How can you create game art that responds to player input?

Keep your things Simple, Elaborated, and Smooth. Engage your users with some heptic feedbacks. A short tutorial would be a bonus.

Multiple inputs are not rare either. That's a decision to make early on and needs to be carefully planned in order to avoid compatibility issues. Things can work very differently across platforms and a change of plans later on can cost a lot of resources in the process as well as poor results.

From my experience with game development/design, I would say the input are a more fundamental part of the mechanics than the actual art, of course your art will be responsible to attract people and their interactive will be very important as well. In indie games, having inputs that stand out is quite important, they bring a sense of freshness to the players that are so used to the game thing over and over.

In software development we've never created buttons that did not have a purpose. If there is a door, an NPC, a guitar and light in the scene, you definitely need to think through the interaction with them. Everything that we add must make sense. Otherwise, why would they be added, we’re not in a museum) We should crafting interactive experiences that engage users.

It is tempting to select an input type based on exciting technology. But before you do, try to take a step back and before all that, think about what you want to accomplish. Which people are you trying to reach and what kind of emotions do you want to create for them. An example: "I want to build a game for a casual female audience that makes everyone just feel good". In such a case, you would want to select a more frictionless input technology, like touch, or even voice. "I want to make a game for gaming veterans that makes them feel like they are pro-players" Touch controls, which are prone to error, would be an ill fit in this case. You probably need to consider keyboard and mouse for best results.

Target quality, style consistency and budget are the three major factors to take into account when choosing your assets. Not all projects are based on high-quality visuals and not everyone can afford fully custom assets. That doesn't mean you won't make games.?Maybe you want to make a minimal asset project with a great story, or it's better for your project to use asset packs re-skinned for consistency. Or maybe you are fully prepared and ready for the big project of your dreams. Whatever it is, make sure you weigh the time and cost and keep a 30-50% extra buffer zone on top, for unexpected needs.

Being a big fan of Photoshop or Adobe in general, I would say making your assets is the way to go, it creates an individualism that can be the key to create your own image, even with a minimalist style or low numbered color pallet that can create a character for yourself on the Internet. The most important thing would be drawing and draw again, if you don't know what to draw, draw for other, look what people need or want, and do that even if It's for free, when you get better, you can make money out of it.

A big mistake I see a lot in the gamedev space is that people think they have to create everything themselves. Now, we are all very generalist artists, but there's a catch that applies to all of us: Learning and perfecting a skill takes a lot of time and effort. If you are trying to keep a feasable release window for your project, ask yourself if you have the time to really get good at a specific skill. For example, do you have the time to learn all the music theory by heart needed for creating a kick ass track? Identify your biggest gaps and fill them with assets you can get from the various stores. Is there an area where you absolutely require individuality? Then this is where you hire an expert.

Art behaviors spread from UI interactions to the faintest ambient sound when passing through a specific area. Active or passive, behaviors build and dress the overall User Experience and can make or break your previous and upcoming decisions.

There are a number of technics you can learn to better mix your character and interactive objects with your background/ environment, Using Parallax effects in side scroller games is a good example, small animations or even big animations always bring the drawings to live. But you don't necessarily need to draw everything, nowadays, programmers can help out with that. You need to think in a way that certain animations don't look out of place, the same goes to the art assets, so players don't waste time on things they think will contribute to the story or the continuation of the game.

The technology of today gives you countless different ways to achieve any singular behaviour. I'll give you an example from my own game. I needed a swarm of butterflies. How to set up a swarm and animate it can be done in many different ways. You could just animate everything in Blender and bake it. You could also use a swarm script and move every butterfly seperately. You could animate each individual butterfly in Blender and apply animations to the models. Or, like I did, you could write a shader that achieves the animation through vector displacement. When chosing the right approach, these are the factors to consider: Development time and performance.

Variations work with behavior to communicate a number of things, completing the User Experience. Mindful choices can elevate your asset library quality, add emphasis to your story, support the emotional path and so on.

This is where you can achieve a lot with very little, depending on your experience. Using texture and shaders, you can create a lot of variation without having to create individual assets. I'd like to remind everyone however of the importance of sound. Too often I see interactive behaviours that pay little attention to the potential of dynamic sound effects. Don't always play the same samples. You can make a set of variations and have them selected randomly. You can adjust the pitch of your samples, randomly, or based on your variable parameters. I come from a strong UX background, where we ignore sound altogether. Sound is one of your most powerfull tools to create a feeling for your players. Don't leave it in the toolbox.

Indeed, I think this part is where your U.I/U.X design can come in handy, thinking of ways to make interactions thought the player's actions. Doing art changes or even sounds can help the player feel immersive in their gameplay. You need to show when the player feels confused, sad, happy, all those emotions, and sometimes you aren't able to thought to certain art styles or other aspects, so using these variations can help you out.

At this point you have a whole set of assets, including your UI, characters, environments, sound and music library, VFX and more. With some good planning, combinations are partly decided later on, even from the visual development stage. However things can vastly change in the process, and the final touches on how everything blends together can be taken quite closer to the end of the initial development and still change under the feedback received on testing.

Art combinations can be a trick subject, what assets would look better in what comment? Using realism can help with a more serious look at the game, you can see this combination mostly in indie and minimalistic games, where your character itself doesn't show most emotion, but you have cutscenes and intros that will have different styles, so you can get more immersive in the story. Overall, it all depends on the liberty you get to draw what you want and find a style that can fit both art styles, be it either having the same color pallet or just the same character.

Testing is your final failsafe before you get your project out there. It's good to have people dedicated to the task but definitely include your development team on this stage as much as possible. Your sound expert can detect sound issues better than anyone and same goes for your graphic designer and the UI. The game designer needs to experience the final result and confirm that everything has been translated as intended. You get the feeling.

Your testing team can run testing with a checklist of possible issues or without it but I always recommend the first run to be without checklists (or even context) to first check the readability of the overall experience.?Last thing to keep in mind on testing is that the players can go towards unexpected paths much more than we might think, and it's the testers' job to think out of the box and stretch the limits of the gameplay as much as possible, to help the development team eliminate breaks hidden in mischievous corners.

As far as interactivity goes, don't every assume you are not required to test with players. What I always hammer into my students is my most fundamental UX-Insight: You can never, ever know what the experience of another person is like. Far too many game designer assume that they understand their players well enough. You do not and if you don't test your creation at some point, you are going to inherently damage your project.

I find game testing to be a fundamental ability to all game developers, being able to analyze your own game, discover your bugs and fix them, In the art part most likely sometimes some frames may be missing thought to wrong name tag in the folders, or sometimes it doesn't look as smooth as you thought, having high regard for your quality art will help you go a long way.

If you are looking to make your first game, then the best advice is to start small. Don't go directly to make the MMORPG of your dreams. It's a noble cause but it's a dangerous road as well for your sanity and resources. Fun projects of limited extent and budget are essential to gain experience and create your own market name. After that, with calculated steps, the sky's the limit!

If you are starting in the game development, my biggest advice is participated in game jams. If your country has game or subject related conventions and stuff like that, go there. You will always be able to learn anything and have a good time with it.