Intro
Hello I’m Digx7 and this is Devlog 5 of Frostloop, a train survival management game.
Working on Trains
In my last devlog I drew a lot of the trains. And here they are in the game. The implementation was a lot of dragging and dropping files into the right spots. Easy when you only have one train, tedious when you’ve got 30.
There’s still more work to do as I need to update each train's game data to give them their exact effects, stats, and so on. I basically need to fill out a complex form for each train. Again, easy when you’ve got 1 train, but tedious when you have 30.
So I’ve been putting that off as I instead worked on the UI art. And I’ve finished the first art pass!! This means I’m not using any Unity default art assets anywhere in the game anymore. Every panel, button, and knob has been replaced with custom art that I’ve drawn myself.
I absolutely could have sped up this process by making better use of prefabs, but I’m just happy to have this milestone finished.
There's still more I could work on, adding animations and more player feedback.
However, this gets me pretty close to achieving another big milestone of having a Steam Store page up. I’ve been putting it off for a while as I’ve wanted to wait until the screenshots or trailers would look good.
If I’m being honest the only thing holding me back is that I’d want to do another pass on my Key Art. Maybe give it a more dynamic composition.
You know I might just work on that next.
Thumbnail
So I grabbed some reference images, made some thumbnail sketches, turned the one I liked into a full sketch, and then rendered it out.
For the sketches I focused on composition trying not to copy a SnowPiercer poster one for one, but when your subject is ‘Train in Snow’ there’s only so many options.
Once rendering I focused on contrast and color values. I needed the train to be the focal point of the image and standout from the background.
Afterwards I got this strange feeling that the finished result was ‘too simple’.
It had less noise than my last attempt, but also a clear readable subject.
Wait, that's what you want isn’t it?
Yes, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that. I sat a whole day with this final result before moving on.
Yet… but I couldn’t help shake this feeling that something wasn’t right, that it was too easy to make, its too clear too readable, is this a sign of me growing as an artist or just stagnating, should this really be the cover art for the game I’ve spent 3 months working or should this just be some concept art? Should I really be trying to make any art if I can’t produce top tier AAA artwork or is the fact that my art is bad give it any charm to it that somehow makes it actually good?
You're probably overthinking it.
Yeah…
But let me know if you think it's any good.
Other Store Page Stuff
Steam requires multiple sizes of your capsule art for all possible locations it could appear in. So I had to copy my result, move and resize all the layers for each image. Well I was at it I also made some other sizes to cover all my social media needs
With my key art in hand I grabbed some screenshots for the store, made a new app icon, and with nothing else holding me back … I submitted my store page for review.
It took a few days for steam to review the store page (which is normal), but by the time you're seeing this it will be live. So please wishlist the game, a link will be in the description.
Outro
That’s all for this devlog, thanks for reading and have a wonderful day!