Getting Back To It
Where have I been?
It's been a busy year, personally and professionally. To be honest I feel like I've been running on fumes for a while, and burnout just caught up to me. Between life and my day job, I simply did not have the time or inclination to spend more time i.e. nights and weekends sitting at my desk and brute forcing learning GML and pixel art.
Flash forward 6 months or so, I've recuperated a bit, mental health is doing a bit better; all the while I've been tinkering in my sketchbook and I'm starting to feel that itch again. Ready to get back into it...
Oh what's that now?
COOL COOL COOL
WARNING
Opera started deleting accounts that they deem inactive after 6 months?
Oh I haven't signed into my Opera account in more than 6 months? Sick. Cool. Fuck you too, I'm not going to buy another license.
It was around this time that I started asking myself hard questions about what I even wanted to do with this project. Actual gameplay was still pretty basic, I was feeling analysis paralysis with the art style because I'm simply not as proficient at pixel art as I am with other mediums. I was just having a hard time finding my voice, and it was seriously feeling like I was just stuck in this endless rut of redoing art and breaking the prototype with another tutorial series that I tried meshing together with the last tutorial series - causing spaghetti code, inconsistent naming schema, and burnout from the stress of thinking about it.
So I said fuck it. I started looking into open source engines. Two sprung to mind. Godot and Defold. I was going to choose an engine that wasn't going to try and make me bend the knee. Something that was basic enough for me to pick up, and not feel like I need to fight against it to make what I want to make.
Godot obviously has the huge leg up in community support, but I was dreading learning another bespoke scripting language. Defold caught my attention through a recommendation from a friend. An open-source, lightweight engine, made in part with King (makers of Candy Crush) for their games, released for free... and... Lua based?
Color me intrigued.
I have no real prior experience with Lua, but it's plain language enough that I can wrap my head around enough of it to figure it out.
Around this time, I wanted to find a voice for the aesthetic that felt more me. I wanted to retain some of the edge from my sketch book, where I was gravitating towards chunkier, exaggerated forms and sharp angles. But I don't necessarily want to hand draw and animate everything either. I wanted something that was scalable... Vector based maybe... so I started looking into Rive - spiritual successor to Adobe Flash, a piece of software after my own heart.
I was starting to find a spark with this workflow.
I was having fun, again.
My wife noticed. She noticed that I was spending more and more time in my office, working on Meteorite.
Worried about my mental health and well... health, since I'm a chronic workaholic prone to long nights, horrible imposter syndrome, and enough anxiety to keep me stuck in this rut; she just asked me a simple question.
"You are having fun, yeah?"
"...Yeah, surprisingly"
"Good, because this doesn't matter if you're not having fun."
So, I'm diving all the way in, restarting development in a pipeline and new process because I'm having fun again. I'm choosing what's going to be best for me, and the project, long term. Because hopefully this is just the start of something that I can hopefully keep building on.
Thanks for reading!
I'm thinking of ways to show some of what I've been doing. Part of me is worried about talking and showing things too early, but I'm really happy with where my head has been in my sketchbook lately working on the world.
I'm working towards a prototype. Then a vertical slice. Maybe once we're in vertical slice territory I'll show more art!
It's a weird mercurial thing for your passions to be your career and hobby at the same time.