roman hyacinths

Hi! I’m an avid game jammer, submitting to 7 different videogame jams in 2024 alone. I’ve been able to pretty consistently create game jam art that I’m both proud of and performs well. I’ve landed in, on average, the top 0.25% in art categories for ranked jams — including ranking in the top 10 for presentation and top 100 overall out of ~7,000 submissions for two consecutive GMTK Jams (the largest online-only game jam in the world). I wanted to share a detailed post with some tips and resources I use to upgrade my art under game jam crunch for less pain and greater profit.

I have three audiences in mind who might find this post helpful:

1. Game jammers who don’t identify as artists
2. Artists who are technically skilled but are new to game jams
3. Game devs working on small indie games projects

I’ll be focusing on giving examples for 2D art, but given that this is primarily about approach, there are takeaways 3D artists could also benefit from. And while these tips are specifically for game jams, most of them are generally applicable to most small-scoped indie games projects.

I know many indie game devs prefer to focus on mechanics over aesthetics, but the two go hand-in-hand for effectively communicating ideas to players — and frankly, you’re going to get a lot more people to play your game if it looks and feels good.

I’m not an expert artist: I’m completely self-taught, and there are a lot of art fundamentals that I’m weak in (e.g, perspective, movement, and anatomy). Though I have a good artistic eye, a major reason I’ve been successful in game jams specifically is because I know what to focus on under time pressure and where to set constraints. I think most people will be able to benefit from doing the same.

Tip 1: Focus on reusable assets and scope small

Reusing assets

In a game jam, time is precious. I’ve had the biggest payoff when I’ve focused on reusable assets with a “quality over quantity” mindset. Try to reuse assets as much as possible, and anything that appears frequently throughout the game and promotional materials — such as GUI, the logo, key backgrounds, and/or a main character — should be prioritized in quality and detail above single-use assets.

I’ll use my GMTK 2024 submission, Benedict Beaver the Builder (BBTB), as an example. BBTB is a puzzle game where you play as a beaver building houses for forest animals. It was made in four days and has only two backgrounds that are constantly reused with slight tweaks throughout the game. I could have created a new environment for every single level, but I’d much rather have two high-quality backgrounds that can be reused than eight low-quality, rushed backgrounds.

The entire game goes back and forth every level between the community board background (which updates with a new house request at the beginning of each level), and the outdoor background (where players get to build new houses customized to each animal’s request). For instance, the house for bears is inspired by a beehive in shape and has kegs of honey outside. Small, thoughtful touches like these are much better than having a lot of varied but low-quality assets.

Another example is my Dialogue Jam 2025 submission, WAITING FOR THE DEATH WIND: a visual novel inspired by Greek mythology and T.S. Eliot. I was considering doing detailed character portraits at one point. I ended up investing time into the the logo and dialogue box design instead, as they appeared more frequently in the game and promotional materials. This elevated the game’s presentation with much less effort than character portraits. Aim for improving the simple elements that are essnetial for a game before moving onto exciting but non-essential assets.

Scoping small

Any viable concept should be thoughtful about the amount of assets it demands from the very beginning. When art assets are treated an afterthought, they will feel like an afterthought. Consider how the mechanical/narrative ideas you come up at the beginning of a jam with will be translated visually — and scope small not only in terms of mechanics/narrative, but also in terms of required assets.

It’s important to approach art assets in a way that prioritizes getting a minimum viable product (MVP) off the ground instead of focusing on fun fluff. To do this, I separate out essential vs. non-essential assets in a detailed list format. I also will often comment the approximate amount of time each asset will take to make sure I’m not scoping beyond the jam deadline. An example from BBTB is below:

You don’t need to write out every single asset the way I do — but I would definitely recommend thinking through what’s essential for your game’s MVP from the very beginning. Starting off with simple sketches of every game screen before going into asset production can be hugely helpful for cataloguing the assets you'll need.

For every game jam I’ve been a part of, there have been assets I’ve created that I’m unhappy with but actively choose to move on from so I can have something that’s decent for every core game asset.

Promotional materials

Reusable assets are also great for promotional materials outside of the game. You can easily make a polished itch.io page with little effort by repurposing in-game assets. (As a side note, I recommend this guide for properly sizing itch.io page elements.)

That brings me to cover images. Itch.io allows you to use GIFs under 3 MB as cover images, and I highly recommend people make a GIF vs. a still image. For either of the following approaches, I recommend using EZgif.com for compressing your GIF down to <3 MB.

• Record Gameplay: If you’re in a time crunch or don’t want to spend time creating an animation, I recommend creating a basic image cover with your game’s logo and a background, and then slapping that as the first frame of a GIF of some recorded gameplay and calling it a day. There are some resources on how to do that in this thread.
• Re-Use Assets for a Custom Animation: I generally aim to create seamless 6-second loops for my GIFs in After Effects using existing game assets and then exporting using GifGun2. For BBTB, I grabbed Benedict’s in-game character asset, erased the bottom, and wrote a simple floating loop expression. I then drew a simple water background with a few brushstrokes, and two extremely simple logs (which I slapped the same loop expression on with minor modifications). I put one of our existing backgrounds as the background for the rest of the cover GIF. This took me maybe 30 minutes in total. Our game spent most of GMTK 2024’s rating period in the top 200 out of 7,571 games for popularity, eventually garnering over 100 votes in a jam with a median 14 votes. A lot of votes within itself doesn’t guarantee a high rating — but it did mean that a lot of people played and left us valuable feedback.

Tip 2: Focus on easy ways to upgrade your art

Having a basic understanding of texture, color, and composition are the three easiest ways to quickly upgrade visual art.

Texture

What is texture? It’s the visual characteristics that give a physical feel to art — often implemented through details such as grain or brushstroke patterns. Below are two practical examples of the same scene — one that’s mostly untextured, and one that is textured.

Do you feel the differences between the two examples? This upgrade consisted of literally 2 minutes worth of texture application: using a grain brush for the shadows around the perimeter, using open source wood textures for the background and typewriter, and then slapping two different grain textures on top.

There are two practical ways to easily add texture to 2D art:

• Pixel Art: If you’re a new artist, consider using pixel art over HD 2D art or 3D art. Pixel art becomes naturally textured as you add shading and dithering, and while it won’t instantly make you an amazing artist, in many ways it is easier for non-artists to produce decent work in. I highly suggest taking a look at this forum thread for pixel art basics, and Saint11’s fantastic and incredibly actionable pixel art tutorials.
• HD Art Textures: If you, like me, prefer HD 2D art, look into texture overlays. Textured overlays are photographed textures that you put in a layer above your assets (setting the blending mode of to “overlay” or “soft light”). I make a lot of my own textures by scanning textured objects and various kinds of paper, but I also use noise textures like this one, as well as paper textures from True Grit Texture Supply. Creative Market also has a stockpile of textures. For more specific textures, like the wood textures above, I’ll search for free-to-use photos on sites like Pixabay or Pexels. This is likely one of the easiest ways to instantly make your work look more interesting and polished. You can also use layer masks to apply textures to specific objects and buy textured brushes (or increase a brush’s “color jitter” — a Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint modification you can make to any brush) to have fine control over texture application.

Color

Color is possibly the easiest way to up your art game. I’d recommend reading about basic color theory (or basic color theory for pixel art specifically) but there are two practical ways to instantly improve your color usage:

• Using Pre-Made Color Palettes: Using pre-made color palettes is a great way to limit your use of colors — helpful for both reducing decision fatigue and also increasing how cohesive your output is. Lospec has some great, user-made pixel art palettes with examples of how they can be used. Limit yourself to a color palette with fewer options at first so you can use colors intentionally instead of feeling overwhelmed by options (picking a color palette with 8-16 colors, such as this color palette, is a great place to start). It’s also super helpful to choose a color palette that has example art, which can help you figure out how to translate the palette to your game. Examples are especially helpful in terms of figuring out which colors look good when used as highlights and shadows since hue shifting can be hard to figure out at first. E.g., in this color palette, a set of slightly hue-shifted grays are being used for stone highlights and shadows. What gray objects in your game could those exact same colors be used for?
• Using Inspiration: Be inspired by other games, and think critically about why the color palettes in their projects are effective, and why they make you feel the way they do. It’s totally okay to copy the color palette of art you find interesting as long as you aren’t also directly copying the artist’s style. More on inspiration in tip 4.

Composition

In addition to generally thinking about color and texture, I’d also recommend looking into learning the basic rules of composition for background art — searching “art composition” in the images section of your browser is a great place to start, as it’ll bring up easy-to-digest explanations such as this one:

Composition is especially helpful to think about for game backgrounds and itch.io cover images, but it can be applied to everything from GUI to character poses.

Working on a game with a boss fight that you want to feel more epic and intimating? Maybe incorporate an unbalanced composition where your character is tiny, creating visual vulnerability for the player.

Working on a game with dynamic movement, groovy music, and lots of juice? Maybe focus on dynamic compositions.

There are so many ways in which composition and perspective affect the feel of a game. I think gaining a basic understanding of why different compositions provoke the feelings they do allow you to recognize what’s working and not working as you play games. Over time, you’ll be able to instinctively incorporate what works well into your own games.

Tip 3: Focus on your strengths and set creative boundaries

I am not good at drawing people. I suck at anatomy and suck at making movement look dynamic. Before joining a jam team, I’ll tell them upfront that I don’t want to want to work on an idea that requires drawing people, as it’s unnecessarily time consuming for me. I’ll sometimes later decide to draw one or two people for a game, but I never want to the game to rely on me having to draw people. This doesn’t mean I don’t want to get better at drawing people, but I’ve found that crunch time is stressful enough without forcing yourself to work through frustrating areas of improvement.

I can, however, create decent UI super fast — and since UI is so reusable, it’s a win-win situation. Stellar Shepherd is another jam game I made where my lovely team allowed me to focus on UI and do very little else. I had a hard time designing the sheep, but since they were the “main characters” of the jam, it was worth the effort put into them.

For my jam game Tender, which features a human protagonist, it was a stretch goal to draw the main character, but the main artistic focus was on the gameplay screen with a terrarium the players would interact with throughout the game. I never ended up drawing the protagonist, and the game doesn’t suffer massively for it.

What do you currently suck at? What are you good at, or at the very least, suck less at? If you care about a high-quality output, set constraints for your projects.

Tip 4: Liberally use inspiration and references

You may have heard the quote “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” I honestly don’t think this should be taken literally, but inspiration and references are critically important. New artists frequently fall into the trap of not using either enough.

Combine Art Inspirations to Find Style

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Do you like X, Y, and Z game artists? Don’t try to copy their style exactly, but it’s totally okay to mix the line art style of X with the textures of Y and the colors of Z. I generally use Pinterest at the beginning of each game jam to search for and pin game art and illustrations similar to the artistic style I was thinking of and/or game jam theme, and return to them throughout the jam if I’m feeling stuck.

Steal from Free Reference Photos

If you need to draw more technically challenging subjects, it’s super helpful to use photos. Drawing a background with leaves? Look at photos of leaves! Drawing a hand? Look at photos of hands! If you’re worried about marking art that’s too close to the reference photo, use free-to-use photos on sites like Pixabay or Pexels.

End note

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much! Please reach out if there’s anything that could use further elaboration or examples.

If you’re interested in seeing the jam games I’ve worked on, I have a list of them and some gameplay videos elsewhere on my website. If you’re interested in seeing my full artistic process for a game jam, I wrote a quasi post-mortem for GMTK 2024 on this blog.