Hi,

i see there are plenty of tutorials about making visual arts on this site and i am impressed by the quality of the material you have, very good.

However, all the material i came across here seems to talk about How to draw something when you already now what should be the final result and the feel it has to convey to the user.

But there are other skills needed for creating a *good* game, and they are related to creativity and not technical skills with Photoshop/3DSMax

- Choosing the best graphical style suited for my game, based on its genre, virtual world, story, expected audience and other factors

Example: why the graphics in Zelda The Wind Waker for Gamecube was in Cel-Shading? There should be a reason why that style has been chosen over the alternatives

- Choosing the right characters, objects, environments i have to put in my levels/scenes, to make them fit well with each other. This is a task suited for a set designer or architect.

Those are creativity challenges you must face before even opening your favourite image/3D editor.

How can i improve being creative??

Do interior/exterior designers learn how to be creative or are they born like that?

There is always an element of arbitrariness and whim to creative decisions. In many cases it just does not matter if the main character's cloak is blue or green, and it just does not matter if a level is decorated with tulips or sunflowers, and it just does not matter if a monster is a rat or a beetle or a turtle. There are many stories worth telling too. At best, if you can decide the theme and story you want your game to tell, and you figure out which part of that theme and story goes with which level, and you know your target audience, then you can make educated guesses about what art style and color palette and characters, etc. would illustrate your story in a way your audience will like.

Many people who are artists and writers are compulsively creative - they didn't choose to be creative, they can't choose to not be creative. There are already far too many creative people in the world for the number of creative jobs the economy can support. So personally I would not encourage anyone to try to become a professional artist or writer if they aren't already compulsively driven to create. Creative work is work people will often volunteer to do if you let them make the decisions; might as well devote your own time to what you can't get someone else to do.

But anyway, for someone who wants to create, experience is very important to quality of creativity. Over time, when playing games and watching anime or TV and reading books, as a creative person you build up a mental box of interesting pieces that you want to play with: characters, plots, relationships, tropes, and even color schemes. Or if you want more stuff to be in your box, you can intentionally look over your memories, for things that were awesome and things that were frustrating because they could have been awesome if they would have been done differently. Most ideas for a new creation are born when a person takes two or three particularly shiny things from this box and notices that they fit together surprisingly well. In other cases a person analyzes a favorite game they have played or story they have read and then tries to emulate it, creating something with all the good points of the original but a few original twists and details that make it something new rather than just an imitation.

Edit: Some of the oldest entries in my developer journal talk about concepting; if you want to look, they are here, start at the bottom:

http://www.gamedev.net/blog/90-designing-the-game-and-its-content/?st=45

Wow thank you for the long and detailed explanation, i'll read the article soon.

So beginners would better get inspiration from other (simple) games and make slight modifications.

The best would be to be able to design an RPG with complex story like Final Fantasy 7 but i bet only few special people can do it :)

I have to forget about RPGs for now

You're welcome. As far as complex or simple games go, it depends on whether everyone involved with a project is a beginner, or whether some have more experience, or whether there is money available to buy assets, and whether the team is willing to use something like RPGmaker. Beginners write novels and screenplays every year, and the core script of an RPG is a lot like a novel or screenplay. But I agree that a novel or screenplay is of the maximum difficulty a beginner could possibly handle. if a beginner is trying to write something that long, it should be their only responsibility; they will not have time to also make art or program. Ideally they should have an assistant writer too, someone who helps brainstorm and can help the main writer past any spots where they get stuck. Also, FF7 is really long, even for an RPG; something a bit shorter would be better, or cutting out several middle parts. And FF7 allows the player to choose the party, which adds unnecessary complexity to the script writing and would be better to avoid.

If the concern is art instead of story, in my opinion animation is the part that is pretty much too difficult for a beginner. But, there are very few games with no animation, it's not really possible to avoid.

I think the reason why there are no tutorials for the questions that you've asked is because these are things that you need to learn for yourself. It's more about personal preference.

- Choosing the best graphical style suited for my game, based on its genre, virtual world, story, expected audience and other factors
Example: why the graphics in Zelda The Wind Waker for Gamecube was in Cel-Shading? There should be a reason why that style has been chosen over the alternatives

Maybe they used cell shading in that game because the team as a whole decided that would be cool.

- Choosing the right characters, objects, environments i have to put in my levels/scenes, to make them fit well with each other. This is a task suited for a set designer or architect.

This comes with experience. You will always know if something doesn't work in a level because it will look out of place. From their you can look at why it looks out of place and fix it. As youdo this more and more, I think you'll be able to make more suitable art.

How can i improve being creative??

Well the most important advice don't try to get good at everything because you might get just not bad at lots of things.

What is really good is to get an expert in a narrower field.

Even if you decide to learn modeling, texturing and animations all together it is best to at least narrower specific style.

The best inspiration you can get is from reading books and novels. You and I could read both the same book and then create an environment or a character and the outcome would be totally different. When you imagine the things from a story the images are yours. they are not copy written. Feng Zhu says he does this all the time with books. If its good enough for someone who worked on star wars then it should be pretty good for me too. Stories inspire. Look there for ideas.

There will always be some kind of trial-and-error process needed to come up with the best choice, be it art style or something else.

You can of course check how other solved a problem and solve it the same way. That works brilliant for technical fields where there is a "best" solution to a problem (the fastest, most efficient, cheapest... you still need to pick what is most important to you)... It doesn't work that well in a creative field like visual arts.

Sure, there are pros and cons to different art styles (a highly stylized black and white art style will sacrifice a lot of visual information like a shirts texture, the difference in color between different objects and so on, while making the silhouette of the characters and the background much more obvious)... But there is hardly something "completly wrong".

Ideally you think about what you want to achieve, narrow down the possible styles to 3-4 that might fit the requirements (be they visual requirements, story requirements (a futuristic neon art style might not go well with a historical setting or high fantasy), technical or budget requirements)...

Then test all art styles to figure out which one works best, on a single character, background, whatever.

Costs some time, sure... but you might come up with ideas that wouldn't have occured to you else, and you can justify later on WHY you went with the art style you picked.