a similar situation to me, and partly to be able to look back at my posts in the future and be able to visibly track my progression.
Before I start, though, I want to give you a bit of background as to who I am and why I’m doing this. (Or maybe it’s a vanity post? Who knows?)
So partly, the reason I’m doing this is that I love retro games and want to explore how they are made. The other reason, however, is that I’m broke. Like, really broke. But I still want to make games.
Growing up, I never realised I was poor. I mean, I kind of knew my life was different from everyone else’s. Nobody else I knew had been in foster care or even knew what that was. (I was in foster care for about a year as a kid, before coming home. I won’t get into it too much.). But I figured that, by all accounts, my home life was otherwise the same as everyone else’s.
It was only in university when my social class differences really started to show. The students around me spent their money frivolously, they could afford to go out to eat multiple times a week, and if ever they couldn’t afford rent, they just went to their parents for more money. They casually discussed holidays they had been on to other countries, and how they were getting money from their parents to help fund their education.
In my first year, I lived with my parents, cooked my own food at home, and saved my money for important things that I needed to buy — like, you know, the equipment I needed. I lived completely off of my student loan, and when that ran out, there was nothing else. When I moved out in my second year, I sometimes had to borrow money from my housemates to help cover my part of the rent. I was really lucky that I had good housemates that understood my position and would help me out when I needed it.
I studied scriptwriting at university. Not really my first choice, but I wanted to go to uni so badly that I took whatever course I could get. I wasn’t a smart student in secondary school or sixth form, and my D in maths meant I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get in at all. The thing I really wanted to do was make games.
When I left home, my housemates, oddly enough, were games development students. I met them at the university Harry Potter Society (Which I eventually became president of. Don’t judge me. I’m a nerd). We got on well and I eventually moved in with them when they needed a new housemate. I was really interested in the projects they were doing and really wanted to get involved. I ended up getting Blender and teaching myself 3D modeling.
I graduated with a screenwriting degree, which turned out to be really useful for getting a job as a customer service assistant in a retail store (ha). I was severely unhappy in the year I was working in retail. I hated every minute of it. I spent my free hours after retail really digging into games development. I watched a lot of Brackeys tutorials. I taught myself to code and make some simple projects in Unity. I revised everything I knew by scribbling on blank receipt paper on quiet shifts when my manager wasn’t looking.
All I thought about all day was making games.
The problem is, the 2015 MacBook Air that I bought with some of my student loan money during my first year of scriptwriting (because I felt so pressured, seeing everyone else around me with a fancy MacBook), just wasn’t enough to make good games. I was so far into my student overdraft that I just couldn’t afford to save up for a better PC with my part-time minimum wage retail job. Moving back home just wasn’t possible (for reasons I won’t get into) and I was barely able to afford the rent in me and my partner’s tiny studio flat. I couldn’t get out of retail and I couldn’t find any better-paying work with enough hours.
That’s when I decided that I was going to take a masters degree. I graduated with 2:1 at my university, which granted me a heavy discount on any courses I took with the same education provider. I could also get a full masters loan and pay for it with that, rather than from my own pocket, with money left over to pay back into my overdraft. This was why I decided to take a course in 3D Animation rather than a Game Art course (where I would have been more suited). My university did not have an MA Games course.
I really wanted to be an environment and lighting artist and I really disliked rigging and animating. I was really excited when I was accepted onto the course and I was really determined to get through with it. The problem was, I just wasn’t that passionate about being an animator. The real motivator was having access to powerful PC’s that would let me learn what I wanted. I generally pushed on through most of the lectures I wasn’t that interested in and I focused mainly on the modelling and lighting lectures. In the end, I did get value out of the course. I had a few independent projects where I could really dig into the areas I was really interested in.
My master's project gave me free rein to spend 10 weeks on whatever project I wanted, so I chose to make a game environment. On these projects, I had to quickly teach myself a lot of knowledge that I was missing — namely how to make shaders, how to light and render projects in Unreal, and how to use software such as Substance Designer to create textures. It was a fun challenge and I’m the kind of person really likes self-learning and works much better under pressure, so I ended up getting a lot out of it.
So now having finished the course, I’m in this weird limbo stage. I know that I’m not in a place to start making AAA game content, and I’m trying to push myself to learn everything I can using the equipment I have. At the moment my tools are Blender and Unity, which have served me fine in the past. I have limited sculpting capabilities, so the high-to-low retopology workflow of newer games isn’t possible for me. So I’m trying different things.
Generally, I love games with a low-poly retro aesthetic, and I love hand-painted old-school textures. So that’s sort of the art-style that I’m really aiming towards. I’m also researching a lot of retro techniques that are actually still used in mobile games to get 3D working on lower-end hardware. That includes using a texture atlas for models, vertex painting, baking lightmaps, and using tricks like opacity maps and duplicate geometry to fake reflections.
(I’ll talk about this stuff a bit later, but if you want a general overview, here’s a cool Tumblr post I saw about it.)
So that’s basically it. My long-winded introductory post to explain who I am, why I’m doing this, and what I’m trying to achieve. I’m hoping that this blog is helpful and encouraging for people without much money, to motivate them to make games without needing fancy hardware or software.
One other thing, this isn’t really a tutorial blog. I’m not planning to write up full tutorials and techniques. It’s more of a general documentation of my journey as a developer. There are much better resources out there for learning this stuff and I will share links to the tutorials and resources as I go.
Thanks for reading this far. Feel free to drop me a line if you have anything you want to say. I love getting feedback.
Stay safe out there,
— Bradley
