November 6
After practicing the individual elements of game development, I have set my eyes on an engine. Memories flood in of games I used to play as a child through CD-Roms, my first exposure to self published works, the wild west that was freeware. I remember RPGMAKER standing out. Even though I was unable to make any functional games, I still enjoyed just making maps and basic events. Naturally, RPGM felt like the right choice, if not as training wheels until I changed to something else.
An upside to doing art for so long is that I already have an idea of the difference between a difficult task and a time consuming task. The later's biggest obstacle is sticking to the project until it's over and I know that game development, as interesting as it is, is going to take a lot of time if my goal is to function as a one man army. Another upside is that I never throw old works away, not even highschool doodles from over 10 years ago.
I used to make all sorts of projects back them, prototypes and ideas that went nowhere as I lacked the means to make them a reality. Despite forgetting a lot of these old stories (maybe it's for the best too), I have a desire to reinvent everything, give them a fresh coat of paint and redo them with contemporany eyes. I see value in these concepts and there's no doubt that my first step towards game development will involve them. Maybe it's a refusal to let go, maybe it's a call from my inner child. Either way, my mind's already set.
November 9
I Figured out what the project will look like but the story isn't quite there yet. Despite enjoying making characters, the main duo are so old that they predate any preexisting formula I'm used to. They're as much of a blank state as it gets but I guess figuring out what to do with them is part of the fun.
I ran into some technical issues involving sprite sizes. At first I thought I had it all figured out but the mistake turned out to be something rather silly (I forgot an entire row of sprites!). After that was fixed, the placeholder sprites looked just right. With that out of the way, the next step should be to establish a basic route to the end before digging into puzzles and dialogue.
In retrospect, working with these characters has been healthy. There's always this annoying temptation of sticking to concept art. I can never get other work done because drawing is just so much fun. I don't get this feeling with this project so hopefully I won't get so easily sidetracked.
November 11
It's interesting how much music influences my creative process. Sometimes I wake up asking myself if I'm in the mood to work on anything. I pick up the usual tools and play instrumental music. Before I realize it, several hours have passed, I'm hungry, tired and my arms hurt. It's like being hyponitzed, I think. The kind of music is also pretty important, it sets the mood and can help a lot when I'm writing a specific kind of scene or figuring out what a character would say.
A good exercize I found is to listen to a video game's OST and attempt to match unrelated music to a specific character or key scene of an (ongoing) project. This usually leads to a "placeholder OST" of sorts for whenever I need inspiration. As the music plays, I can practically see them move and speak on their own, I end up with a ton of new scenes or just cool ideas for miscelaneous art projects. Sometimes it feels like watching an old Youtube AMV or something, where you would see footage of a game or anime as the music plays. The hard part becomes translating that mental image to paper (it usually looks worse) or remembering dialogue (I tend to forget most of it, sadly). Regardless, music can't be underestimated when working on a project.
November 16
It's been a steady development cycle. I find myself with more free time to work on projects which is a mixed blessing as there's more temptation to procrastinate. The relative simplicity of the current project makes me more confident in my growing experience with my tools. The path towards the oh so desired finished project is still far from reach but from my own failed and halted projects from the past, safely backed up just in case ("the fridge" as I call it), I have already gotten more experience in how to work faster and effectively. In fact, some pre-alpha placeholders are proving to be super useful. I'll look forward for a fully realized foundation so I can turn my attention to art, writing and music.