itch.io

I do remember The Way! I remember having my mind blown by it in like 2004. I also mentioned it on r/rpgmaker just the other day.

At this point after decades of RM obsession, my collection of other people's pixels is so vast and well curated (organized not just by type, format, and style but also by what I have the rights to use commercially and artist credits) that learning to pixel myself would almost feel like wasted effort. Also to be honest I've never had even the slightest artistic aptitude or inclination, no drawing experience whatsoever outside of doodling (very, very badly) in grade school, some people can draw a more or less perfect circle freehand but I'm one of those people in the other extreme who genuinely struggles to draw a straight line using a ruler. I did take five or six months last year to finally learn GODOT, and that WAS a good investment of time. 

I can cludge together just about anything I need from my archive of (*checks notes*) 23.1 GB in 292,012 files across 23,481 folders of game dev assets plus the stuff on here (with new stuff coming out all the time, this website is pretty great) I haven't yet hoarded. My current project is the first one in recent memory to not use either character sprites nor tilesets at all as it's a first person turn based dungeon crawler/JRPG/VN hybrid, but I'm still (enjoyably) spending tons of dev time "frankenspriting" the VN style busts and front view enemy graphics.

Amen to the rest of what you've said. The people actually making something like a living in this space definitely seem like the ones selling assets, not the ones actually making games. It's a real "if you want to make money during a gold rush, don't pan for gold, sell picks and shovels" type deal. Anyway sorry to fill up your page with mostly irrelevant words, but thanks for chatting!

Excellent stuff. While my games have more than their share of blood, I'll be re-tinting to cyan blue because I think these should also serve well for a first person perspective frosting and fogging up during extreme cold and heavy snowfall.

Keep you in mind? I absolutely will! Yes, I am the same Legion that's been around since about 2002 (Iron Gaia, Backstage, etcetera, in around 2006 at the age of 20 I helped judge the Misao awards) so I remember that era quite well. Actually I ran into Don Miguel himself on Twitter last year and we followed each other. What a blast from the past! Specifically, your stuff reminds me of the "future" assets for OG rm2k used in the 2k thru XP era Japanese sample game KNight-Blade, which were famously used in A Blurred Line (which I still venerate and adore). 

I can't pixel from scratch to save my life, but at this point I have over two decades of experience with what we used to call "frankenspriting", so I've become a deft hand at that pseudo-skill.

These are excellent and reasonably priced! Very curious how well they'd scale up to 48x48 with Nearest Neighbor. The piloted mech sprite I see in the preview reminds me a lot of Graft from Phantom 2040 for whatever reason, but that's kind of a deep cut and I'd be amazed if you'd even seen it.

Pretty sure it was just a typo.

These rule! I love the style they're made in. It gives me a very warm and fuzzy nostalgia for some of my favorite RPG Maker resources from the rm2k/rm2k3 era of circa 2002-2006.

If these had been available 4-6 years ago when I was working on Live Free Or Die/Spirt of '76 I would have used the hell out of them and the project would have been greatly enhanced thereby (the latter was using these, which are great but extremely limited in variety of characters available and quite stylistically distinct from any other sprites available). 

I just wanted to say the way the guns are previewed on this page is some of the slickest shit I've ever seen on itch.io. Very impressive, great job!!

Okay, the gun pedant in me can't resist adding this: what you've called an "M15" is actually an M16 or AR15 (the actual "M15 Rifle" is less well known and a variant of the M14) and your MP5 while otherwise pretty accurate is very rarely found or depicted with wooden furniture and should probably look like this:

Still, GREAT work!

Sad to hear this never finished development. Itch didn't show me it until now, six years after the demo release. As a fellow RM survival horror dev I can safely say it looks rad AF.

do not calle up what ye cannot put downe

These are GREAT!! Are we allowed to edit the art for use in game projects? (Obviously, following all other licensing rules.)

This is rad AF.

(So is the font on this page. Which font is it, by the way? Looks almost like TT2020 to me but not quite.)

thank you for the delicious pies

look, I'd never complain about a free asset pack, but there are literally only 66 images in this pack so I'm not sure how you counted "90+"

Not a bad idea to disclose that these are AI generated. Not buying AI assets RN but I feel like those who would are probably wondering if the character images come with transparent BGs? Also, are the two female characters shown in the 'Screenshots' meant to be the same character (within the limits of GenAI)?

Hey you absolute legend, I owe you (at least) $9.00 if and when my ass is less utterly, cripplingly broke. Amazing stuff, and lots of. Rated 5 stars, naturally.

Is AI used in your workflow at all? If not, the sheer quantity of these is incredibly impressive. I see to me what look like a few potential telltales of AI generation (no judgement, and certainly no offense meant!) but the original resolution and the heavily dithered upscaling indicates otherwise.

Anyway, I like these regardless, but if these are actually hand pixeled, I am somewhat in awe of you. That is a TON of pixel art landscapes to drop for free and Creative Commons.

Hi, can you confirm for me if these are AI generated or not? I'm looking for alternatives to AI generated content already in one of my games.

hey I was going through the PSDs trying to work out how to convert this into a 2D asset and I stumbled across the subtle ad for your game First Winter and I just wanted to say that was absolute class! cool stuff. : )

Not yet, but let me know where you're stuck and I can help you out!

Part of the reason I describe pre All Saints 2017 me as another life is because I lost all of my friends all at once and have sadly lost most of my family since then starting with the passing of my father two years ago. But the game is finally 100% content and feature complete, IT IS DONE, I suspect that polishing it and exterminating the last of the bugs will probably be a basically indefinite undertaking whether the game sells or doesn't sell.

But I love the game, and it is done. I have done a frankly incredible thing. It's a borderline miracle I'm still alive after the damage I've taken in my real life, let alone that I was able to create something this relentlessly and insanely ambitious. If it got noticed, I think it would challenge people's ideas of what can be done in the engine the same way Fear and Hunger, LISA, Space Funeral and To The Moon did (all made by contemporaries of mine).

Anyway if you're not broke, buy the game, if you're broke like me, I'll send you a key here on itch. I'm coming from 22 years as a hobbyist dev releasing shit for free (became quite famous/infamous in that context in the oughts, at least in a certain scene). I just want people to play the damn thing. I'll figure out how I'm going to pay the rent later. I appreciate the understanding and/or concern.

I appreciate that but I kind of did the opposite put my full weight on the gas to try and get the thing done and in 1.0 by Halloween (tomorrow) like I promised in the very devlog after this one. I've been in an absolutely feverish crunch mode and I think I've probably put in something like 70ish hours over the 5-6 days, actually finishing the game, playtesting it (and all the different endings), last second debugging, capturing vod, making gifs, still have to cut a new and also see if I can actually uploading a working build/depot/package to STEAM (which has been a huge problem for me). I'm in a pretty terrible place, medically, psychologically, and especially financially, but I've thrown myself into the work and not really allowed myself to think about any of my other woes or crises. This is probably the feverish crunch state talking but part of me feels like I'm not going to survive much longer and I want to get this thing done before I die, fulfill tha tpromise to myself. 

But even if every moment up until this devlog was wasted effort, I made the decision to waste more effort and harder to get this motherfucker SHIPPED. What's another 17 or 19 days of my life I've squandered on this very-possibly-marketless game after the three years I've been working on this incarnation and the 19 years I've been thinking about the project more broadly. Once the game is actually out of EA and in full release on STEAM and I have screamed my lungs out into the void about it, so by the end of All Saints Day, I'm going to let myself pause and take a very, very, very deep breath and generally do the stuff you said. I THINK about quitting all the time, but push comes to shove, when it comes to DOING I really have no quit in me.    

(I was a mildly successful entrepeneur/small business owner once, in an even more niche nerd market, Tabletop indie RPGs, but in most ways, like so much, that feels like it was in another life.)

You might wish to also update the description to describe it as "AI generated backgrounds in a pixel art style".

Although some of these just don't look like pixel art at all.

this is the only post this person ever made and the completely random hostility towards this completely random asset fucking baffles me like WHY?

super hyped to listen to this, your stuff is so consistently amazing and always adds so much to my game.

is the track name "Devil's Dance Floor" a slight nod to the Flogging Molly song of the same name or just a coincidence?

First off, this game is amazing. Secondly, it brought to mind a balance concern I'd never thought of before, because unlike 99.9% of pen and paper RPG it involves physically yeeting dice at things. Different kinds of dice have different ballistic properties! Most plastic d20 are going to behave similarly, but I feel like heavy duty metal ones like I've been privileged to own a few sets of would have considerably more force and momentum. 

Every time I read "stacking blocks or dominoes" I mentally find-replaced that with just "standard dominoes", because "stacking blocks" outside of the specific context of Jenga (or I guess Dread) don't have any standardized shape or size.

Two final thoughts, A) is there any particular reason that losing is not possible and is vampire prison by default and that this game is 'play until you win'? I feel like generally speaking the possibility of a TPK/bad ending adds spice and savor and nothing about this gourd-based premise seems to me to clash with that.

B) have you thought about giving the boss vampires the ability to 'play goalie' against (a limited number of) the player's rolls (in a turn)? I feel like this could really spice things up and add excitement. Curious if you tried anything like this in playtesting.

this is metal as fuck

Like I said, I have 22 years experience in RPG Maker and a little less than a year in GODOT (I can code competently enough in GD Script although I still have a ton to learn). I have a degree in Creative Writing and am extensively professionally published in that field. 

Anyway, forget it. Your ideas of what personnel are required to make a game are very, very different than mine. Probably informed by the dozens of games I've made and released on my own over the years without an artist or composer, handling all of the programming and writing/narrative design myself, along with the game design. Also you didn't even answer if you had an idea you're excited about that you think has legs. I've already started a jam project on my own (like usual) besides, although I'm not sure it'll be a good fit for this jam after all.

Take care, have fun.

sure, here's a 16x16 3-frame sideview I took an hour to throw together, free for anyone to use in their game or build on

1x: 

3x: 

this looks fucking amazing. I think I might have to shrink it down to 16px tall for this jam I'm doing and if so I beg your forgiveness eternal. But super cool sprite, love it to death.

Also I feel this definitely takes place somewhere in the https://whalitf.itch.io/darkweb-streamer universe, at least enough to use that as an excuse to make sure you know about this game.

oh fuck yes

that does not appear to be an actual game screenshot, and if it is, I am really struggling to square it with the description lol

Thank you for having the courage to be the person to ask "where is the intersection between Wordle and SAW", I commend you, and I find this, unironically, to be stunning and brave.

Hi, I'm considering joining the jam with a 2D entry. I joined your discord and downloaded the asset pack and as you said it's all 3D stuff. As the Metic cameo is required (and I don't mind using the character) and a judging category, I'm afraid this will prevent me from joining, as I don't really have the pixel art chops to do a halfway 2D Metic sprite from scratch, especially not in a style that will match with the rest of the assets I'm using. Unless by chance you have any 2D assets for this character, anything at all?

look I'm probably overthinking this, overthinking things IS a specialty of mine, but I went to the reddit to try and understand what "weirdcore" is and I understand less than I did before I poked around the reddit. this "explainer" image only increased my confusion. 

so I get that the developers are filled with an unfathomable hatred for weirdcore images that involve 'OCs' with disembodied objects for heads. cool, gotcha. but is the presence of too many eyeballs where there should not be eyeballs and 'biblically accurate [_________] (whatevers)' also frowned upon. Because I gotta be honest, outside of those elements of "mainstream weirdcore" (an odd phrase to even type/say), I'm not at all sure what actually unites "((("""true"""))) weirdcore as an aesthetic. I understand what liminal spaces are on a deeper than memetic level, but I am very confused by this good versus bad weirdcore dichotomy. 

So as the jam start date approaches if you're still checking this, let me ask if you have an idea? I am an experienced (>22 years in RPG Maker, <1 year in Godot) generalist 2D dev but I have never really worked on an idea that isn't mine in its genesis and I think that could be a really valuable experience for me so if you've got a good one, do hit me up.

fuck yes space terrorism

These are great but they're also in a style that doesn't quite match any existing style. Have you made alive/intact characters in this style (which I quite dig)?

well that's swell of you! lmk if you have any issues buying it (maybe I should be more embarrassed to admit this but no one has, yet) because I've run into an issue at least once in the past where itch turned off my payment processing w/o telling me.

Hi GarmdGriek, the beta (the 'new build' I've been 'releasing soon' for uh, several months) is finally live! If you want to just buy it, you can definitely do that. If you are willing to commit to beta testing the whole thing and giving detailed feedback, I can also hook you up with a download key. Just let me know where to e-mail it or otherwise send it to, apparently itch won't let me link or send download keys to itch accounts, it just provides the URL.