Jump Around

It’s great to be at a point where we’re getting things coming together. As you saw last week, Matt’s made some great progress on getting the game engine working. Having something that will be playable is looking more and more like a reality every day, and it’s pretty gratifying for us to see this stuff take shape and become tangible.

In my last progress report, I showed some of the work in progress of the background painting for our first stage. I got some valuable feedback on that and have done some revision on it. While I’d love to spend more time on it, we’re actually trying to get a playable demo up as soon as we can, which means I’m going to have to prioritize other parts for the time being, and come back to tweaking it later. But if you’ve got more time to kill and want to see me painstakingly paint rocks, here’s another timelapse video of that process:

In the meantime, I’m now plugging away at animation! This week, I completed the first walk cycle that I’ve done in about 8 years 🙂 I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of Aseprite, and now that I’ve completed a couple of the cycles should be able to pick up the pace a little on the remaining ones. I’m finding that I enjoy these animations much more than I did doing hand drawn back in the day. The delay between seeing your drawings, and scanning them to see them perfectly registered and timed and spaced, and then trying to get the clean-up to be jitter free… classical animation was not a craft that I excelled at. But the speed at which I get feedback, and can compensate is so much easier this way. It does of course have the challenges of low-resolution art in that I cannot always make shapes look as I want, and have to instead fuss with getting some sort of iconic representation… but that’s part of the fun too!

A timelapse of me animating our first jump cycle: