Yo listen up, here's a story
about a little ven
who entered an art contest
and it ended in a total flaming disastertastrophe.
My bad.Alright so I mean, I'm not good at art. Never pretended to be. But I really wanted this contest so that there'd be a compelling reason to get a tiny bit better at it. And man, lemme tell you, it's been a
really rough ride. This is actually the fourth iteration- the fourth time I've hit a brick wall and been forced to learn things I simply couldn't within the time frame, the fourth time I've stressed out over not being good enough for my own standards and dumped the project in favor of something more my speed. They say third time's the charm, and they're totally wrong, haha. As it turns out, fourth time wasn't the charm either, but when it really comes down to it I think I accomplished my goal- I learned what my artistic limits are, I've pushed those limits, and I've gained a ton of cool new ideas to attempt when I'm further along. And that's all I really care about, not winning or losing or even whether I enjoyed participating (the answer to which is a resounding "not particularly", heh, the burnout is mega real :p). So enough's enough, I said I'd enter regardless, and the fourth iteration will be that entry. No regrets (on my part at least, teehee~).
When I first saw the Nature theme, my initial thought was of some scenery image. And that's fine, I know some people have done that, and I'm not trying to put down their work at all. But it's just not "Ven" enough, y'know? I'm that guy who designs levels that are sometimes impractical, sometimes flat out bad, but they're the levels that I want to make, and judgings be damned. So I took a slightly different approach- that of the conflict between everything "natural" and everything "artificial". That's been my motif since the very beginning, and yeah, if you've been following my changelog (before it was deleted, anyway) it's undergone a pretty radical progression from brutal and pessimistic (that of an age thousands of years after humanity is dead and gone, where relics of their civilization exist only as mouldering ruins Nature is quick to push out of sight, very conquest-styled) to the current gameplan (that of a more optimistic paradox of natures, in which the artificial and natural can work together, sometimes in unexpected and unanticipated ways). I'm more than a little new to this art stuff but I really dug working on and experiencing that flow, that evolution.
I've gotta admit, though- I may have cheated. Although every pixel was placed individually by
moi, I had the help of tens (if not hundreds) of reference images from Google, and a bit of assistance from other users, who inspired me to think about things differently and keep at what ended up being a very long and very tedious task condensed into a span of less than four days. It's sure as hell not good, and I'm actually a little sorry for anyone who clicks this spoiler, but hey, we learn through failure.
Enjoy, or don't.
Probably would've turned out better if I did everything at once, instead of combining elements at the end. Or if I'd upscaled, instead of covering my blunders by artificially pixelating. Or if I actually had a background, instead of plain transparency. C'est la vie.
