Hey everyone, a friend and I made a little game in 30 hours for a game jam. I think it came out pretty cool. It's a game where you arc electricity onto electromagnets to pull yourself towards them and climb as high as you can. You can play it in the browser here:

preece.itch.io/arc

I personally really like the style. While I think it has roots in "retro" video game graphics, I do not think it works simply because of nostalgia. If anything, our childhood experience with pixel graphics predisposed us to "getting" the aesthetic, so that we can now build it out as its own thing.

I also think it is a good style for an interactive medium like video games (where movement is the essential aspect of that interaction), because it lends itself well to being animated. Not just because it is simple and relatively easy to produce, but because there is something inherent in it that allows the artist to capture exaggerated movements that are entertaining. The same is true for the "cartoon" style. These abstracted forms with very little rendering are extremely effective at capturing interesting movements. In other words, a single frame of this style is not designed to stand up on its own. It's designed to stand up in the moving interactive environment of the video game.

I see a sort of backlash of people saying it's a gimmick, overdone, trying too hard to appeal to nostalgia, etc... But if it's a gimmick it is an undeniably effective and productive one.

I'll just throw my experience out there, as a counterpoint. I came here with essentially 0 art skills and 0 pixelling skills. Probably 95%+ of my time was just working on my own, trying to figure stuff out and make it work. Then when I hit a plateau, I'd come here to see if someone could help me move past it. Sometimes, I would get responses that were amazing and helpful (I remember some great ones from Helm). Sometimes, I would get responses that were good, but not revelatory. And sometimes I would get nothing. But anything I got, I would try and learn from if I could (often, it was way over my head and I was simply not good enough to learn all I could from it).

I also started giving critique. When I picked something up, I'd try to pass it along to other newbies. Honestly I learned so much from doing this, trying to create edits. Did I have a big impact on anyone? Almost certainly no, but there were a few times where I really helped people and it felt good. And from doing these edits and trying to see what could be improved about a piece, I got better.

Perhaps you're focusing too much on what you think you should get, what you're entitled to, and too little on what you can give back. Plus, when I look at your posts I see loads of good feedback. Lots of it you dismissed as outside your skill level or ignored.

Cool animation! It does lots of things well, I think you have a good eye for animation. One thing I think might help you though, is the way you time each frame. Right now, many frames have different timings. This might seem good at first, but it really makes things way more complicated and difficult. With a regular frame timing, each frame represents a certain amount of time, and more importantly each unit of space represents a certain amount of movement between frames. For instance, if you have a single pixel moving one pixel every frame, a regular frame timing would give you regular movement. If the frames all had different timings, making that pixel move at a steady pace would be very difficult. With animation, everything involves the change in position between frames. So with an irregular frame timing, you need to account for both the amount of movement and the amount of time represented by that frame. Very very tricky.

I can see you are trying to make quick things happen quickly by reducing the frame time. But there are better ways to represent the speed of an action. Remember that the distance an object moves between frames corresponds to it's speed. For the gun recoil, it is meant to move quickly up and then slow down as she gets control of it. The motion blur you use for the gun, is actually a product of film. In film, each frame represents some unit of time (same as in animation). If the shutter speed is too slow, all movement occurring within that frame time will be captured (making a blur). That's why a motion blur makes things look quick, it represents to the eye a lot of motion in a short amount of time.



In the edit, I did a few very simple things. I made the frame timings regular. Then, I combined the muzzle flash frame (too quick to be represented by its own frame) with the first recoil frame. Finally, I increased the amount of recoil experienced and the response to it. The edit is still flawed. It seems to "catch" a bit before the recoil. This is because the muzzle flash frame has a small amount of change in position from the last frame. The frame after moves a lot more. Anyway, hope it helps a little bit.

Keep up the good work, I like what I'm seeing overall.