Color palettes

Was messing around with color palettes today, 

The game I'm working on doesn't look bad, per-se, but I feel as though it's a bit boring. Rarely do I step outside my boundaries and come with a decent palette. I tend to just play it safe.

I'll hold myself back this time for time's sake, however color palettes are definitely something I want to spend more time on in the future.

Daily sketches

Did more sketching today,

I want to make it so that you can see the contours of the face based on the shape of the eyes, however I need to develop a better method than what I'm using, since it doesn't really take the angle of the eyes into account well enough. You can see that the shape of the eyes works in the last picture because of the way they arc, whereas in two of the other sketches, they conflict with the shape of the face a bit too much.

I guess I'll practice that tomorrow.

The other problem is that my current method of drawing the face often makes me end up with something I have to tweak a lot. I want to come up with a method that gets me to that result in the first place, so the next time I do sketches perhaps I'll do the initial guidelines, make adjustments, and then draw guidelines over the result, to see what would have brought me that result in the first place.

There's also the mouth, which I tend to draw way off centre, when realistically it'd be more like this (and probably rotated inwards even more than this.)

Another rough

Drew some more today,

I feel like I don't do a very good job of maintaining the look of the line art when I color faces. I tend to exaggerate the position of the mouth, so it makes shading sort of awkward. I might experiment some more with this sort of colouring style, though.

Sketch again

Here's a sketch turned coloring experiment I did today.

Might try a similar style tomorrow but with bigger eyes. Who knows, perhaps I'll even draw a character who's gender doesn't confuse people -__-

Another song

I'm probably not going to use this song in the game since I decided to change the tone of the music a bit (and I'm not going to be using Snes Soundfonts). So I figured I may as well post it here. Another Castlevania inspired theme.

Sketches

I did some quick sketches today. I'm trying to decide what I want the protagonist to look like in CGs, so that I can practice drawing her that way beforehand. Cgs in the past haven't really been the most consistent, because I ended up drawing the main character differently in pretty much every scene -__-

The first few sketches kind of sucked..

The best were the top left and the one on the right, I think. Though if I want to draw bigger eyes, I need to practice making them more "focused". Whenever I do big eyes, they always seem to be looking in a vague direction. I also need to make the hair conform more to the shape the head, since I've found myself making it too straight in the front.

Edit:

Geh. Second sketches kinda suck too. I need to practice more..

Health stuff

Geh, I hate talking about personal issues, however I feel as though I should at least explain my current condition, given how it's been effecting my ability to work properly for a while now.

A month or so ago I briefly mentioned that I was going to get a medical issue checked out. Without going into too much detail, that medical issue is basically "I have to use the bathroom like every 5-10 minutes". There are other symptoms as well, however that's what's been affecting me the most, for obvious reasons.

It started around a year ago, and slowly got worse over time, so I didn't really notice it until it started affecting me on a daily basis. At this point, there are around 2-3 hours after I wake up where I'm fine, and then from that point it basically happens all day, and interferes with my ability to sleep. Early tests at the docter's seem to indicate that it's not something that will be fixed by popping some pills, however I don't think it's something that will require surgery.

A pretty lame sounding medical condition to have to explain to people, and possibly something that will be easily fixed in a couple weeks, however it's incredibly frustrating, especially right now.

As a result, I may look into hiring an artist to help finish the game. I don't really have enough money to risk hiring someone with the money I make month to month from sales, however if I need to, I might sell some audio equipment so that I can hire the artist I planned on working with during the next project. While I'm sure I'll get the medical condition sorted out in time, I don't really want this game's development to go on for much longer in this condition. Working like this sucks.

Just so I'm not leaving you with "Things suck right now, goodnight!", here's a WIP of a song I started for the game. Not sure if I'll go with this sort of style, or something else.

Progress report

Still actively working on the game..

I've mostly been doing tileset related stuff over the past few days. I wasn't really satisfied with what I had done initially early on in development, so I expanded on it a bit. At this point I'm more or less done with tilesets.

 

I may end up doing a couple more parallax backgrounds, however. They take quite a few hours each, but they make a big difference to how a game feels. Honestly, if I hire a pixel artist I may end up making them a higher priority than enemy sprites, simply because of how much of a difference they make. I can do great enemy sprites when I put the time into it, but my backgrounds just end up looking passable, with the same effort. 

As for progress...

How far am I into the game? It's hard to say, honestly. Last month I was around 75% done, but now I'm 75% done again, because rather than moving closer to the end of the game I keep changing or adding to the mid-game content. In addition to that, I've still got to do the CGs, which will be animated, and all the music, which I'm having trouble with.

I've tried quite a few times in the past few weeks to create some music, but thus far I've yet to do anything I'm satisfied with. It's frustrating, because unlike pixel art I can work on songs for 10+ hours over the course of a couple days, and still end up with nothing to show for it. I could pull songs from abandoned projects, but I feel like the result wouldn't be very cohesive, and I doubt I'd be satisfied.

So all in all..things are going... okay. If had to describe my current state, it would be "tired". I usually end up getting sick of "mid-development", and I've been mid-development for the past year, with all the games I've worked on. It sort of creates a constant feeling of not having time for anything, which can become very tiring. More than anything, I'm just looking forward to that magical day when I can release the damn thing and sigh in relief. 

Looking at Offbeatr and alternatives.

I was thinking about Offbeatr again today. I feel like it has some things that make it really viable, but one thing that makes it sort of iffy.

If I were to use it, I could hire artists that are a priority using my own money, and create an offbeatr project with stretch goals for things that, while not a requirement for the game's release, would improve the game considerably. For example,

$2400 - 20 extra CGs
$4000 - Second H animation for every enemy
$4800 - All enemies voiced (monster girls)
$6000 - CGs are animated.

Rather than the Offbeatr project being about raising enough money to create the project in the first place, it would be about raising the exact amount required to hire artists to make extra content. In other words, it would basically be like pre-ordering the game, and ensuring that what you spend is going straight towards content.

The first problem, though, is that people couldn't pay for exactly what they want. If it's based on the stretch goal order, some people would be annoyed that voices are before animated CGs, for instance.

However, the biggest, problem is that they take 30%. Meaning if I need $2400 for 20 CGs, then the stretch goal would need to be $3120. Doesn't seem like a massive difference, but that's a lot of money to just lose entirely.

Alternative

I don't like it when pre-orders are blind purchases of a game, or pre-ordering for minor bonuses, but I like the idea of paying for elements that you care about. Which, makes me think of another alternative.

The thing is, there doesn't need to be stretch goals. I could set up a page for pre-orders, the same way I sell games now, but instead of a single payment option, I could let the customer choose what "pool" to pay into, and how much. For instance, you could choose to buy the game, and pay into the "in-game H-animation" pool. This pool wouldn't actually need to meet a certain goal to take effect. Meaning if it only makes $500, that's still 25 hours of work I could pay an artist to work on H-animations, or around 5 CGs, if it's the CG pool.

Just a thought. I won't be doing this now, mind you, but I might consider it for the next project I work on. Tell me what you think, or if you have any other ideas for such a system.