Just doodling some silhouettes
Didn’t get time to try and dig into them for texture and shapes. But the ones in color are the ones I think might have potential..
Maybe this weekend I’ll get a couple hours to play with them some more.
So Month 3 of the Oatley Academy’s Magic Box course dropped and I’ve been devouring the videos. Despite them being repeatedly saying how dull Photoshop masking is, I’m having one heck of a time with the assignment. (Maybe I’m a overcompensating for working on the lady gazelle for 2 months a bit)
Basically, stage 1, make a scribble with a lasso and make it into a mask and scribble some more with the lasso tool until an interesting silhouette appears and then lasso some more to add patterns and texture and see if interesting interior shapes appear and then turn it into something interesting.
Anyway after some head bashing failures.
I managed to come up with 2 critters I like.
I call him Mr. Maggenpye, he’s some sort of scavenger/used junk dealer who travels the land digging around for easy profit.
and
Dewdrop, some sort of miniature plant horse that roots about your vegetable garden, a favorite steed for the elfin folk.
Total time ~2hrs.
Just a random Scribble worked on until it turned into something. about 95% lasso and gradient tool.
Ok a couple weeks of quiet, but not unproductive.
So Month 2 of the awesome yet super challenging Magic Box digital painting course unlocked and the next step is to work on brush skills and economy of brush strokes. So pushing onward, I’ve started rendering out the Lady Gazelle color comp.
And here’s where I’m at.
And here’s the final color comp from month 1, all lasso tool and gradients.
And the original Master’s painting
Man was this hard.
I mean .. seriously hard. I’m a scribbler, and forcing myself to think about EVERY SINGLE STROKE, was at times, frustrating and enlightening on a profound level. But after watching the lesson videos and reading and just examining other peoples work, I’m beginning to ‘get’ it. I couldn’t have even come close to doing something like this 2 months ago, and I already see so many things regarding edges and just stroke economy that I’d never seen before.
More progress on moving along to the color comps portion of the month 1 homework. Next week is looking like not much painting time so I’m going to crunch the rest of this week and see if I can get these guys done.
Turns out… painting is hard.
Needed some quick reference studies on gazelle hooves… Man it’s so hard to find more than 1 picture of the same species, gender and general age.
There’s a saying “If all you eat every day is cheeseburgers, even if you LOVE cheeseburgers, at some point you’re going to desperatly want to do something other than eat another cheeseburger.”
Now replace that cheeseburger with code.
I’ve been eating cheeseburgers all day every day, then on weekends for freelance and then in the few remaining moments of the day there was a great big helping of gamedev cheeseburgers just waiting for me.
So time for a bit of a programming break.
So I signed up for a digital painting course I’ve had my eye on for a few months.
http://chrisoatley.com/digital-painting-in-photoshop/
And here’s some scribblings from the first month’s homework.
And some scribbles from the kitchen without reference.
The web player version will be back for Alpha 3.
But Just in time for this month’s OneGameAMonth!
Alpha2 of Blood Soaked Deadly Dungeons of DOOM!
Finally got some time to dev last friday and Made Progress(tm) since the week before was spent rebuilding the pc.
The Maze Generator works!
I’ll need to increase the internal branching, it’s a bit too linear right now but that’s just a variable that needs to be tweaked.
Rooms now get harder and harder, the further in you go. Next up is some minor UI tweaks and then a second enemy and that’s it for Milestone 2. Just a couple months behind schedule.. but that’s the way it goes on top of real job, consulting work, children and a house to maintain.
1 month shy of hitting the 2 years without re-installing windows everything broke. Spent all the gamedev time rebuilding the system.
There goes my chance of hitting the 1GAM March entry.
So much software and config stuff to fix.
In the funniest of ironies the advice that got me making progress by leaps and bounds this week came from me, as randomly re-tweeted by the 1GAM twitterbot.
#gamedev wisdom by @drakkheim: don't build a rocket ship when a bicycle will get you there. via #1GAM http://t.co/b9vQDB0HaU
— One Game A Month (@OneGameAMonth) March 21, 2014
And yet here I was wasting a month doing exactly that building a rocketship of an editor when all I just needed was to look for off the shelf parts.
One quick download of the Tiled editor (http://www.mapeditor.org/) and a quick peek at the raw file format reveals that it saves the files in XML.
A few hours later, and I have a functional loader which generates in-game rooms from maps saved from tiled.
Bulkify it and presto, all the levels are loaded automatically and the maze generator from week 1 now has a collection of rooms to choose from.
And so after a very long weekend, we’ve got a whole map being generated (ok so there’s still some significant glitches, but at least it’s loading it all from disk, generating a random maze and creating a bazillion prefabs from it)
Ok so we’re going to go on pretending February didn’t exist at all and here we are at the beginning of milestone 2.
Good progress this week (ok it’s been 2 days, short week)
No new playable build for a bit, there’s just a lot of groundwork to do before any of this stuff pays off.
“Just what is the big push for Milestone 2” I hear you ask?
Full game map generation and room editor.
This week I think I’ve got the maze generator 90% of the way there, it’s now generating a maze and throwing in some internal extra branches because the basic depth first algorithm doesn’t have a lot of internal branches for smaller mazes like BSDDoD will be using.
And secondly
I’ve got a level editor 75% functional, still needs to write the output files and have some sort of load capability. But it draws the level and lets you select and fill tiles.
seriously… post winter doldrums suck.
Progress has been just terribly slow, too much day job, freelance and depressing weather.
Short and to the point, having family in town all week and then a week’s worth of misc stuff to take care of over the weekend means 0hrs to allocate to GameDev this week.
That’s life, and I’m not going to beat myself up over it. I’m just going to churn it out asap and then keep plugging away into the fun of Milestone 2! Hope to have a start on that this week.
In the mean while, reboot yourself and get ready for Month 2 with this:
and some misc concept art scribble, which is the only creative thing I got done this week.