Meet David Stanley of Greenville

Today we’d like to introduce you to David Stanley

Hi David, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
In 2012 I was just beginning my freelance art journey, while also attending college for graphic design. Before finishing my degree, I got an opportunity to become a full-time freelancer, providing in-game art and promotional art for mobile games. It was a tough decision, but I chose to drop out of college and pursue a life as an artist.

That mobile game gig led to our tiny 2-man team having games featured on the front page of the App Store about 17 times if memory serves. Along the way, I moved into actual level design and creating puzzles for our games. As a lifelong gamer, that awakened something in me as I fell in love with level design and creating difficult puzzles for players to solve.

During my free time, I decided to learn how to write code and started making a passion project game for PC. Mobile games were fun, but I wanted to tell a bigger story and have access to more buttons on the keyboard/controller. I was also doing all art and animations.

Long story short, my solo passion project caught the attention of gamers and press across a period of 5 years, leading to the game being published by one of my favorite childhood game publishers, Konami (Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, Castlevania, and many more). By the end of development, the team had grown from just myself to a small but dedicated group of 13. We released the action platformer ‘Skelattack’ in North America and Europe for PC and consoles in 2020. Years later, it’s still one of my proudest achievements.

As of this writing, I’ve left game development behind and work as a video thumbnail artist for the Youtuber SSundee! Typically I create the art for his Among Us gameplay videos, as well as game banners and icons for All Out, an original game made by SSundee’s production company. I also create a ton of test illustrations to help the team decide which videos they want to make next. My work through SSundee’s channel is seen by millions weekly, which is a unique metric that can be added to the portfolio for the future.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It’s been one of the roughest roads of my entire life, but that makes the victories even sweeter. The first big struggle was the fact that I willingly left college behind. There are no shortcuts in this field; you have to put in the time to learn your craft whether it’s in a classroom or on your own time.

When I was doing level design for mobile games, a lot of the time I had to figure out strange tricks to make everything work. The software we used was more of a physics-based playground of tools instead of coding things from scratch. A lot of the games we shipped almost seemed to be held together by glue and tape, but we tested them extensively to make sure they didn’t fall apart.

When working on my solo game Skelattack, it was a massive struggle for years: Learning how to write code by myself, maintaining a solid social media presence, compiling demo builds for the community and praying there wasn’t anything I’d forgotten, providing bugfixes when the community inevitably broke things in my game, traveling solo across the country by Greyhound to show the game at my very first convention. Years of unpaid work on that game (prior to the Konami publishing deal) just because I believed in my ideas.

As an artist in love with the work, you have to expect bumps in the road. If you’re seeing 100% smooth sailing, you aren’t being challenged, and therefore you aren’t growing.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I wear many hats, but simply put I’m an illustrator and sometimes animator for entertainment media, mainly video games and Youtube. I also sell prints of my original work occasionally, and am currently working on my first graphic novel.

I’m best known for Skelattack, the indie game which was bought and published by Konami. It was the flagship title of their new indie gaming branch back in 2020. It’s also the work I’m most proud of; it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and it taught me that the biggest success can come from the strangest places (you just have to see it through).

What sets me apart from others is my unique way of looking at the world, and my determination to figure out solutions to problems that may seem insurmountable. In my personal art especially, I strive to present something that has never been witnessed before. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is not my concern.

We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
Absolutely, there have been a lot of risks along the way. Freelancing itself is risky by design; you have to be okay with the lack of job security some clients offer. You have to be ready to job hunt and put yourself out there incessantly. In the early days of freelancing, I learned to live more frugally as a safety measure.

Skelattack’s development was a huge risk, because I was spending massive amounts of time working on it as a passion project with no real idea if people would want to buy it. When the game was accepted into the gaming convention known as PAX South, I pretty much went broke on my bus ticket and Airbnb. It was a wild time, an absolute blast but also a bit scary to know it could all go wrong at any time.

A decent amount of risk needs to be built into my life. Nobody was busting down my door begging to give me money, so I went after opportunities myself.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.artstation.com/dave_draws
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elder.skeleton/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61569107681003