Hello cohosters! Hope you're all doing well.
A whole lot of indie games came out in May, huh? I feel like I only barely scratched the surface.
Without further ado, here's your Indie Game Recap of all of the Cohoster interviews I did and new games I found in May...
I had a chat with @SuperBiasedGary about writing indie narrative games
I had a chat with @bugbearstew about the nostalgia and modern touches of being a pixel artist
With INDIE INTERVIEWS, I talk to the game developers hanging here on Cohost to learn more about new games you might love.
Pixel art is timeless! I truly believe that, and feel it even more as I see the vast variety of different pixel artists working today. One such artist who crossed my Cohost dash was @bugbearstew, so I knew I had to have a chat with him about working in indie games!
You can find Yolk Heroes: A Long Tamago and Rogue Labyrinth on Steam!
Introduce yourself for everyone here on Cohost! Who are you?
I'm Kyle Bugbearstew. I've been doing pixel art for well over a decade now. Didn't start doing pixel art until after I graduated high school and just kind of randomly fell in love with it. Spent a good few years doing art basically daily and honing my skills before going into it more professionally. First with personal commissioned work for individuals and slowly expanding into game projects. Learning pixel art was also a part of having my own assets to make my own small games. You can find them on my itch.io page, but I haven't done anything recently. So all that to say I'm self taught, never went to art school or anything like that.
Unrelated to game dev and art stuff I also love to play tabletop roleplaying games. I'm currently running one thats been going for over a year now and I'm always fighting the urge to start another one because theyre so fun. I also really enjoy cooking and baking. I'm a huge horror fan. And most importantly, I live with two cats, Mabel and Emma, and they are both extremely spoiled and we love them very much.
Is there a project you're working on currently? Tell us about it!
I'm working on two main big projects right now! Yolk Heroes: A Long Tamago and Rogue Labyrinth. Yolk Heroes I've been working on for a while longer and it's so adorable. I love working in this style and the lead artist, Raph, on it is killer and I love working with the whole team. It's a tamagotchi pet idle game kinda styled like a Neo Geo Pocket game. VERY akira toriyama inspired, but I think with enough Raph and my own style to make it unique.
Meanwhile Rogue Labyrinth is a bit more typical indie stuff, a really fun, fast-paced roguelike about smacking things and bouncing them around an arena. Kinda like Hades + Lethal League and also queer and anticapitalist LOL.
I wish I had some personal projects to talk about, but right now I'm just a bit too busy with these jobs to work on my own stuff and totally not because of zelda nope cough cough, but I want to make some stuff. I've been learning Godot and really miss the feeling of making small weird games.
How did you find yourself first getting into game development?
I actually got into game dev back in the newgrounds days when I was a kid in high school. My older brother made some relatively popular point-and-click games for the site and that was like, the first time I realized that it was people that made games and you can just Make them. So that was what I decided I wanted to do. I planned to go into game dev college and all this stuff. But whoops college is expensive and I was poor and also depressed! So instead I just messed around with stuff on my own time. Back in 2013 I made an RPG Maker horror game inspired by OFF, which was huge at the time with its recent english translation, and Junji Ito. It was the first time that I really felt like I could do this and then I just kept doing it! I took part in jams and made a bunch of little prototypes and had a really good time doing it. Eventually I fell into doing art for other peoples games and I've been there ever since.
How would you describe the process of pixel art, for those who are used to other forms of art-making (painting, drawing, vector illustration, 3D modeling, etc.)? Can you describe what that workflow is like, and what is it that draws you to pixel art in particular?
My process for pixel art has evolved a lot over time. I started out doing line sketches, cleaning that up, and then adding colors and details. I found myself complaining about the lineart stage. I hated it, it was so slow and boring. Then I interrogated that feeling like, "if I don't like this, why am I doing that part? Can I remove this part entirely and have a better time with my art?" After some experimenting I ended up on a process that's a lot more painterly. I slap down rough colors and shapes and then work backwards. Refining the entire piece over passes. It feels so natural and smooth. I cannot recommend this method of interrogating your art process like this enough to anyone who has a particular step in the process they don't like.
What drew me to pixel art might seem a bit.... shallow. I started doing it because it was easy to get quick results that looked nice and got a nice response to being posted online. I think pixel art is great for this reason, it has such a low skill floor to make things that look good. At the same time it has such an absurdly high skill ceiling. As I gained more understanding of the medium and sought out other artist it became almost like a puzzle. "How can I make these squares look like this thing I want it to look like?" is a challenge every time I open up aseprite. It makes my brain light up and it all flows so easily out of my hand.
In years past, I've heard many non-artists lump all pixel art together as a trend of appealing to a more nostalgic era. For you personally, do you feel like you're trying to incorporate nostalgia into your work, or does it feel as modern to you as anything else?
I do certainly think nostalgia appeal is a part of it. We're always going to have games that go after a certain style from a time when we were kids. I think pixel art can be a really good tool for recapturing that feeling of nostalgia, but it's very narrow minded to lump it all together. It's like saying "all animation is for kids" when that's obviously not the case and never has been. When I was first digging into pixel art and the pixel artist Discourse in the early 2010's "Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP" had just came out and it led to a trend of extremely low-rez, one-pixel-thick leg and arm characters that I hated at the time. However, now that I'm more mature I think this is an extremely good example of pixel art being used as a tool to do something entirely different. The game's gorgeous and I don't think it appeals to nostalgia at all.
All that said, I think studying old pixel art is something all pixel artists should do. I learned so much when I studied NES, SNES, GB, GBC, and GBA sprites. Learning how and why these sprites work will make your appreciate them more and understand how to take that nostalgia appeal and apply it to something modern. I consider my art more pop, more modern. Bright colors, big shapes, lots of movement. Things that old games couldn't do, but you can look at my art and see obvious inspirations from NES, SNES and Game Boy games.
When I saw the post going around about Yolk Heroes, I was absolutely smitten. Virtual pets feel like a genre that desperately needs to come back. What're your favorite things about Yolk Heroes?
I'm really glad you like what you've seen for Yolk Heroes!! Raph's art for the game is so insanely good. He's CRIMINALLY underappreciated on social media. There's a ton of art he's done in the game that is just, ah, gorgeous. The music also hits really hard. I've done a whole bunch of animations for the game that I'm really happy with, the fishing ones especially, so keep an eye out for those ;). But overall I think it's just so cute. Everytime I play it I get such a big smile on my face. Here's a sneak peek gif for you
Any advice for aspiring indie devs out there?
I play SO many small tiny tiny indie games and every time I talk about them with my friends or my partner it almost always comes down to "get an editor." Find someone who will read over what you wrote, what you made and tell you to cut some of it. Cut 20% of what you made, it'll be better.
Lastly, are there any indie games out there you've been playing recently? Any favorites to shout-out?
Indie games I've been playing... A lot of them are bigger name ones that don't particularly need shout outs like Darkest Dungeon 2, Dwarf Fortress, that kind of thing. But recently I've also played:
-Garden Galaxy, an extremely chill little... sorta-idle game? You get to make and build an adorable little garden
-Rusted Moss, an AMAZING metroidvania where you have guns and a grapple. The amount of freedom in this game is insane, me and two friends played it simultaneously and each of us had drastically different paths through the game.
-Super Lesbian Animal RPG, an RPG Maker game with amazing combat, music, and REALLY gay anthro animals. Huge recommend to turn-based combat fans and also queer folks
-24 Killers, this game is my hidden gem of all time. I cannot overstate how amazing it is. Very inspired by chibi-robo and other love de lic games but just as much it's own beast. Dripping in style and beauty. Please please please play 24 Killers.
Thanks for chatting, Kyle! Everyone else should follow him over on @bugbearstew, and stay tuned for more interviews with devs on Cohost. See ya then!
Bat Boy
Developed by Sonzai Games and X PLUS Co. Ltd.
Published by X PLUS Co. Ltd
"Ryosuke isn't just your regular high-school kid. He and his fellow sports-star friends secretly battle against the evil invading forces of Lord Vicious, hellbent on hosting sinister athletic events for his own amusement! Ryosuke is Bat Boy!"
You can find Bat Boy on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
You can find Sonzai Games on Twitter
Sunshine Shuffle
Developed by Strange Scaffold
Published by Strange Scaffold
"Play cards with a group of adorable animal friends who robbed the largest bank on the Eastern Seaboard 12 years ago, and are willing to let you decorate their boat in return for not being executed by the mafia."
You can find Sunshine Shuffle on Steam, Nintendo Switch, and itch.io.
You can find Strange Scaffold on Twitter
