Creativity Thrives With Constraints
This past week I’ve been working on the art style and direction of Martian Alchemist. When I first made the title page, I knew that it probably wasn’t going to be the final image, but it at least felt good to put my ideas on paper. But since then, there’s been this gnawing in the back of my mind and something about it was bothering me. I don’t know exactly what, but my execution was nowhere near where I had envisioned Martian Alchemist to be.
Trying to not get distracted by imperfections that I knew I would fix down the line, I decided to proceed anyway and build out the greenhouse space. My goal was to throw together a quick scene, put it in Godot, and then write a short script to get the basic functionality going. That was the goal. The problem was, after spending all day working on my greenhouse idea, I knew it sucked. There was a fundamental problem with the art style and also the whole vibe was off. It wasn’t accurately portraying what I had envisioned AT ALL.
So back to the drawing board.
I decided maybe it was an okay time to revisit the title page. I did more research and gathered some more pictures for my inspiration. After spending 2 entire days working on various different title pages, I hated them all. Nothing felt right and nothing was inspiring. Not going to lie, I was pretty frustrated. Especially since I was spending so much time on these and they all ended up looking terrible. Last night, I forced myself to finish the latest title page that I was working on just to have a finished product. But once I finished, I realized I had just redrawn Carmen Sandiego from the 90s and made a terrible-looking flash game title page. I still hadn’t written my weekly blog post and I was overtired and frustrated and just generally in a bad mood. So I went to bed instead.
This morning, after spending some time away from the project and allowing myself to just think, I decided I needed some serious help in the art direction department. I stumbled across this YouTuber who does 2D art for video games and he gave me some really profound advice: I needed to limit myself. I had heard this advice before, but this time it felt more timely. My problem was simply that I had too many options. And I found this to be true. There is nothing more paralyzing than opening up a blank canvas with unlimited tools and unlimited colors.
So following his advice, I decided I needed to start limiting myself. I needed to constrain myself on how much time I was going to spend making each art asset (because I don’t have unlimited time). I needed to constrain myself with my brush choice, my shading choices, and my colors.
I spent pretty much the rest of the day today making some new assets. I’ve decided to go in a completely new direction with style and, quite frankly, I really like it so far! I’m much happier with the new vibe that the assets are evoking and overall, I’m able to produce more stuff more quickly. Which is super important because there are literally going to be hundreds of assets for this game, even though it’s relatively simple.
After making a handful of assets, I decided to throw them into a scene and try to build out the greenhouse again, but this time with the new art direction and style. I hated it. It sucked. And I know the reason why. The perspective of my assets is not the same as the perspective of the game that I am envisioning. Right now, I don’t know how to reconcile them. I’m quite literally at a creative block on how to display the greenhouse. So after taking some time to go on a walk and clear my head, I decided that for now, I’m going to work on a different scene.
