Teaching early teens how to create their own game assets for #VisualNovels (and #GameDev in general) and today we were talking about using layers to speed up art creation (alpha locking, filters on layer groups), to give characters different expressions, or even create variations with multiple colours without having to redraw the whole image every time. In talking about expressions we discussed icons and why adding two diagonal lines to an orcs face immediately makes them an angry orc.

We also talked about how you always want clear visual separation between your visual focus (the orc) and the background (the corridor), lowering saturation and making sure that there's a contrast between the edge of the focus object and the background even if it isn't "realistic" - i.e. why it wouldn't work to have the corridor fade to black if we want to use filled line art with black lines.

All after doing some thumbnail sketches to work out what the problems were in the first place. Not bad for an hours work! #krita #VisualDesign #IterativeImprovements