Hi all! Sorry for the delay. It's been a crazy few months here at DigiLena, but I’ve finally had a chance to stop by and give you all an update.
So, last time we left off, I had given a demo of level one to a whole bunch of people. That left me with some bugs and general feature adjustments that I wanted to make in the game before moving on. Most of March was dedicated to that. After that, I moved on to greyboxing everything, and I mean - everything. At this point, I can run the game from start to finish, minus the cut-scenes. It feels great to be able to do that and get a feel for the time the game takes, and start to see it come together.
Greyboxing also revealed that I had one too many levels, where I felt the player might lose interest, so I cut a level to avoid losing people mid-game.
After the grey boxing was done, it was April, and I had an extended break planned due to some personal stuff to take care of.
May, though, was back in full swing. If you haven’t learned it by now, I am always trying to find the right tool that will make me most efficient at what I am doing, and May was the month that resulted in me trying another art program, Clip Studio Paint.
Honestly, I had always planned to try this once I got to the cut scenes, as I didn’t think that Krita would be able to handle it. However, I decided to try it now since I had researched it and found that I could get a lengthy free trial. I'm amazed at how much switching to this program has reduced my overall workflow time. I know the tool doesn't make the artist. Still, Krita constantly gave me issues with copy/paste (including a bug I found documented), and the way they handled clipping compared to an Adobe product wasn’t as robust.
Meanwhile, CSP has clipping and masking capabilities that are pretty much what anyone coming from Adobe would expect. I managed to get out an animation in a couple of hours, which would have taken at least a day in Krita. The ability to use the light table was a game changer, since most of my animations are pretty simple. I also love that they have a full camera and 3d models you can trace on top of. I am loving the switch.
As a result of the switch, I thought I had lost the functionality I needed since the English version of CSP doesn’t allow plugins (if someone knows why, please let me know). The functionality I’m referring to is the ability to create a spritesheet quickly. However, leave it to Reddit to solve that problem. I found a product called TexturePacker, and truthfully, it’s even better than the plugin I had for Krita. You drop the PNG files for the animation, and it packs them together exactly how you want. It even has built-in support for Godot (you do need to pay for this, though).
Besides learning new software, I was hard at work on level two art assets. Since all of the general code for the levels is complete, art will be the focus for the next several sprints. I created the background, the tileset, and all the different enemies and pickups. By the time I was done, though, I decided that the background and the tiles no longer fit with the rest of the assets, as I felt that they were too one-dimensional and were blocking the ability to add more depth to the scene. So, in the next sprint, I will redo the background and the tiles; however, this time, I will skip the dreaded 9x9 tileset and create the blocks as I want, then pack them together for the tilemap.
You might also be interested in hearing about my AI use. I like communicating with ChatGPT to bounce ideas off or try to solve problems. I don’t use it to code directly, because it’s horrible at it, but with the right prompting, it’s pretty good at getting me out of a pickle. I have also started using it recently to create inspiration/references for art. I always try to use Google first for this, but sometimes I have a very specific idea in mind, and I struggle to put the pieces together. So what I end up doing is giving ChatGPT that information in a prompt, and then I can use that as part of my mood board when working on the art assets. This was particularly helpful when I got stuck trying to figure out why my background and tiles weren’t giving me the feeling I was looking for in-game.
Next month is quite busy with some personal matters so that I will be back in July. Talk to you all soon!