Aesprite for Beginners

I enjoyed this class, it is detailed enough to teach, but also leaves room for exploring our own ideas in creating 2D assets for games. Anyone interested in making retro style games or modern 2D adaptations, will want to explore this class.

Sadly I can't recommend this course. I worked through 60-70% of it's content now and so I'd say I have a pretty good overview. Fist of all: The name of the software is Aseprite, nocht Aesprite. 1.) The structure of the course is mediocre at best. It seems just to be a massive recording session over many hours cut into some lectures. There is no common theme. 2.) There are quite often irritating background sounds. You can hear a baby wailing, police sirenes, car horns, etc. and the teacher yawns many times. Little to no effort went into editing the videos to make them more pleasable (or less annoying). 3.) This is the perfect example of a course where it seems that the student is to be expected to just paint along with the teacher without much explanation WHY we make this and not that. Why are shadows working like this? We'll never know. Studies have proven for many years now that with this kind of teaching there is little to no learning effect. 4.) The teachers expertise in Aseprite is not as proficient as I would expect as a student. Especially with a course that really concentrates of only one specific piece of software. There is quite a number of elements that make life really much easier when creating pixel art that the instructor doesn't even mention - e.g. the shading mode of the pencil tool and the outline generator built in Aseprite (I had to watch a youtube video - for free - to learn about this). It may be that some of these features were added after the video was recorded but than again: Other instructors are able to update their courses with new material. This instructor apparently is not. The instructor will very often not even know the correct keybinding for one of the tools and pick it manually which slows down the workflow so much! 5.) The artwork produced by the instrcutor during the course - the artwork the student is expected to use as an orientation - isn't well made. One of the first exercises is to draw a strawberry. Well, after I finished, my strawberry was easily recognized as a strawberry while the product of the teacher was a very ugly blob of red-ish colour. As if he'd never seen a real strawberry. The teacher states "Well it doesn't have to be perfect". While that may be true it's certainly also true that it should be recognizable - especially if you only have a small canvas and the position of every pixel counts! 6.) The instructor will encourage the students to use templates or models from the internet for inspiration but he won't use them in the course. He would always upload the inspirational piece of art into Aseprite and than absolutely forget about it. 7.) There is little to no interaction with the students. As a student you aren't encouraged to share your work and although there are some pictures of students and they get commented on there doesn't seem to be a motivation by the teacher to really show what you have learned. There also are now challenges that you are encouraged to do by your own, no quizzes, no community (discord?), no visible interest in the students progress at all. This is in fact the biggest letdown for me personally. TL;DR: The course is poorly structured. Little to no effort is put into the quality and entertainment of the videos, there seems to be no interest in the (paying) student or his progress, the teachers Aseprite skills are questionable and the art the instructor produces isn't good (in my opinion obviously).

The instructor is exceptional; I like how he explains everything in the most chill way, for me it's really interesting and relaxing at the same time. Well done!

So far so good! It's great to draw along, and I didn't know the reference layer trick. Getting better!