I don’t spend absolutely all of my time coding.
In fact, part of the reason I am a game developer is because all of my primary interests coalesce into what a game is made of. I play guitar and bass, I draw, I write stories and I am a software developer.
Today I spent a good portion of my time working on my website. I found a really fleshed out template for my github.io page on someone’s repository. I forked the repo and got to work trying to understand how it was put together. I say it like this, because I am by no means a web developer.
I have a basic understanding of some concepts. I’ve built some scrapers in python in the past. I built one that pulled the serebii.net page for the new Galar Pokemon when Pokemon Sword and Shield was in development. I wanted to see if I could make a cool program to pull and parse the html data for the new Pokemon page. Other than those kinds of projects, I’d never had any kind of training in web related development. It took me some trial and error, probing different parts of the code base and refreshing the web page, until I finally found where I needed to make my marks. I ended up finding a very helpful commit by the creator as well. The commit allowed you to see what they would change, if they were in your place, filling the information in for yourself. I still don’t consider myself a web developer, but after today, I was on my way to having my own website.
After I’d burned myself out on website editing, I decided to work on a new character for my Helicopter/Flappy game implementation in Unity. The artwork I’m currently using is placeholder art. The sprites come from the asset set of Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo. The character I have been using is one of the Super Koopas. If you don’t remember, a super koopa is one of the koopa troopas without a shell, and a cape.
I used this character as the inspiration for the character I began to doodle in pixels. My brother has been using a crab emoji a lot for some reason, so I also decided to make him a crab. My crab character wears a cape much like the super koopa. His cape is a little more defined, albeit sort of a mess right now.
I learned a lot in the time I spent making that little crab animation. And like usual, at the end of the day, I’m left wanting to take what I’ve learned, scrap the current version, and start fresh. I may or may not restart him. I’m kind of proud of what I was able to accomplish in that one sitting. I’d obviously like to clean up some of the cape animation, and the loose ends on the piece as a whole. I would also like to add some more dynamic motion to the animation. My brother, who is about to start college for animation, suggested that I add a vertical bob to the body of the crab. He suggested it be at a slower rate than the flap of the cape. I liked this idea. I also thought it’d be kinda funny to make the crab’s eyes a little taller, more like Mr Krabs, and then make the eyes kind of flap back and forth in the breeze. I might consider adding a blink animation too. This crab is low on my priorities so it may be a revisited project.
I ended my evening with a little bit of noodling on my guitar. Lately I’ve been trying to come up with a little melody that elicits a “soaring” feeling. This would fit perfectly in my game. I’d love for the music and art in my game to be made by myself or of my design. Well, at least in my own games that is. I think I found a melody that almost fits what I’m going for so I spent my time refining it. It’s coming together and I can’t wait to finally find something and hear it along with my sprite animation and control it in my game.
A day like today, is the exact reason I got into programming in the first place. I am at my core a creator. Today I got to smith words, pixels and vibrations. I hope to do this for the rest of my life.
:: Tello-
