Jamming Myself Out!

This past week has been an absolute blast--I've had so much free time I've managed to add some art to the blog, put some new posts up, update my YouTube channel, get in contact with some awesome people and arrange my trip next week to LA. In short, all the things that I've been meaning to get to for months have been got to, INCLUDING my very first game project, PEW!

Since Friday I've done nothing but eat, sleep, shower occasionally, go to the gym (before showering, obviously) and work on PEW, a-la mini game jam style. I'm proud to say I actually have three whole environments completely fleshed out. You can see the awesome finished products here:

You can see the separate layers here, each one is larger than the last so that they can easily parallax.

I can't believe how well they turned out--in little more than three days I pretty much gave myself a crash course in pixel environments, grit my teeth and bore through it. It helped immensely to start out with an organized file system, looking at the Game Design Document and writing down the screen resolutions and what my process would be. Having a strict plan is super useful and helped me work much faster, even though I'm not too familiar with that work style--compare these results to my hilarious attempt at an environment earlier this year, which I drew mainly for the GDD.

The horror!

There's a marked improvement, I'd say, and what's more the entire environments feel much stronger and connected thematically. These three environments represent the scenery changes within the first tutorial level of the game--I believe that busting these out this weekend will help keep me motivated as the year goes on; I've got a great foundation and now I can just keep building from there.

What's next? tomorrow I'm going to make everything that wasn't the agents or the environment: User Interface, enemies, special effects, bullets, explosions, and so on. In the meantime I've been passing the artwork on to my programmer, who should be able to turn them all into a little demo later on this month.

Keep tuned, because I did record my process for making these things, and I'll definitely put that stuff up on my channel.