4: Mistakes Making Character Portraits

People overestimate how much they can do in a day, but underestimate how much they accomplish in a month. It logically follows that setting goals on a weekly basis allows for a perfect evaluation on your targets.

I spent this week doing character portraits! Wait, it’s been almost 2 weeks since the last post? Ah, fuck.

There are only two options for me: adapt or die forgotten as a failure to my ancestors and a financial burden to my family.

I spent the last 11 DAYS drawing character portraits. That’s more than 50% overschedule. So allow me to reflect on my misdeeds.

My Misdeeds

The easy excuse is that winter break has given me a lot of distractions. I’ve been out with friends and at christmas parties. My sisters came home from uni. Also, I was forced to learn Guilty Gear Strive.

But even with those distractions, I’m convinced I still could’ve done better and hit deadline. When things go wrong, there’s rarely a sole reason. That’s the *snorts* single causation fallacy. I think there’s more to learn here than blame christmas.

My goal was to make 12 portraits for 2 characters. Most games use small portraits or the same static perspective with different faces, but I wanted to have unique full-body poses to show off more personality. This is typically very uneconomical, but SUPERANT has only a few characters.

Other than that, no extra spice. No various head tilts, lip-syncing, or blinking implementation. SUPERANT is supposed to be retro, after all.

My first mistake is not accounting for my inexperience. Since I have little experience with anatomy, I had no idea of how much work was actually ahead of me. I assumed that like other pixel art, it would only take a few days and I’d have a lot of free time left over to refine and do some jolly christmas things with friends and family.

Doing new things is like diving into the fog. It’s an exciting and integral part of learning any craft. But you don’t want to get too lost, spending months on tangents with disproportionate impact. Maintaining interest in a long project requires a good, rythmic pacing between predictable rigidity and spontaneous exploration.

In my opinion, characters portraits are worth it. They make my characters a lot more intriguing and enable me to tell a more involved story. The problem was how I went about making them.

I assumed that conceptualizing and rendering the portraits would be as easy as any other sprite, without considering everything new I would have to learn. In fact, I spent the least amount of time actually pixelling. Most of my time was spent drawing, revising, and deleting my character designs and poses over and over again.

I thought I could base my poses off of references, but very little of what I found online matched the personalities I had in mind for my characters. I ended up having to create most of the poses on my own, which took a while.

Context-switching rapidly between tasks is unproductive, but so is doing the same thing for 5 days in a row. It got exhausting to wake up and prepare myself to do the same thing all over again. It got so repetitive I was literally dreaming about Aseprite last night.

I should’ve paced myself out and added more coding or reading activities to my week. One of the advantages of solo game development is that there is always something different to do if you get bored, but I didn’t allow myself to do that.

As I continued to repeat the motions throughout the week, I learned some various techniques to expedite drawing new poses:

• Make Character Model Sheets. Not having concrete FORWARD/SIDE perspectives led to annoying inconsistencies between sprites.
• Flip the Canvas very frequently. Doing so enabled me to revise and polish much faster, especially with the faces.
• Lay out portraits horizontally to make it easier to crossreference poses and keep sizes consistent.
• Keep character design unique yet clear. Use color to seperate different parts of the body and make weird poses easily readable. Keep the design simple so you can draw it a whole lot.

In the end, it went pretty well. There was a lot of time in the middle where I felt very annoyed with the process, and very unhappy with the sprites, but looking at them now, they’re good enough.

If you got any questions/wanna tell me sumthin:

• email: kevinjin729@gmail.com
• or, if that’s not your style: friend me on discord @andrygast