Thursday, January 3, 2013

A little progress information.

I am progressing quickly with Project Skitter, and it seems like I could finish the coding side for a playable beta by the end of the month (or even in as little as two weeks). The problem is the art is going to take me forever. it took me an entire day to paint one background, and it was easily the easiest/most simple/quickest one I'd have to do. I have like 50 more of those to do. And then I have to draw the sprites for the creatures... it took me all day to draw ONE creature's sprite with only a few frames of animation... and with all that, it's not even halfway done for that one creature.

Plus I really don't feel like doing all the art, I just want to code and design the game... I certainly understand why entire teams are required to work on games. Even if I was extremely motivated to do all the parts included, imagine if this game had a story that needed written... I'd have to write that, do all the art, write all the music, etc. (luckily I have a composer for this game!)
Perhaps if the beta is popular enough I could get the interest of an artist who'd like to help, or at maybe even start a small kickstarter to hire one. I mean, even if I did all the art myself, it wouldn't look nearly as professional as other games. I mean, it won't look miserable, but it won't be as high-quality as I'd like. But then again, this is my first "real" game project, so what can I expect?

Hopefully by tonight the training and facility systems will be complete... so all I really have to code is the inventory system (which will be nearly identical to the facility system, but probably even easier?), the town/shop system (should be fairly easy), and then the contests system (which will probably take at least a week working on just that). Then I will have all the core systems complete... and it will just be a lot of linking them together and debugging them and smoothing up the GUI. And then I can apply some art to it and I will have the playable demo! (But like I said, the art is going to take FOREVER). I will prolly throw together some really bad dummy art and get the beta testing underway, and work on the art while that's going on.

I know I haven't put much in the blog yet... I just started it! But I plan on updating with information about each system, what the game is going to be like, and give you guys some screenshots to look at. To those of you following on thefacebook.com, you've already seen the screenshots, but hey :) They'll come with better descriptions and better organization now!

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