Post 5 Pixel Art and why it’s the burden of my life 10/3/2021
Pixel art does come with its issues, especially when it comes to text creation. Arlo is a game of many posters, a lot of hidden messages, and a whole bunch of writing. Pixel art has its pros and cons when it comes to that. On the positive side of things, Pixel art made it easy to pick a font, because it doesn’t allow a lot of room for typographical flair. On the other hand, my drawing software goes mental when you try to write out something in a tiny font size, which regrettably made it quite the chore to complete.
The process consisted of writing out a statement such as “eat the rich,” in a giant font, and then make it smaller with the resize tool, utilize a special setting that deactivated the anti-aliasing (a setting I would have to re-click every time I wrote something) and then drawing the poster behind the words I’d written. Occasionally I would also have to go in and move certain letters so that they lined up better. If there was a better way of doing this, I wish I had found it before writing out 20 or so posters using this method.
I’m also going to go over Marketing in this post a bit because it’s been one of the hardest things to account for. Arlo has been very difficult to market through Twitter, sure there are a lot of people on the platform with strong political opinions, but very few of those people are interested in exploring someone else’s ideas, especially when someone else’s ideas involve a satirical viewpoint on arson as a logical combatant against late-stage capitalism.
There’s also the fact that despite being a game with a spicy political viewpoint, a lot of people will see it as just another 2d Pixel-art side scroller, which I can really blame them for to be honest, that’s what it is. So Arlo doesn’t really have the draw that I’d like, especially on a platform like Twitter, where a lot of indie games with actual quality are still being ignored. Still despite not being a very relatable game, I’m happy to have surpassed 50 followers.