Introduction

In preparation for bringing ChaosTheDevil to the public I started researching the best way to make the game available.

Being a solo dev I have to be conscious of where I focus my time. I want the most bang for my buck (time).

I turned to GDC talks to get a deeper understanding of the topic.

The research suggested the following points:

  1. Steam traffic greatly out performs other platforms such as itch.io.

  2. Your Steam page is the most important part of Marketing.

  3. Most users that find your game will find it through Steam.

  4. Nobody reads the Steam descriptions (including me).

  5. Your game can live and die by a Steam capsule.

  6. The best Steam Capsules are not screenshots.

I decided to take some time out to focus on producing some marketing and concept art.

Here I document my experience.

Contents

  1. Why not commission one?
  2. Why not use AI?
  3. Preparation
  4. Overview of design process
  5. Result
  6. Conclusion

Why not commission one?

This could be a sensible route with the idea of keeping my focus on the other development. However, I chose to do this myself for a few reasons.

  1. I want to push my art skills.

  2. I don’t want to spend time looking for a contractor.

  3. I don’t want to spend time managing a contractor.

  4. I am going to need a lot of marketing material tailored to meet the needs of different sites and this could quickly become costly or limiting.

Why not use AI?

I want to have complete control of the images.

Preparation

I decided to use InkScape, a vector graphics program. It’s free, I can make infinite tweaks, don’t have to decide on a resolution, and I have prior experience with it.

This GDC talk[TODO] by bla argued that it was important that the Capsule captured the style of the genre and identified that each game style had similar capsules. The idea being that the user could identify the game type from the Capsule style alone.

Luckily ChaosTheDevil has a very solid idea of itself. So I spent some time browsing the platformer category on Steam and copied capsules into an inspiration board. I included AAA and Indie titles and included successful and obscure titles.

Things of note with the capsules:

  1. The capsules of the genre did appear to have a similar style. Focus on Main character, environments/supplementary cast behind.

  2. AAA and indie were pretty different. Indie had much less going on and relied more on artistic style, while AAA had a polished cartoon perfection to them.

  3. The obscure titles had more occurrences of inclusion of game renders.

  4. There was a direct correlation with quality and my awareness of the title.

Overview of design process

I stopped programming to focus entirely on one image. I spent around a month iteratively designing a single capsule.

The design was actually really 6 different components.

  1. The character (aided by having a render similar to what I wanted as a start point).

  2. The lava cave scene

  3. The castle waterfall scene

  4. The ice mountains scene

  5. The logo

  6. Finial composition and ensuring that all these components worked together.

Each component was made in an iterative process. First outlining basic shapes and then slowly adapting and adding more detail.

DESIGN GIF

Result

| Affine warping effect on polygons with offscreen vertices | |:–:| | Twitch banner - Steam capsule design adapted to fit twitch banner specifications. Shows the most of the design. |

I was also able to adapt the file for an array of different sites.

Most sites required landscape images but some such as the Steam vertical image, required portrait. Portrait images were the most challenging to compose as my source images were all designed with landscape in mind.

The hardest site to make a cover image for was YouTube as it required so many different variations for all the different supported hardware. It lead to a very different design to the others which I wasn’t too happy with. However, I don’t expect many users are actually going to watch my youtube videos on their TVs so I am probably fine.

Affine warping effect on polygons with offscreen vertices
Steam materials - Shows capsule, main capsule and vertical capsule. Varying compositions created efficiently via separate art elements.

Conclusion

I am very happy with the final result and the change from programming was thoroughly enjoyable. Losing myself in art so completely for over a month was very satisfying and I have to say I miss it.

The best technique I would recommend is ensuring along the way that the disparate pieces of the image hold together during design. Many times I altered the design of the base elements, as they clashed when brought into the final composition. It proved to be a great design guide to keep the parts working together, when in theory I could have drawn anything.

e.g. using the colour red in the background scenes often caused the main character to blend in with the background.

As a solo devs we need to use time efficiently, we should prefer to make decisions which can result in maximum flexibility. The image I produced is entirely vector graphics, nothing is raster. I am able to alter the image for other marketing materials which require different image sizes to the capsule fairly easily.

So easily, for fun I even created a large version to put on my office wall.

Affine warping effect on polygons with offscreen vertices
A3 Poster created mostly for fun.