July 26th - 9 Days Remain
My game just got a lot more important.
Adobe has announced they will no longer be supporting Flash Player by 2020. This means any unarchived flash games will become unplayable. It's not surprising news - Flash's security vulnerabilities have long been known, third-party support has been waning, and HTML5/WebGL/whatever-the-fuck has been slowly creeping in. Despite this, there's still a significant flash gaming community out there. I was browsing through Newground's portal yesterday in my nostalgia binge; it might not be the center of the internet anymore, but the Flash community keeps going (here's an interview Tom Fulp did last month). I'd hate to see everything go to waste.
And here I am, making a Flash game-like. I guess I gotta finish now, don't I?
I'm still drawing. I hate drawing.
I wouldn't mind I was good at it. Right now, I'm shooting for par. The instruments are passable. The UI is passable. The people are passable. Everything is passable, and that's the best I can do. Trust me, I've been trying.
And keep in mind; drawing is only part of the art. The stage and main menu are 99% complete, but I still need to separate each image layer into it's own sprite. Right now, it's a pretty-ish image that I can't animate. Once that's done, I'll need to import everything to GameMaker for use with the code. There I can create animations, either by manipulating sprites with code or by importing individual frames. I'm not entirely sure which process is ideal. I guess we're gonna find out.
Let me go through my drawing process in more detail.
1. I try and freehand (read: use GIMP's tools and artist intuition the best I can). If it works, great. If not, fuck.
2. I google a reference image. For instance, a keyboard for the control diagram:
3. I overlap the reference image with my canvas and make it partially transparent.
4. I copy the reference image the best I can in my flash-gamey style. If it works, great. If not, fuck.
Above: A shit drawing, but I don't know how to improve it anymore so fuck it. It does it's job.
I'm not saying this is a good process. Tjere's potential copyright infringement if I don't transform the image enough. WHICH I DO please don't sue me.
July 27th - 8 Days Remain
Quick one today (you can only say "GAH ART AGH" so many times). But I finished the ending screen!
With that, the art is done. I'll probably need to touch up some things later, maybe add a few sprites I missed, but it looks like I'm done! It's finally time to start programming!
...crap.
In the next update: The warmup song and main menu!