Cave Story Tribute Site Forums

Maybe you can scale back and release a version of the mod with sprites you can achieve by yourself by the jam deadline?

I mean for the 30 mods I've made I've done by just lightly editing the vanilla ones. You don't need an artist (or to be an artist) to make something.

It wouldn't look very good though, especially the facepics. It's gonna look like dog shit if I make all the graphics myself.

I recommend to just make the art yourself. You don't necessarily know it'll be terrible until you try it out. And also... does everything need to look good? This is a modfest mod, not some years-in-the-making magnum opus. Personally, I'm really bad at art, and don't have much interest in pursuing it. But all my mods require some level of custom art, and I don't feel at all comfortable asking other people to help with my amateur projects. So I've just tried to make do with my meager skills. And lemme tell ya, needing everything to look good has resulted in me giving up way too many times to count. But in the times where I got things done, it was only because I stopped caring about if it "looks like dog shit." Even if the stuff you make for this mod is bad, it'll still do the job, and that's all you really need here. And hey, if you keep making them, maybe your creations will eventually become good.

If everything looked like shitty MS Paint drawings, art as a medium would be dead.
Also, I've been practicing drawing for a bit. My art has somewhat improved, but it's nothing significant.

I said "everything" there, not "anything". And while most things definitely should look good, not everything needs to. Sure, it'd suck to see "shitty MS Paint drawings" in a Triple-A game or a big indie project with thousands in Kickstarter money. But there's a lot more leeway for a CS mod, especially if it's for modfest. Nobody's expecting every submission to have good art, level design, music, writing, etc. Those things are certainly worth striving for, but they aren't a necessity.

Make a mod that doesn't need facepics than.

Yeah if well played you could totally skip out on using facepics.
Alternatively if you have dialogue you can always opt for using the sprites itself.
If the other aspects of a mod are good, who cares about looks? So long as it isnt spritesheets saved in jpeg or something.
Vanilla stuff is perfectly acceptable.