EverEnding DevBlog 180: Step By Step

It’s been a few weeks since the last update. I went on vacation, and also I had to figure some things out. When not on vacation, I’ve been working verry slowly on animating the main character of the game.

To be honest, the amount of time this is taking me is scary. When it comes to the running animation, Its represents 18 of of 399 frames that I’ve prototyped out for the player animations, and it’s taken me more than a week to get those frames done. I’m probably going to have to add another 50 frames or so of miscellaneous animations for the main character, and then I’ll probably need to create several hundred more for all of the enemies in the game – Fortunately, since many of them don’t run around like a person, just float or roll or whatever, the enemy animations altogether probably won’t add up to many more frames than the player character animations, but still: 1000 frames is a reasonable ballpark estimate.

So, if it takes me a week to make 10 frames, can I expect to spend three years on just the animations?

Well, probably not, but we’ll see. It’s obvious this is another case where I took on a task without understanding its full scope or ramifications. In fact, I may have made this harder on myself by going for a pixelated art style, since it severely hampers my ability to use shortcuts like rotating the limbs in software. Maybe I’d be better off taking a more straightforward approach to creating the frames and then crunch them down into the resolution and palette I want after the fact. It’s an idea worth exploring, so perhaps I’ll do the next animation that way and see how it looks.

I must admit, though, I love the kind of detail you get with pixels. That sounds like nonsense, since lower res images should logically be less detailed, but in practice each pixel becomes incredibly suggestive, and minor changes take on a life of their own. Perhaps detail is the wrong word, but I can’t think of a better one. So, yeah, I really like the way the running animation turned out, but I’m scared of the idea of having to make a hundred more animations like it.

Meanwhile, I’m in the early stages of working on another project. I’m still going to be pretty stingy with details, but I’m looking into expanding a game I developed some time back for Ludum Dare into a finished product. This version of the game will be far more robust and, as I’ve envisioned it, will take some tricky programming – thus, in these early stages, I’m mostly just focused on getting a prototype up and running. I probably won’t bother talking about it here again until I do.

I’m also reconsidering how I want to do these DevBlogs. Having a daily work-blog plus this weekly devblog seems like overkill – or it would be, anyway, if I was in the habit of using both of them as regularly as I’m supposed to. I’m strongly considering doing this DevBlog on a monthly basis and being far more stringent about the daily work blogs on Titan Seed, to the point where I’ll log all the work I do in a day there so I can use it more effectively as a diagnostic tool for myself. I’ll also probably use it as a sounding board to think through ideas, while this blog can be dedicated more solely on my progress on EverEnding. That’s a change that will most likely kick in next update: So, in all probability, next update will be the last weekly update, and new updates will come at end of month from then on.