Additional Summer Learning

While a lot of my time has been on studio stuff and Fateweaver assets these last few months, I’m still squeezing in some additional learnings. Not all of them art related. So this is a grab bag of random things kind of blog post.

Spencer drafting for animation class

I attended the yearly Spencer Wan animation class last month. This one focused on draftmanship for animation, which is basically how to draw figures quickly because you need to draw so much for animation.

It’s a pretty different concept from his last class, which was on 2D visual effect animation. Here he went over some of the traditional draftmanship approaches, their pros and cons and what he thinks is best. I don’t see myself doing any fully body character animations any time soon but all the tips applied to more general things like gesture studies and capturing dynamic poses. It’s also just cool to learn about how there are identified approaches to these kinds of things. Lots of people acting like online educators don’t know the terms or background to these established practices.

The class then ended on a talk about “confidence” which was really good. Spencer’s point with it was that feedback that other artists will give you is “to be confident” to “have more confident lines” and he found this really vague and unhelpful because no one tells you how to get that confidence.

My page of his suggested exercises for learning confidence turned into this weird scribble mess which I didn’t remember at all when I opened the file to export these images.

GDQuest

When we decided to make a game with more traditional game play to it we needed to choose and engine. Even while I work at Unity I have a huge soft spot for Godot…

My experience using the Unity Editor is crashes and long wait times. I know it’s a good engine and has a huge amount of built in features that speed up a lot of development. But I’m working on a MacBook Air, we’re being tight with our money, I don’t want to invest in a new computer just to run Unity. We also shouldn’t need a lot of the things that Unity has built in. We’re going for a 2D game so we don’t even need 3D support. So that’s how we ended up with Godot.

My wife hadn’t used it before so she bought the Learn 2D Gamedev from Zero with Godot 4 and started learning. I watched her progress through the lessons and thought it would be a good idea for me to take the course as well.

While watching a talk by a game developer from Motion Twin I learned that the studio is a worker cooperative that has a really interesting approach to development. Everyone there is comfortable in-engine, if someone gets an idea for a feature or level instead of having to pitch it and win people over to their idea and wait for an engineer to build it, they just build it themselves. I love the idea of being able to be more hands on in-engine but this takes the idea to the extreme. I hope to be comfortable enough to contribute code to our games but I think it will be a while yet.

The GDQuest course is really well done and I feel like I’m learning a lot, even just on chapter 4. It’s just difficult to squeeze it in while also working on art assets, learning how to run a studio, and all the things that come along with that.

But! I won’t learn unless I keep plugging away at it. They suggest trying to do 30 minutes every day and I’ve been failing on that front :| Hoping to do little blog updates on my progress to help motivate me to keep going. There’s a lot at the start of the course on how to get the most out of it and the earliest homework is answering these 6 questions:

• Why do you want to learn to code? What's your goal? : Make game + contribute to game
• What will you get when you reach your goal? : A game, be helpful with Godot
• Where and at what time will you practice? Some time between noon-9 everyday (oops)
• For how long will you practice? 30 minutes minimum (oops)
• How will you avoid distractions? Close apps that send notifications, tell Sophie I’m in focus time
• How will you stay accountable? Post to BlueSky / Write blog posts / Show Sophie I did manage to complete every lesson in the Learn GDScript From Zero which did take many hours. But it also felt like a very good start. Now it’s time to get back in engine.

Game Juice

I haven’t started this one yet but one of the things I’m most interested in learning in Godot is to do small effects and visuals. A day into my GDQuest course I bought Learn how to make a juicy game in Godot 4 as what I get to start as a reward to finishing the full GDQuest. It was on sale for like 80% off so I bought it earlier than I would have.

Fateweaver updates

Development on Fateweaver is swimming along. Sophie has nearly implemented all the playing cards now. Next up will be Fate Cards then Items and then we’ll likely be ready to put it in people's hands.

I’ve been working on a pitchdeck which is required to apply for an upcoming grant. Since pitchdecks are so art heavy I’ve been trying to get at least a few assets ready for that. Which has lead to:

Card backs for Landscape Tiles and Journey Cards:

A decent amount of Fate Cards:

My first attempt at one of the characters the player will meet:

Conclusion

If you’re someone who happens to be awake late at night, check out the Hard Drive’s Wheel of Woke And Gay Charity Stream happening from 8PM ET on July 25th and goes until 8PM the next day. From 10PM to 1AM they’ll be spinning the Wheel of Woke, a collection of games deemed woke and gay from LGBTQ+ creators and Love in the Time of Spellphage is on the wheel!

Not sure what my next blog post will be about yet, feels like there’s a lot of projects on the go.