A plan™

So after the last week's magnificent failure and subsequent scramble to recover I took some time to just think and study. I solidified the ideas I had around the time of the last post, sticking with 2D until I manage to publish a game at least. Failing to publish a game by September will result in redoubling my focus on web dev, primarily the back-end.

So I am going to be trying to do alternating weeks of learning and Game Jams. There may be some schedule nonsense to work around there given I don't control the game jams out there. It doesn't matter if the jam is small, I will compete if it fits the schedule. I will break schedule if I have to in order to compete in at least 2 jams a month. All rules go out the window for the likes of Ludum Dare (My dictionary tried to correct to Dumdum Dare which is on point), which should be a priority as it's been a goal of mine to actually submit something for once.

Depending on the time I have and how comfortable I am with Unity at that time I will have to make a call between Godot and Unity. I will use Unity if I have time since I will spend time figuring stuff out. Unity will be shooting myself in the foot out of the gate but hey, I learn better under pressure... that's why the month-long limit was imposed on the prototypes and I chose such complex project in the first place.

During this time I will be keeping track of all my game ideas and games I make for jams and at the end of May I will choose whichever one seems to be the best choice to push forward at least to an early-access viable game by September. Given that these will be Game Jam games, they should be simple enough that I can pull this off(at least on paper).

If I do manage to pull this off I will revisit the jump to 3D in September and treat it like a Uni semester. Otherwise I will just go full on freelance web dev and work on games in my off time. I like doing both, though the dream is running my own game dev studio without bowing to any big publishers. Lofty, I know.

So I will be Jammin' at least half the weeks, what about the other half? Courses and projects. I got my MUD partially setup on my server as well as an Intersect project with a DB backing it, all configured, now I am just gathering and formatting resources for it. Takes me back to the days of Mirage Source where I first got into game dev. I still have my VB6 reference book. Those were good times, the days when I got my entertainment downloading real player encoded anime from IRC bots and mostly listened to MIDI music because hard drive space was at a premium and 56k wasn't fun to deal with downloading MP3s.

I am currently working my way through 2 courses with a few queued up. First is a course on Digital painting which will be followed by character art, next is a music theory course(it's been a while) which will be followed by game music composition. I'm leaning into the creative side of my brain hard right now, in theory this will help me with the game jam projects by helping me think more creatively, plus I gain the ability to create better assets.

Anyway, gonna get back to sketching some random junk that comes out of my head and working out how to do digital painting in Krita. Really fond of Krita, sketched a lot of weird concepts in it a couple years ago, made a few into sprites actually. Maybe I will dig them up one of these days, they're around one of these drives or servers somewhere.

Well, back to coursework. First day of actual digital paint concepts and practical after several days of theory so this should be interesting.

Ehhhh.

It's good enough to use as concept art for pixel art but I wouldn't use it for much more than that. Well, this is why we practice. First attempts usually ain't great.

Cheers.