Lmao yeah. Good point I didn't even consider outside of browsers. That's a whole ass other beast. I think that's why literally nothing I use is webp prolly.

Calling a website that doesn't support it outdated is probably a bit harsh, but it is universally supported.

There's plenty of universally supported things that not all websites use though

But on the point of stylization and expression, I think 3D is fine! This is very similar to how Dead Cells does character art, which is very stylized and conveys a ton of expression!

If I spent some time on the model I could probably get similar results, including the normal mapping for lighting.

Right now the intention isn't to use this as a final asset, but for prototyping or maybe tracing it for actual characters.

I'm absolutely more experienced with 3D than 2D when it comes to animation though. Adding new animations only takes a few minutes in 3D but probably several hours in 2D.

Ah! Godot's documentation is actually really good for that, there's a few demos they walk you through building, it's not too bad and there's loads of information just sorta browsing through it too!

I did a shader one once! Been thinking about writing more, but honestly I don't know what kind of tutorials would really be helpful for folks. There's many ways to make whole games and I feel like providing a tutorial for like a "tactics game" could go all sorts of ways and I wouldn't wanna mislead.

To me it's whatever's easiest. I prefer custom data, but the editor isn't very friendly with the data I like to store there, so sometimes making a custom plugin or something to present/edit that data is super helpful. I did this with GridMapLayer, where the data you edit is represented as a 3D scene

Yep, itch analytics. Most clicks come from itch itself, my profile as well as tags. I assume the profile ones are from people browsing around after noticing something I did in a jam. Kinda inspires me to make more jam games to keep that one coming cause it's the most common thing overall

quick question can you give this mouse a cookie?

Or to add, I think that's why I like Screenshot Saturday posts more, they're usually developer focused and more about "Look at what I did!" and devs are more open to talking about their projects and that's real neat to me

I don't have a steam game for wishlish wednesday, so I don't participate in that one. But... I'm thinking about changing that in the near future and I can't imagine it'd hurt really. I do get what you mean about it, it feels sorta... corporate and less personal. I'm not really a fan of that.

Generally, I love to see the Screenshot Saturday posts. They're a nice look into games I probably wouldn't otherwise see.

My analytics tell me only a very small portion of clicks come from bluesky, but it's not nothing and I'll take what I can get.

I think it helps to have these languages in a user-experience way, but it's also worth questioning how far you can push them. The most obvious example would be games that push UI to a stylized extreme, and game genres are constantly being stretched and pulled in various directions.

Probably true, you can see a lot of the same within web design trends too. Once something is done enough there becomes a sort of language that users are familiar with.

That said, this language has always existed in some form or another, eg. games like dungeon crawlers borrowing from tabletop games.

Random question but do the two sprites need to be related or is it just whatever you want?

It's certainly worth looking up more traditional videos on the topic for sure. There's some artsy thing about lines of action. It's difficult to apply it to pixel art given the constraints, but if you ignore all of that and go messy and refine later, it tends to work out.

I'm sure you've already stumbled upon it but I really like AdamCYounis' video on the topic, the way he blocks in the lighting to build up the character helps me a ton when I go about it, though adding all those finer details still gets me caught up plenty.

Ooo this is the exact method I use for most art!

It's a bit tricky to really figure out dynamic poses for me, or figuring out the "readability" of things.

What I've found seems to help is doing the silhouette method at like 2-3x the scale and then shrink it down before trying to render things.

Honestly, agreed. I do appreciate most of the world building and such but the ending did feel like it kinda dragged on forever with no real light at the end of the tunnel that I was expecting.