Slowly plowing forth…
Time flies, and I get nothing done. Well, that’s not particularly true, but I’m kind of disappointed in how little progress I’ve made.
November was a strange month for me. I was pretty productive at the start, but various things came up concerning college, so I had to get that straightened out. Then near the end of the month, I spent some time hanging out with cousins for various reasons. And then I made the mistake of buying some games because they’d gone on sale, and suddenly large chunks of my time just disappeared.
But I’m not here to blog about my life–I’m here to talk about working on the game (which is, despite the above, still a large chunk of my life). The point I guess I’m trying to make is that I have trouble switching gears. When something comes up, I feel the need to focus my attention on that so that I can get back to what I want to do. The problem is that once something is taken care of, I’m terribly slow in going back to being productive. It’s a constant problem of mine, and compounded with my usual horrible time management skills, I get very little work done.
As an example, here’s a little outline of the past couple months of working on the game (to make up for the lack of updates): I spent October mostly doing artwork…both concept art for the game and practice sketches to work on my technique. I then decided to switch to creating in-game content…stuff like sprites and background objects. But then I ended up going back to drawing, and found it hard to transition back to working on putting the game together. And now that I’ve finally gotten back on track, I feel like drawing, but I’m afraid of getting distracted again. It’s like…I can’t do both at once because it’s too much of a shift. Yet, if I focus on one too much, I feel like I’m neglecting the other. Urghhh…
Well, no more wasting time–I’m going to have to get used to working hard if I’m ever going to survive art school.
Here’s two different images. The first is an example of concept sketches I do, and the bottom is an example of how an in-game screenshot of the game currently looks like now (you can see that I’ve used the zombies from the first image as placeholder graphics for enemies in the second). In the past few days, I’ve been trying to figure out the coding part of the game. Having almost no experience with programming, I’m lucky that Game Maker 8 simplifies the process, though there’s still a lot for me to figure out. Unfortunately, all this work is pretty invisible, and the game is still a mess, graphically.
It’s interesting…on my past projects, this would be around the time I give up (when the game has some sloppy pixel art and somewhat working code). However, I’m really determined to make this shine.
