So some months ago i have started development on a twin sticker game that i nicknamed “Shooty”, it was inspired on http://diep.io, a game that i have sinked a lot of hours into, but i wanted to make it a fast paced single player experience. So i started prototyping it and could make a lot of stuff in a relatively fast paced manner, following inspiration, i decided to make it a vector based art style.

There are some advantages on taking this approach for art with your game:

- Vector based arts means that your game will look nice on every screen.

- You can iterate your art fast with it.

- Svg editing is pretty accessible with programs like inkscape and figma.

But the main one being the scalability, i started making some art and kept prototyping, but there was one thing i didn’t account for: i don’t like this art style and don’t know how to work really that well with it. So even though making art with it was fast, i started dragging myself everytime i had to work on the game, just because i couldn’t decide on what the game should look like, this prevented me from making progress on things that should had been simple at the first place.

I am pretty used at doing pixel art because i did it since i was a kid, but there is some holding back for me to using it in my games because people seem to regard it as “bad art"even though a good pixelated game looks way better than a poorly made vector based one, if you go to pixeljoint.com and see the weekly top rated arts there it is difficult to hold your jaw in place, because of the skill from other artists is too great, even with the limitations of the medium. But this doesn’t prevent people from regarding it as "low spec”, this was holding me back from using pixel art, but by not doing pixel art, it made me not enjoy my work, so i procastinated and didn’t made any progress, i love making games and solving problems but working on this game wasn’t bringing me any joy.

Even though working with pixel art is the “worst option” (which i don’t believe for not even a second) it is the one that i will be working with from now on, because i love it and it brings so much joy. Working with pixel art takes more time to make it look great, but i still make more progress with it than without it. That’s why i think it is better to make what you enjoy instead of trying to fit in with what you think other people like, which may not even be true in the first place.

Check out the post “A Pixel artist renounces Pixel art”