Game Jam 2024: Day 2, June 20th

The idea had taken on a life of it's own, as ideas often do, and after a short meeting the treasure hunting aspect had been replaced for a singular goal (common in platformers), and the setting changed to a city in shambles with some quirky twists.

Goblin meter maids, missing wallets, and unpaid parking tickets all appealed to the unique sense of humor that Cory and I have in common. I'm happy to say that this idea tickled our imaginations enough to give us an abundance of details, set pieces, and characters that we could continue to add to the game for the foreseeable future.

But that's something better shown than explained here.

Next I got to work on the art.

I've dabbled in pixel art over the years, but I've done very little animating in the style, and when I did it was only drawing sprites side-by-side on a page, always having to find other ways the test the animation in other programs. This was not very efficient, and a little annoying, as I'm sure one can imagine.

I picked up Aseprite about a month ago, and I was loving it. Having a program built specifically for pixel art AND for animating your sprites was awesome. However, the goal of this jam was to learn something new, so I decided to give another program a go. This would help stretch my mental muscles, and who knows, maybe I'd find a better program in the process!

First, I downloaded OBS and started to record whenever I worked on the game.



Second, I installed Pro Motion. It seemed good enough. It didn't take me very long to see it wasn't for me (about ten minutes or so). It was functional, but it seemed outdated and unintuitive. It felt bogged down and frankly I didn't like how it looked.

Back to the online forums and articles to find a new program.

Krita seemed like a decent enough option, and I ended up using it for the rest of the jam.
 
I then made the first asset. The player character in a static pose.



Granted, it was really just a place holder to be switched out for animations, but it's technically an asset nonetheless.


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