You may be wondering- so here’s why.

The Grand Vision

My main vision is Learn Indie, a place where game-developers (and creative people) can find the information and resources they need, as quickly and easily as possible. The information will be sourced from indies who live and breathe their niche skill.

I’ll write a post about it so keep an eye out for it!

Before any fancy app or tutorial content is created for Learn Indie, 2 things must be tested:

1. What topic/resource do Game-Devs need?

2. How do I become the BEST at a specific niche, in the shortest time possible?

Once these 2 questions are answered, we will have a blueprint to create tutorials from. The process of creating a tutorial is an art in itself, so that process will be for future posts.

What do Game-Devs Need?

Clouds

I chose to hyper focus on Clouds for 3 reasons:

1. I’m a VFX artist so I’m naturally inclined to draw nature

2. The topic is broad enough for beginners to dabble in

3. Clouds are a foundational topic for more advanced topics

And so, on Feb 28th of 2026, I committed to drawing Clouds. The first few weeks were quite frustrating because they weren’t as awesome as I have hoped.

But by the 1 month mark, I was comfortable enough to share a screenshot on Reddit and Twitter.

The results blew my expectations out the water- each post got over 4k likes within 2 days! From my past experience, random posts can explode on Twitter but not so much on Reddit.

So I knew that I was onto something, and that I had to double down. The next step is figuring out how to improve as quickly as possible.

How to improve as quickly as possible?

Intentional practice & documentation

I knew something had to change if I wanted any chance at improving quicker. Here are 3 things I immediately implemented:

1. Daily Notes

When I post daily drawings on Streak.club, I only include a title, relevant tags, and an image. I figured the quickest change I can implement is writing a note to every daily entry. This allows my mind to materialize abstract concepts into words, right before bed.

2. Structured Studies

Instead of drawing things on a whim, I’ve decided to structure the clouds by themes. Each theme consists of a set drawing style, color count, and palette. Variations of the theme includes size and shape style.

This allows me to study one thing at a time and gradually progress to different themes/styles as I master the current style.

And in doing so, these Clouds can then be distributed as asset packs using the same structure.

3. Explain the process, live on Twitch

I’ve read from the book, The Science of Accelerated Learning, that teaching is the most effective way of retaining knowledge.

So I set up OBS, reused some assets I had laying around, and went Live. Getting viewers without much social reach was quite difficult but I was blessed enough to have a handful of chatters.

I explained my thought process as I drew, and the fact that I was live kept me focused on the task at hand.

I’ve only done 2-3 stream thus far but the overall experience has been extremely positive. I connected with old and new faces, got a ton of work done, and have improved my skills much quicker.

Final Thoughts

This Cloud Template Series isn’t a one off thing- it’s a foundation for Game developers to build & learn from!

I’ll talk about my Youtube content strategy and share how the journey goes.

Thank you for reading if you got this far into the blog post!

Subscribe now

1. 2020-2025: The Results

2. 2020: The Failure

3. 2023: The Beginning

4. 2024: The Search for Purpose

5. 2025 and Beyond

Intro

This is a story of how a single doodle transpired into 2 years of doodling, with many lessons learned along the way!

The Results

Here are a few of my favorite drawings done during this drawing challenge!

Feel free to join me and others over on: Streakclub/Daily Art Club

To view all of my submissions: Streakclub/u/jasontomlee

2020: The Failure

It all began on January 1st of 2020.

I was scrolling through Instagram and stumbled upon a Calvin and Hobbes doodle. It inspired me to replicate the doodle & practice my digital art skills, so I did. Once it was complete, I had to decide on which platform to post it on.

I stumbled on a site called Streakclub because Leaf (the creator of Itchio) shared about it at the start of the year. I was a fan of his work, so I figured I may as well give the site a try.

After fiddling around with the site, I’ve come to realize that Streakclub was my cup of tea- it was created to encourage users to form daily habits by tracking their posts as daily streaks.

I’ve done writing challenges in the past on a site called 750words.com and hand-drawn challenges a few years prior. But I’ve barely gone beyond the 100-150 day point on all those challenges. So I had very little commitment going into this, but as many ameteurs do, had delusions of becoming insanely skilled.

I had no game plan on becoming a great artist but I knew I needed to at least give it a try. And so, my naive, yet brave, younger self began the journey.

As days and weeks passed, my motivation to maintain the daily streak dried up. I went from posting every day to once every few days. And then just like that, in the blink of an eye, posting every few days turned to NOTHING for the next 3 years.

Did I want it enough? Was I not capable enough? Will I ever do it again?

After the streak had ended, I continued drawing here and there for fun and work. But in the back of my mind, I KNEW that I needed to attempt this challenge again with a new mindset.

I had to prove to myself that I could do it…so I gave it another go.

On January 22, 2023, I began the daily drawing challenge with the intention of drawing for 1 year straight.

2023: The Beginning

The daily challenge was supposed to begin on January 1, 2023, but my first drawing was posted on January 22, 2023.

Why did the challenge begin on a later date? The anxiety of failing again.

Thankfully, I mustered enough courage to start again from Day 1.

I began this challenge by drawing things that inspired me, so I naturally veered towards VFX. At the time, I began a passion project called HackNSlash FX, so I decided to doodle things related to that project.

But as the days passed, my will to draw began to dwindle. I knew something drastic had to change, or I faced the possibility of giving up AGAIN, just like I did in 2020.

I concluded that the solution was to draw solely for the fun of it. This helped reduce the friction of starting a drawing, and in turn, kept the streak alive.

And this is how I began doing dedicated, thematic drawings for weeks at a time. (My favorite being, of course, Calvin and Hobbes!) Drawing things within the same theme for weeks at a time improved my eye for iteration and technical art skills. Having the freedom to start a new theme at any moment inspired me to keep the streak going.

Day by day, I could feel myself improving.

My lines went from thin and sketchy to confident, smooth strokes. Drawing the same thing allowed my mind to search for ways to improve future drawings.

And just like that, a year of drawing passed by.

I had achieved what I set out to do!

Now what? Was I going to quit?

No. But the worst was yet to come.

2024: The search for purpose

After successfully drawing for 365 days, I was faced with a new dilemma. Purpose.

Why did I want to draw every day? Why did I want to improve? Is drawing every day necessary? When should I stop drawing?

As these questions flooded my mind, my drawings devolved to lazy drawings done on my phone and mouse.

Fast forward to 2025, and the purpose of all of this has FINALLY been found.

Discipline.

Yup, that’s seriously it.

Doing something that you may or may not want to do over an extended period is a powerful idea. Regardless of how my life and priorities change, the importance of discipline remains a constant.

2025 And Beyond..

Moving forward, there is no doubt in my mind that this streak will continue for years to come.

My main focus now is to create pixel-art assets, content, and learn 3d to bring my passion project, LearnIndie, to life! Whether or not my endeavors work out, I hope these drawings and blogs inspire you to FIGHT for what others YOU want in life!

Thanks for reading!

-jlee

The Tileset Template Asset Pack

The Tileset Template Goals

-Outline 2D, 2.5D, and 3D Perspectives
-Simplify the Tileset creation process
-Material Types
-Material Impact Reactions
-Establish a World Theme for Characters, and VFX

Planned Roadmap

-Release Index Page
-Release Asset Page
-Create HTML5 Demo
-Complete Basic Tileset set
-Organic Materials | Jungle Theme
-Rocky Materials | Stone Age Theme
-Metallic Materials | Space Age Theme
-Written Tutorials for The Tileset Template Index
-Animated Tutorials for The Tileset Template Index

What’s next?

The Character Template
The VFX Template

The Tileset Template Asset Pack

References

Auto-Tileset Index

1. Gamemaker Studio 2 Guide

2. RPG Maker Guide

3. Godot Guide

4. Unity Guide

Material Texture Index

• Stone

• Grass

• Metal

• Goo

• Gem

• Cracks

• Clouds

• Trees

• Sky Gradients

Tileset Theme Index

1. Pokemon

2. Interiors

3. Caves

4. Medival

Backgrounds

1. Clouds

2. Sky Gradients

General Concepts

What is a Tileset?

A reusable set of images arranged in rectangular grids, often used to create backgrounds, decorations, and level layouts.

Using tilesets saves a lot of time, but there’s one problem…Every individual tile must be placed manually.

The solution? The Auto-Tiler!

What is an Auto-Tiler?

"AutoTilesets" or "AutoTiles" is a technique that allows the game engine to automatically determine which tile is used based on the surrounding tiles.

This saves developers an enormous amount of time by reducing the amount of redundant work.

There are 2 popular methods for creating an Autotiler: the 16- and 47-block methods.

The 47 and 16 block Auto-tiler method

16 Block
>Requires the least amount of drawing.
>Tileable ONLY using a 3x3 block, and not individual 1x1 tiles.

47 Block
>Requires the most amount of drawing with a lot of redundancy.
>Best used for ground textures in top-down games

Blocks and squares are great and all... but we are missing a type of tile that exists in almost every game, slopes!

Tileable Slopes

Here’s how Slopes look from different perspectives.

Platformers vs Top-Down

Slopes aren’t auto tilable in most game engines.
Ensure they are compatible with the existing tileset.

Tilesets are accompanied by backgrounds to help immerse your players into your world.

Background and Foreground

Backgrounds exist to enhance the visual depth of a scene.

Here are a few basic rules to follow:

1. An object becomes dimmer, greyer, and blurrier the farther away it is

2. Backgrounds should be dimmer than core gameplay elements

3. Match the theme of the Tileset

Do backgrounds stay static when the center of focus, or the camera, moves? Nope! That’s where Parallaxing comes in.

Parallax Movement

Parallaxing is a technique used to create the illusion of depth by shifting two or more objects at different speeds relative to the viewer’s perspective.

The farther away an object is the slower it moves relative to the viewer’s speed

The closer an object is to the viewer’s perspective, the closer it is to the viewer’s

Methods

Materials

• How to: Stone

• How to: Grass

• How to: Metal

• How to: Goo

• How to: Gem

• How to: Cracks

• How to: Clouds

• How to: Trees

• How to: Sky Gradients

AutoTiler

• Easiest way to create a 16 block autotileset

• Easiest way to create a 47 block autotileset

• Setting up AutoTilers in Gamemaker Studio

• Setting up AutoTilers in Godot

• Setting up AutoTilers in RPG Maker

• Coding your own AutoTiler

Slopes

Parallax

• How to set up Parallax Layers

• The math behind Parallaxing

Play

The Tileset Template Asset Pack

1. Introduction

2. Designing for practicality

3. Animation process

4. Setting up the Page

5. What’s next?

1. Introduction

This character, BeastMan, is the start of my character animation series!

This asset pack’s primary feature is to showcase Platformer movement animations in conjunction with Smoke FX and future Tileset/Code/VFX asset packs. Its purpose is to help game dev’s game jams and prototypes feel fun and exciting.

But it also serves as practice material for me, and I myself can utilize these assets for my own tutorials/game-jams too. Now, that’s what I call a win, win situation!

2. Design for Feasibility

As someone with little experience animating characters, yet alone designing them, coming up with a simple yet effective design was the most important step.

These characters needed to share a universal design while expressing unique traits that gave them a niche purpose. Here’s what I came up with:

I settled for a minimal, yet bold color palette. Red is the main hue with 3 shades, black is for the body, and white is the highlight with purple as the shade.

The visual design centers around a circular, hollow face with the rest of the body designed around the character’s purpose in a game.

In the particular case for BeastMan, I settled for a small yet energetic character resembling a beast-like animal. It reminds me of a hedgehog that is known to go….fast, real fast.

Animation Process

With the character designs completed. it was now time to bring the static drawings to life.

As somebody who has little experience animating characters, I approached it using first principles thinking.

I followed this train of thought to guide me during this animation process:

1. Establish the character’s purpose

2. Utilize distinct features to personify its purpose

3. Exists in a realistic world, therefore physics applies to everything

4. Start with frames that lead up to the current animation.

5. Keyposes should be distinct enough to differentiate each animation

6. Animations are a blend between the starting frame, key poses, and end frames.

Page Design

I’ve recently have been redesigning my Itchio pages to be more coherent and follow a common theme. So I simply copy and pasted most of the text panel graphics and CSS from my other pages onto this one.

So the primary focus was to write the contents of the page, upload all the gifs, and design the primary icon.

HTML5 Demo

Something I never had for my projects is a playable browser demo. I’ve been putting it off for quite some time so with a playable character ready, now was the time.

I dusted off an old Gamemaker 2 template I made many years ago and began implementing the animations, tweaking the code, and tilesets.

Here’s how it came out after a day of implementation!
Not too shabby, but it needed a ton of work. Things such as turning animations, ledge grabbing, super jumps, dodge rolling, and more, were missing.

These are things I would have never known, so moving forward, implementation is a MUST for all projects. It’s the only way to improve the quality of my work.

What’s Next?

Now that my first playable character has been animated, it’s time to create the world around it!

The next two assets will focus on templates to start from foundational concepts. This allows us all to reference these templates to save TONS of time when creating more complex things.

Thank you for reading, catch you on the next one!