Messing around with pixel art

dfebs Mar 30, 2023 0 Comments

I’ve been enjoying pixel art more and more these days. It gives me a way to think without having to access the part of my mind that’s usually active when coding. Plus, you can sit down for an hour or two (or more) and usually have a finished product by the end. Is it something I’ll continue doing? Hopefully. I could use more creative outlets.

I decided to pick up Twitter to get more involved with the pixel art community ’cause why not, and I saw things that would make lots of aspiring artists quit on the spot. People make some insane stuff. One artist I’ve particularly enjoyed is Joseph Hyde. Call me basic but I’m a bit of a sucker for the landscapes honestly. Definitely worth checking out.

There’s also a twitter account called Pixel Dailies that posts a topic every day and people can make pixel art based on the topic. I like that they’re pretty open interpretation of the topics and they actually feature (by retweeting) the best works they find. Given my lack of experience, my submissions have been pretty juvenile so far; needless to say none of them have been featured yet. I’ll take my time with it. It turns out other people have been doing this for far longer than I have.

On the topic of my game, I’ve been slacking a bit on it, though it isn’t without any good news; my job does hackathons every quarter so I’ve been putting some work into a neat little side project with Bevy Rust. That’ll be a little extra something I hope to host on the site too. It’ll involve fancy sand.

One thing I know for sure is that in two weeks I’ll be taking a week-long trip to Colorado, speaking of sick landscapes. Knowing that, I want to have my projects in a complete state before I go. I highly suspect that whatever is incomplete when I get back won’t get done. I may try to mess around with pixel art during the trip though since that’s easier to pick up and put down.

Anyhow, that’s about it. ‘Till next time.

Now approaching the 20%

dfebs Mar 26, 2023 0 Comments

I’m sure you’ve heard of the 80/20 rule and how it applies to effectively everything. In my particular case, I’m beginning to reach that point with the game that I showcased in my first post here. The situation is as follows:

• 20% of the development time has taken up by 80% of my todo list
• 80% of the development time is now being taken up by 20% of my todo list

To clarify, I have reason to believe I have reached that 20% based on the fact that I have gone from knocking out multiple things per day, to one thing per day, to potentially one thing per multiple days. I would say progress slowed down after my commits on March 23rd.

I am reaching the end of my first month for making a game and I’m hoping I can meet it. It’s tough; since I’m new to Rust and the Bevy framework, I’m now suffering the consequences of some of the mistakes I made while making a game for the first time. I’ll definitely make a reflection post on it after the fact, rather than now since hindsight is a bit of a better teacher in these sorts of pursuits. When you’re in the technical weeds, it’s easy to incorrectly assess the big picture.

I had a pretty fantastic breakthrough with the discovery of events in the Bevy framework though. I was having a hard time wrapping my mind around how the game would know the exact moment that the game was over and it was safe to clear everything exactly one time. On top of that, there was also the logic involved with resetting state back to the beginning. Thankfully I was able to figure that out and now the game restarts when you lose!

Also, I made a new enemy type which is neat. They’re far more dangerous than the standard ones that drive in a straight line (as hard as that is to believe).

Anyway, I’m hoping to get the game published to my website soon. I have no idea how that will work but apparently it’s mostly trivial to get a bevy game working on your own website. I like to hope those aren’t famous last words.

Experimenting with palettes

dfebs Mar 23, 2023 0 Comments

Starting a blog

dfebs Mar 21, 2023 1 Comments

This is my first post and a test to see how this website framework works. So far it’s been pretty neat with only a few snags here and there. I’ve been working on learning Rust and making games with the Bevy framework. It’s actually been a nice experience and I’m hoping to stick to a 1-game-a-month schedule. March is looking pretty good with a game I’m making that was originally supposed to be about *avoiding* bad guys but I could not resist adding a mechanic to also *destroy* the bad guys.

Currently, the annihilation works a little too efficiently and deletes the bad guys from existence with no trace of their previous existence. I’m working on trying to get an explosion sprite sheet I made to show an explosion occur when an enemy gets killed. Turns out it’s harder than I thought, due to my lack of knowledge in handling game assets in general. For the curious, here is the Github repository.

I’ve also been learning pixel art with Aseprite as a side-effort to at least come up with my own sprites for my games. I don’t expect to be good at it any time soon but that’s okay. It’s another avenue of creation if I don’t feel like coding.

Anyway, that’s all I got for now. This site may undergo lots of changes cosmetically and functionally, but for now it seems to work. Once I have a better workflow, I can hopefully start working on more in-depth and interesting blog posts. And with that, I am going to test out code blocks by writing the following:

fn main () {
    println!("Have an Awesome Day!")
}