Spam is amazing! “I like wootfu.com. Bookmarked for future reference. LEGAL STEROIDS”

Subtle. Anyway. OH GOD ART TAKES FOREVER

Above the dresser? That is Art. When you hear the buzzer, stare at the Art.

One thing I’ve found with pixelling that makes it totally unlike programming: distractions help me. It’s kind of funny – I always used to draw stuff when I was bored in school, to keep my brain awake enough I guess to half-absorb what was going on. Turns out the same’s true in reverse, more or less, and having something on in the background stops me getting bored while I’m drawing stuff for hours on end. Today’s E3 presentations have been filling this need nicely.

Course, there’s a downside. Today, I realised I’ve finally become a cynical old bugger who thinks mainstream games are rubbish. True, Microsoft and EA’s E3 presentations are always going to cover the most whitebread games available in the most shallow possible way, but I don’t think I saw anything new there I wanted to play.

That’s a little bit sad. Maybe I’ll rent Gears of War 3 once it’s out and just get drunk enough to enjoy it.

I’ve been waylaid by germs since Wednesday but I fought through the pain (at least this evening, with plenty of Lemsip) to finish the B&B exterior scene and code the full intro sequence.

I’m sort of happy with this scene now.

I am really looking forward to calling this done and getting on with something else. I think I’ve given up entirely on trying to predict when I’ll finish it due to massive, apparently unending scope creep, but it’ll be soon. SOON

And now I’m going back to bed.

Well, the artwork from the last post is in the game now as a fancy scrolling-parallax title screen. I’ve been working on the remaining backdrops I need to be happy with the game, and I’ve hit a little trouble.

Drawing the van driving along gave me the idea of setting all the cutscene action and some intro/ending stuff in, or in front of, the bed and breakfast where they’re staying. The front of it’s maybe 80% done:

…and now I’m agonising over feeling like it looks a bit crap, and wanting to redo the park graphics to fix some issues there, and wondering whether I can simply move the cutscenes I’ve already got into these new backgrounds without changing the tone of the thing and having to re-script them and possibly redo their music. I’m basically struggling with art direction and the narrative flow of the cutscenes, whether it’s obvious how the locations link up and whether the transition from each to the next gives the right impression about the passage of time and movement through space.

But the main thing is that this backdrop’s mostly done. 🙂 I can probably finish it up and do the only other whole new backdrop, the room interior, tomorrow. Once all this stuff is actually in game, I can start making decisions about what I need to iterate on without worrying too much.

Vigilance has definitely taken on a life of its own. Fully realising it means tackling all these issues, which is stressful, because I’m out of my comfort zone 😀 but it’s great for the same reason. I think I’m going to feel much more confident in my pixel art when this is over!