Speed & Reality
I clearly did not updated on Wednesday when I said I was going to. I live in tornado alley (incidentally, right below one of those three tornado graphics), and things got a little weird this past week. But let’s get right down to it.
My plan that I was so sure was going to work, actually didn’t work out the way I needed it to. The idea was to have a base layer with all the un-clothed character animations in it, and then to have a layer directly over that one with all the clothes, so the clothes would always appear on top. The result is something like this.
Obviously having EVERY piece of clothing appear above every piece of base caused this fun layering issue. So I I had to re-think my layers and ended up merging the two. This works a lot better because I can manipulate piece hierarchy between sets. For example, with the nude set, I want have the legs appear above the main body piece. But with clothes, I’d like for the body-shirt to appear above the legs. It was a simple fix with a little folder move. The result of merging the layers ended up like this.
The behind the scenes stuff was me re-figuring out how to make those buttons work for clothes and things. It’s basically the same script I wrote for changing color, I just had to edit it a little differently. It actually took me 3 tries before I got it working the way I wanted it to. The way clothes were positioned above the base was also a cause of some frustration because the pieces didn’t quite snap the way you’d expect them to. It required more tweaking, especially the joints for the knees/elbows. I think I got it worked out, though.
Since everything seemed to be working in practice it was time for me to make sure each section was arranged correctly, and then begin moving and merging the base and outfit layers for the other 3 directions. But before I did that, I wanted to make sure everything was working properly, so I didn’t have to come back and manipulate things again. I decided to try and make ApathyTeen proper.
I am again frustrated. Everything looks OK except the feet are really bothering me and I can’t seem to get them to look right. My mind began to wander a bit. This next part has less to do with the direct art process for the game, and more to do with my current state of mind and the process of me creating things in general. (You are welcome to skip it, I italicized it for easy skippin’!)
I became a little disillusioned with myself earlier this week when I was fixing up my redone portfolio and decided to put a date on each of the images I had up there. Of the 11 images I edited it down to, eight of them were done in 2010, with one from this year and one from 2011.
My first instinct was to go to my art directories from 2011, 2012, and 2013. I was surprised when I realized these directories were mostly empty. Have I really just not been making art like I used to? My ’11 and ’12 directories combined have eleven images in them. In contrast, I have 150 images from 2010 saved (and each year before that seems to average between 60-80). How is it even possible that I did so little art the past 3 years?
I have my first art for FairWeather marked as around May of 2011, though that was around a weird time in my life where I had just moved and was looking for a job and was fairly busy. I didn’t start working on this project intently until about January of 2012, and up until that point I wasn’t really able to get much art done for anything. Since Jan of ’12 though, I have 335 saved images in my GameMake directory. Some of these are still images of plans, some concept art, flash animations, some are slight edits to other images, so I’m not suggesting that these are all fully finished pieces of artwork, but these 300 plus images are just the ones I ended up saving and sharing. I felt a little better when I realized that my art production hadn’t slowed down over the past few years.
However, I kind of feel like a fake at this point. I feel like any other artist would have been done with this project by now, or at least have a lot more to show for it. Even compared to any other project I’ve ever worked on, I’m getting an alarmingly small amount of work finished. And it’s not from lack of time spent working on it, I can prove that. Looking at the numbers, I’m perplexed at how I can spend so much time and get so little done. It was when I got to this point in the animation process that I started to understand a little better.
At this point I’m frustrated with the entire design of everything, but that reminds me of what Derek Yu wrote, “stop making excuses for starting over”. I will admit that I have restarted the animation process several times, and am always extremely upset with it, but it’s not just that a shoe isn’t lining up properly. It’s that I feel like I’ve bitten off more than I can chew on the animation end of things. I’d say “on the game as a whole”, but I don’t believe that to be true. Nothing, for the most part, about the other aspects of the game has me worried or stressed out. I want to get this done as quickly as possible, but I am seriously starting to wonder if my design and style choices for animation was holding me back.
Having said that, all that’s left to figure out is the shoes and how to get them to display properly. The framework for everything else is almost in place and pieces are easily swap-able. There are a few fringe instances. For example, I will need to add an extra piece of clothing for the pants that wasn’t necessary for the bases. It will serve as a waist line piece, fixing every pair of pants on a shirtless person looking like a pair of chaps.
It’s almost done. The skin is changer is broken in this one because of how I have the not-seeable outfits layered. But it’s really close. To give you an idea of how much time making this framework saved me, I made the entire outfit set for apathy that you see in about 20 minutes, and that includes having to adjust some of the pieces slightly so they’d line up correctly.
Work smarter, not harder.
Goal for next week: I’m kicking it into high gear to cross the map-animation finish line. Finished male & female thin running animation sets with however many outfits I have time to make. I’ll run some tests of these new graphics on the current map-tiles and we’ll see what adjustments need to be made, and then possibly move back into tile battle work.