Editor-in-Chief at GameDeveloper.com, Berklee College of Music game design lecturer, BJJ Purple Belt 🤼‍♀️, hobbyist game dev, beginner pixel artist, sometimes screenwriter, fitness dork, volunteer EMT. She/her.


After my little jam game (I am very, very pleased it placed in the top ten for story! Yay!) I'm back to working on art for The Tunnel. One thing that was driving me bananas about earlier drafts of this was just how flat it felt... so, I'm trying to now have much more obvious foreground/mid/background elements and stronger compositional... framing? Is that the correct word?

The first image on the left here is the current draft I'm working on, and the last one is a very early version. I think we're finally moving in a good direction here? I want to do much more texture with the mountains, clean up the sky... and man, I really want to get better with shading and adding detail and texture to the "space base" shapes here. I've been finding that I love organic shapes and nature and landscapes... and struggling to make human-made objects look like anything other than boxes. But we're making progress, and I'll take it lol!

Feedback, as always, is very much appreciated!


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in reply to @danielleri's post:

Lovely progress here. What helped me the most with shading, as a hands-on kind of learner was picking up some geometric primitives at the craft store. They usually have some made of cardboard or styrofoam or whatever. I'd set those up on my desk kinda like the composition and use a desk light for a very simple 1-point light setup, take pic with my phone and then it's just a matter of simplifying a bit. As a bonus, it improved my understanding of perspective too.

You've already discovered the dark artist secret that most manmade objects are basically just boxes that have been stretched in various terrible ways and smooshed together. I also keep in mind the Big, Medium, Small guideline. Make sure your objects/architecture have a balance of detail at each of those scales. A huge sci-fi wall might have a big door, a few human-scaled access panels, and then small seams and edge-wear that don't even register on first-look. It's amazing how few details you really need to sell a texture if they've been scaled properly.