-----------------------------------------------------
Date: 12/30/2024 Title: Year of iteration
-----------------------------------------------------
I started to refine the pizza shop NPC, Morio. I've never really known how best to make these NPCs because usually you would use a spritesheet, but these sprites are highres. Each of about 100 frames could be 1024 x 1024 and I can't fit that on a sprite sheet without seriously shinking them. After importing individual frames into Unreal, I ran into an error. Unreal ran out of virtual memory to commit to these textures, so some of the animations suddenly looked blurry. How do games like 'Born of Bread' or 'The plucky squire' use such high res animations? I dont know. Maybe puppet rigging. I'll break up the sprite into parts, tie them to a rig and animate them like a puppet. Where I need it, I can try to blend it with frame by frame animations to make it look less puppety. After looking into programs specifically designed for this process, I found Spine 2D which looks great but is unfortunately too expensive at $300. I decided to try my hand at doing it in blender. The final result was suprisingly workable. Note that I need to make a tutorial around this workflow as its a bit unintuitive between working with blender and working with unreal.
-----------------------------------------------------
Date: 12/10/2024 Title: Please excuse the mess.
-----------------------------------------------------
The throes of creativity tend to be messy and disorganized. At some point you start to think either a.) "Hey, Ive put so much time into this and it's looking pretty good!", or b.) "Hey, I've sunk so much time into this, I need to get something out of it!" and so you want to bring people around and show them the pile of stuff you now have. But it can't just look like a pile of stuff, you need to box some things up, organize, set the context and whatnot. So thats what you're looking at! I mean it's a WIP ofcourse, but this here is that box. I thought up a slick title, bought a domain name, and made all the appropriate social media monikers and now I'm going to document it. And you're here for it, Internet.
-----------------------------------------------------
Date: 12/5/2024 Title: Early Days
-----------------------------------------------------
During the 2019 lockdowns, Kaizen and I decided to make a game. Kaizen was (is) an accomplished backend programmer working for some high-end clients and I was a starving artist fresh out of a pointless master's degree in painting. I had a story and some designs that had been floating around my brain since undergrad and were inspired heavily by CAPCOM. The initial form of the game was that of a Mega Man clone. We began our work using Unreal Engine 4 in a 2.5D platform aesthetic that would allow me to play around with 2D characters in a 3D world. It's been 4 years since and the game is currently simmering at around the prototype phase. In the following DevLog I try to breakdown what we've alreay worked on and describe where the project is currently going.