Back for 2023!
It's been a while!
2023 has started (actually it's halfway through February...), and I felt motivated to try and revive my efforts to both make a game, and blog about it.
At the start of 2022, I was in a good swing with working on the game. That died out over the course of the second half of 2022. The start of 2023 feels a lot like the start of 2022 did. I'm motivated, I'm in a good streak of going to the gym, and I'm eating well. My good habits are resurfacing, and I'm generally on the up. I have a feeling that 2023 is the year I make big strides in game development, so let’s do this.
The week of 1/16 was when my new year's efforts started. As such, that week is called Week 1. As I write this, we're in the midst of Week 5.
HOURS WORKED
Week 1 - 5
Week 2 - 5
Week 3 - 5
Week 4 - 5.5
Week 5 goal - 6
To start, I vowed to work the equivalent of one hour per day (Monday - Friday). For week 4 I bumped it up to 5.5 hours for the whole week. This week I'm shooting for an even 6.
These are small numbers, but I also think that these are some of the hardest hours. I need to re-establish a working groove, and I'm moving (slowly) in the right direction.
The first 20 work hours
Relative to where this blog left off, one change is that we're restarting with a clean slate here in 2023. I started a new project within Godot. Our new project codename is jrpg2023.
As the codename suggests, I've been working on a jrpg. Last year I spent most of the year working on an action game. I learned a lot from the experience and don't consider it to be a waste at all, but idk. Switching direction feels right to me at this moment.
Up first is creating the four most basic animations for my four main characters.
Characters: Rob, Erika, Podo, Pancake
Animations: Idle, Walking left or right, Walking down, Walking Up
My workflow for this was to first try to setup the basic movements, and then revisit each image later to shade them. So you'll notice here that three of Rob's four animations are shaded, while no one else has any shading done yet.
Some of these are also a work in progress still. You can see that originally Pancake and Podo’s eyes were only one pixel - they still look like that in each of their walking left / right animations. While I go through and do more detailed shading on each of these, I’ll also cleanup inconsistencies like that. Erika’s hairline needs some work too now that I’m looking at it. Podo’s tail in his right / left walking animation also needs some attention. It currently looks like a snake.
Erika is the top row, then Pancake the cat, Podo the beagle, and Rob is the bottom row.
See you next time!
