I've been working much slower than I would like, and I believe I know why. But first, what have I been doing? I've been ploughing through the characters, still. I completely finished the character portraits and am just about through the sprites as well. Hooray! It's been a long process, much longer than I am comfortable with, but the results are good at it's just about over.
So let's start with the character portraits:
I'm pretty happy with these. Actually, very happy. It was a really fun time drawing them and I feel like I learned a lot about what I was doing as I went. I would be a lot more confident drawing more in the future, that's for sure. The portraits also really helped me when writing the characters. Having a face to look at helped me write what sort of people they would be like, and of course the character descriptions also informed the portraits. Two-way street.
These will be used in the game when talking to these NPCs.
But the rest of the time in the game world, the characters will be represented through their sprites. I hoped the sprites would be much faster to draw than the portraits due to already having the colours and features worked out, but alas I was still only able to do perhaps 3 a day. At the moment I have a few left to do, but most of the sprites are done. Here's the new ones in no particular order:
Of course, working in 32x32 is much more limiting, and it can be hard to get across facial features. I think I've done a good job overall though so far. There's a few that might need to be revised to raise contrast or add detail, but I will wait until I have seen them in game to decide to do that.
Of course, all the sprites come in sheets. They look like this:
With this I can animate my charcters shuffling about or standing around in different directions. I left one column empty for two reasons: I wanted to save that in case I needed another pose later, and I wanted to keep my sheets power of two sizes.
Here's some example animations:
I already wrote my own animation script for this which I mentioned a few blog posts back. I've also since then had some more experience with manual animation work, having written two sprite animators in JS for both Three.js and HTML canvas. I think it's worth mentioning the Three.js project. I won't go into detail here yet because it's not super relevant to this project, but I spent about a week working like a madman on a 3D FPS engine thing in Three.js just to see if I could. I could, and it turned out ok. I never implimented physics and didn't want to import a library for it, so the enemy behaviour isn't great on the terrain, but other than that it's fairly complete. It was a fun project and I learned a great deal about game development techniques and fundamentals; things like game loops/render loops, the purpose of coroutines, and so on. You can see the result of it here -> http://www.squidempire.com/plutonium/index, and you can see the code here -> https://gitlab.com/SquidEmpire/plutonium
Anyway, I said I had an idea why work is progressing too slowly here. It's the same reason I did the project I just mentioned I think; I'm driven and motivated by results. I like to see things happen. It's been a very long time on this project since I made anything happen. Drawing characters and writing their stories is fun and productive, but at the end of it there's no tangible result. The actual game isn't any further progressed. And so, I started getting demotivated. I didn't want to fire up paint and just draw sprites and then go to bed. So, hopefully now that I've forced myself through this period I can start making things happen again and the game progress will speed up once more. I would like to have a demo ready before the end of the year. I don't think it's an unresonable goal, the game logic is sound, the characters and writen and drawn. I just need to find a way to build the level and start laying the content down.
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