The Adobe Illustrator Paint Brush

Good day.

I touched on this in the Covid-19 post, but I don't think I've gone into nearly enough detail. What is "this"? "This" is the title of this post and a huge chunk of the reason I carried my game through to completion rather than giving up and throwing it into the bulging sack of half-baked ideas. I am talking, of course, about the Adobe Illustrator paint brush.

If you are not familiar with the paint brush, it is much like any other you may have used but with one key difference: it corrects small mistakes.

Let us travel back a tad, to a time when a littler me wanted to draw things from my own head. I could see the picture in my mind's eye, but when it came to the act of scribbling it on a page, it came out absolutely nothing like I wanted it to. I could copy things, probably pretty well if I had enough time, but drawing the images in my own brain just seemed impossible. I'm not exaggerating and I'm not doing that thing people do when fishing for comforting words, my drawings were garbage.

Fast forward to earlier this year. Maybe after lockdown in the UK, maybe just before I don't remember, but my step brother (an android programmer) wanted some assets for a game he's been working on. I had the Adobe package (need it for work sometimes) so I downloaded illustrator and watched one video on YouTube. This video in fact:

I then drew a thing using what turned out to be the brush of my dreams. This thing:

And I flippin' loved it! Yeah I know it's a bit pants. The point is, that's what was in my head and that's what came out. I genuinely put it down to the Illustrator brush smoothing out all the small errors. Oh by the way, I'm just using a mouse. I didn't even have a proper mouse mat at that point so occasionally the cursor would annoyingly skip about a bit, but even still, that took about 10 minutes to do. I labelled it "title screen lol" and sent it to my step bro. I then redrew it, mainly because I wanted to, and this came out:

So, "a huge chunk of the reason I carried my game through to completion" was what I said at the start of this. Please, allow me to explain...

It boils down to my process. I would think of something I wanted to add to the game, draw it, stick it in Unity and then program around it. If it wasn't quite right, I'd redraw it. After very little time, I'd have a piece of the overall game that I could actually see, rather than just a box or other placeholder. For me, that is completely invaluable. Because I can see exactly what I'm creating as I am creating it, there is one less thing I have to use my brain for. It is one less thing I have to imagine and, of course, one less thing to redo later. For example in Secure This, I needed to add a new building front, I drew it, added it, made it line up with the rooms, floor etc. and stuck all the appropriate scripts to it. If I had used a placeholder, I would likely have to do all of this twice: once for the placeholder, then once again for the finished asset. I think that would have been enough to annoy me and send me spiralling into a well of tedium, especially if I'd known that, after I'd finished the bones of the game, I'd have to go back and add all of the assets later. Boring.

I'm starting to ramble a bit so I'll shut up. If you fancy trying the game Secure This on Android, it's here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Wilabod.SecureThis&gl=GB

A fella wrote an article about the game you can read that here if y'want:

https://www.pocketgamer.com/articles/084524/secure-this/

One dude did a little gameplay video on the YouTubes too. Check that out below:

Please let me know if you'd like to see the game on Steam and I'll wang it on there. I would take out the in app purchases and charge a small amount for the game. It costs £95 to publish on Steam so I would have to have enough people interested for it to be worth it for me... 5 or 6 would probably be enough to be honest...