The return of the 'bedroom' programmer [video] | Hacker News Reader

The return of the 'bedroom' programmer [video]

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106 pointsjkbr36 comments

Papers, Please was my favorite game from last year. It amazes me that a single person was responsible for the programming, art and music.

My favorite example of a solopreneur game development is Chris Sawyer writing RollerCoaster Tycoon in x86 assembly language in 1999 [1].

The game series (along with Transport Tycoon) sold an estimated $180 million worth of copies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RollerCoaster_Tycoon

I would sure love to get my hands on that source code...

Well, what you have is pretty close. Comments and aliases will be missing, but the structure is there.

I loved Another World ( 1991 Amiga game ) and was amazed that the whole thing was done by one guy: Éric Chahi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_World_%28video_game%29

I definitely agree. It was a groundbreaking game too. He gave a great postmortem talk about it:

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014630/Classic-Game-Postmortem...

Thanks for sharing this. I did not know about this talk, but the game itself is fantastic, and has a very unique feel. I suspect I'll learn a little something from this.

My personal favourite of one-man gamedev is the Touhou Project series. The guy behind it has been making the games - story, code, graphics and music - for the last 20 years, creating a huge franchise that has a pretty much cult following worldwide.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touhou_Project

(I still can't fathom how you can put that much storyline and create so interesting characters in what is basically an insanely hard version of 'dodge the bullet' game)

The best part is that the developer is called "Team Shanghai Alice" on the title screen and elsewhere. This gave me the impression that it was a ton of people working on the games. I was shocked to find out that it was one guy.

I don't know if this was the original reason for the 'team' name, but I hold the image in my head of dolls doing most of the work ;).

And the story, gameplay and -flow. Papers, Please is actually a pretty "basic" game, but the way it is all put together makes it great. Achieving that is not easy at all. I think it is better than some new shooters, even though they have great graphics, action etc - Papers, Please looks like a kids game compared to them. It just shows that the idea is worth much more than anything else.

Banished is an even more technically impressive example: one guy doing all the code (C++/DirectX) and 3D art, just not the music. And of course Minecraft, same thing until late beta, I think.

The creator of Dust: An Elysian Tail doesn't get enough credit for a similar accomplishment.

Aside from voice acting, soundtrack, and parts of the story, Dust was designed and programmed entirely by Dodrill.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust:_An_Elysian_Tail

What's more, I believe he actually didn't know how to program when he got started.

EDIT: Why did someone downvote me? I read it in an interview, and it goes to show how awesome this guy is!

A user went haywire and downvoted a whole bunch of comments. We'll correct the damage.

All: when you notice substantive, civil comments that are unfairly faded out, please give them a corrective upvote. This is a longstanding community practice. It usually only takes one or two corrective votes to get a good comment back to par, so every user can make a significant difference.

Could you dig up the source? That interview sounds like something worth reading.

Check out this postmortem: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/180520/postmortem_humb...

"Late in 2008 I read an article in OXM detailing what was possible with a new programming language, cryptically called XNA. I had never programmed before, and besides a short contract doing cutscenes for Jazz Jackrabbit 2, had never worked on a video game (I'm actually an animator/illustrator by trade).

...

A week of rudimentary tutorials later, I quickly realized you have to make EVERYTHING from scratch! No level editor existed. No animation tool. No scripting or dialogue systems. No nothing -- just a bunch of otherworldly programming words. But that's what made it exciting: learning a new language (literally), slowly making my artwork interactive, and more importantly, growing my aspirations beyond the original 8-bit design."

A truly inspiring story!

Any advice [for programmers] of how to draw such pixel art [easily]?

I'm not quite there yet, so take this with a heaping spoonful of salt, but as another programmer who wanted to do pixel art for their games: Forget about pixel art for now and learn how to draw first. Pixel art is not an easy shortcut. It's just another form of art, and a surprisingly difficult one to do well. Trying to do pixel art without knowing how to draw sounds kinda like the people asking "how I make game without programming?" Answer: By stumbling around in the dark a lot and wasting your time.

I recommend the Ctrl+Paint video series, if you're interested, which starts off with simple exercises done with pencil and paper, and builds up from there:

http://ctrlpaint.com/library/

Going from knowing your way around one field to being at the level of a small child in another is a frustrating but profoundly humbling experience that I sincerely recommend to anyone that's built up a bit of arrogance from being "good at computers" for as long as they can remember. I can honestly say it was a turning point in my life. It's also a very time consuming process, however, that often leaves me thinking that I'm wasting my time starting from scratch instead of focusing on my strengths. Alas, not everyone has connections or artistically talented friends, and most pixel artists I've talked to would rather work on their own games if you aren't paying them up front.

Give it a shot anyways, there's a lot more logic to the drawing process than most people assume. If you find it's not for you, ASCII art or one of the various CC-licensed game art collections is probably a better use of your time:

http://opengameart.org/

Learn the basics of pixel art with some good tutorials. This is my favorite: http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/tutorials/tuts/tsugumo/

Practice a lot. Get feedback from others in the community (e.g. http://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt )

Have a consistent style and constrain yourself. The faces in Papers, Please are drawn with only 3 colors! It's a lot easier to get something decent looking when you limit your options.

You could always hire an artist of course, but that doesn't answer your question and it doesn't allow you to be that lone developer who has fine grained control over everything. I'm no artist and I've been able to make at least workable graphics in a short time period: http://humbit.com/gkh/

Upvoted for mentioning http://www.petesqbsite.com

I tried the "learn by doing" approach to pixel art with my only android game so far. I honestly thought it would turn our worse than it actually did, but it's still _far_ from what an artist would give me.

For reference, here is the pirate ship sprite I made: http://i.imgur.com/nsZpCVf.png

Good effort and yea it does look like the work of a beginner.

Papers Please looks like the work of a seasoned artist. If a programmer wants their game to have a polished look like Papers Please, he has to put in the time into becoming a better artist (not just pixel artist, a general one, because asking for pixel art only is asking how to be a good Android programmer only)

That's why hiring an artist is reasonable advice, it will take years to become good yourself.

Absolutely. Being good takes a lot of time and dedication. Had my main goal been making money, I'd surely have hired an artist. Good thing is for us, programmers, games can be relatively easily reused with new art on top of it.

I guess it is the same as programming. You can get your friends teenage kid to write something in PHP that will work, but if you want quality, you are better off with an experienced professional.

That's pretty awesome! As an artist, the only thing I would really do is add some lighter/darker browns to emphasize shadows and areas in the light. The same goes with grays on the flag.

Thanks! Note taken. I'll try to add a few more colors to it as soon as I have some free time.

Hire an artist. Pixel art is actually a very tricky form of art if you want to make anything actually look good. You have to be very meticulous and pay attention to every detail. You have to also have a good understanding of anatomy/shaping as well as lighting and color patterns.

Not that it isn't difficult, but the creator of Papers, Please pulled off programming, music and art apparently all by himself. I think it's possible to create expressive pixel art with some dedicated practice.

Like learning anything new: start with the simplest project you can think of, be prepared for frustration, and show your work to people who will encourage you.

This! I've seen loads of terrible pixel art by people who think it will be easier or look better than other kinds of graphics, and failed miserably.

I've had better success using Blender to make the things in 3d then pixilating 'em after. But "better" is still relative. You probably wanna hire an artist.

I second this suggestion although I would suggest to use any decent 3D package that you can get your hands on, Maya 3DS Max, Lightwave have all had a long history as being used for making things for games, even if they are 2D games.

There are plenty of 3D models on the internet that you can use, e.g. a pirate boat. You can put together some sensible lighting, e.g. with some fill, a key light, some ambient level or just one glowing thing in the sky, and, from that you can get some sensible shadows, highlights and subtlety to the colours that are flat in your source model.

If you want an effect remember that 3D has been used for cartoons for a very long time, there are plenty of plugins and some don't need aeons to learn and master.

If you want to have the boat explode you can animate that and tweak the animation until you have it looking good. It is not like you have a set of drawings to manually tweak.

Depending on how far you have taken the style (e.g. cartoon plugins) it then becomes a matter of rendering to get your finished bitmaps.

But why stop there? Once you think in 3D it becomes intuitive to do a game that way and use existing libraries for things like collision detection.

Not a direct answer to your question but if I were in a situation where I needed art like those faces and I didn't want to spend money (and believe me, there are lots of people who wouldn't want to be paid much for great work out there) I'd "cheat" by initially using photos and Photoshop to do the hard work.

Indeed, I just gave it a quick go. Searched for "old russian woman" and did some stuff with posterization and pixelation: http://imgur.com/a/Tj2Os - it's not great, but it took like 3 minutes. Obviously, I'd be looking for photos that could either be heavily edited or were open licensed/public domain if I were doing it for real.

Not exactly what you're looking for, but certainly Hexels is an interesting tool for creating cool art

http://hexraystudios.com/hexels/

Start to draw. Practice.

Or hire someone who's good at it.

inspiring. pixel art really has a quality all its own, regardless of the technical or budgetary limitations surrounding its origins.

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