Today I wanted to show you the most popular design that I ever made. Here it is:
I don’t know how many designs I’ve made in my life – a few hundred probably. This remains my best selling one.
Doesn’t look like much, does it? It’s really quite simple. My friends don’t believe me when I tell them that they too could design something and sell on a t-shirt. But as you can see it’s absolutely possible.
The important thing is to just have an idea.
I was thinking about my first two jobs and that it was a good thing that they were just a bit too uncomfortable and forced me to find something else. Nowadays I like stepping outside of my comfort zone. That’s why I make games and why I started this blog. But back then I don’t know if I would have been brave enough to leave comfortable employment without an external push.
A few weeks ago I took a Self-Couching course and in one of the reading materials was a sentence which I liked:
“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”
Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
After the success of our first game, we decided to make a sequel. Making a second game should be easier, you are supposed to learn from your mistakes, right? Well, not only did we repeat a lot of mistakes from our first game, but we also added new ones.
The game is Hidden Paws Mystery. Here are the 4 worst mistakes that we made:
1. Scope – As before we planned too big a game, way bigger than we could make in a reasonable time. And we made even more levels than previously.
2. Topic – Our first game was about winter, it looked lovely: islands covered in snow, pine trees, little houses. We decided that our second game would be Halloween themed. The problem is that it’s difficult to make Halloween cozy and beautiful and cheerful. What’s worse — we actually planned to make it all weird and scary. But this was still a game about finding little cats. It didn’t match up. Players didn’t know what to make of our game.
3. Promoting – since our game didn’t look as pretty as the first one it was more difficult to promote on Twitter and got fewer wishlists on Steam.
4. Art style – our first game had a cute low-poly look. Our second game has more real looking graphics. Not only does it take longer to make a game with this art style but it was completely unnecessary for such a simple game.
Not surprisingly it sold poorly. It has very positive reviews though so that’s good.
My favorite book from childhood is “Summer Lake” though I have it in Polish. There’s a dead fish on the cover, but other than that, the book really is lovely.
Or at least I think this was my favorite when I was a child. Maybe I had another book that I loved more, but I forgot about it?
Anyway, this book is wonderful, it has everything a good children’s book needs: beautiful hand-drawn illustrations, lots of details, nearly no text so you can invent your own stories, little animals, tiny yellow ducklings.
The drawing that I like most is on the last page. Do you see the fish net full of flowers? It’s magical.
It’s been out of print for years, but you might still find it.
I’ve been browsing children’s books lately because my brother and I will be drawing our own book this Christmas when we meet at our mom’s house. The previous Christmases we made games.
This text is not about dogs.
When I first started drawing things and selling them on t-shirts and such, I spent way too much time endlessly improving my complicated designs. And then after maybe a week of work I would have one finished design and I would submit it to various websites. And it would disappear, no one would like it, buy it, no one would pay any attention. Then I would repeat the whole process: make a design for days, obsessing over tiny details and colors, submit, and most often than not, get no response and no interest.
Even after being in this business for years, I still can’t predict what people will like. That’s why it’s so important to not get too attached to any artwork, but keep making them, preferably fast, keep submitting, and some of those designs will get printed, often the ones you least expect.
Among my 10 most popular designs, 4 are designs that I thought no one would like. But I said to myself: “OK, you worked on it for hours, you might just as well publish it.”
So remember — quantity trumps quality. Draw a lot and publish everything, you never know what will be popular.
I drew a cat in a gift box, and it made me think that I could write a short note about gifts because I am asked about it sometimes. First, I think it’s better to save money than buy gifts this year. Covid-19 is in no way over, and the worst is yet to come. But we all like giving gifts, so here are the two most important things that all designers and artists and creators will find useful.
PENS
The one thing that any designer that I know would like to get, even if they still have a supply on hand. You don’t have to buy the exact kind, most designers will draw with whatever. Best buy black ones, here’s a nice set.
SKETCHBOOKS
I prefer square ones, but artists often use the standard A5 size like this one. But again, it doesn’t really matter all that much, any sketchbook will find its use.
The story goes like this: in a pottery class students were divided into two groups. Students in the first group were asked to make a perfect pot. Students in the second one were asked to make as many pots as they could. When all pots were compared it turned out that all the best pots were from the second group.
The story about a pottery class is from “Art and Fear” by David Bayles which I haven’t yet read. I’ve first stumbled upon it here.
I like it a lot because it takes the pressure off. I don’t have to create that one perfect drawing. It’s better to draw as much as I can without obsessing over a single drawing. I don’t need to write a perfect blog post either — the more I write the better I will get at it.
In December 2017, like every Christmas, I visited my mom. My brother was there too. Usually, we eat a lot, maybe watch some movies, do jigsaw puzzles, and play games. It should be relaxing, but it never is. Or maybe it is at first but we don’t like being unproductive for days.
So, we were there for yet another Christmas, and we knew how it would go and that we would feel tired after all the sitting around and eating. We came up with an idea of creating a small game. We wanted to make it in 3 days tops because we were delusional — most game developers are when they estimate how long it takes to make a game.
It was winter and it was snowing outside so all our ideas revolved around winter and we agreed that there would be an island and that little kittens would be hidden there and a player would need to find them. My brother knows 3D modeling so he made the cats and the island in Blender and I programmed it all in C# in Unity Engine. We had a small working prototype within a day. But there was still a lot of work to be done. And we kept adding isles and things. We kept making the game when we got back to our own apartments.
We titled it Hidden Paws. This is the description that we came up with:
“It’s winter and cats are still outside. Cold and alone. Find them and bring them home.“
We finally released it in March 2018 — our first game!
T-shirt designs are sort of like cartoons. Everything is more inspiring when said by animals.
Before I created this blog I’ve read a lot of articles that tried to motivate me to — start now! I still procrastinated but I am glad I did finally start writing.
If you have a project that is on your to-do list, don’t wait, act now.
There is one app that I use every day, many times a day — Roam Research. And I can’t overstate how vital this tool is for me. Roam is a note-taking tool but on their website, they advertise it as “a tool for thought” and they might be right. It certainly feels that the way I see connections between topics changed since I started using it.
I’ve tried many other apps for taking notes like Evernote and Notion. I had high hopes at first but inevitably I stopped using them after weeks or even days. A note talking tool must be, first and foremost, easy to use. If there’s a barrier to taking a note, let’s say if you have to open the right directory and find the correct file, open it, and then add your new note — then it’s unlikely you will take as many notes as you could.
And if we don’t take notes, we forget.
To take a note you open Roam and you already have an empty page with today’s date and you start writing — that simple. In Evernote and Notion, you can create new content fairly easily at first too but after a while you spend more time organizing your notes into hierarchical structures that those apps enforce and less time actually writing.
This is not a tutorial to Roam, by the way, because Roam doesn’t need one. The only thing that you need to know to get started is that you can put any phrase in [[brackets]] and it automatically creates a page and links to it.
And this is how you create a link to another note in Notion:
If you want to use Notion then don’t even look in the direction of Roam —once you see how easy to use Roam is you, won’t be able to switch to any other tool.
I like Roam so much that I recommend it to all my friends but it’s a surprisingly tough sell, maybe because it’s so different than what we are used to in note-taking apps.
I use Roam but there’s also a completely free alternative to Roam – RemNote.