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#i owe my gif making skills to tutorials made by
sirverofarrows · 2 years
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all our days - jeff williams (feat. casey lee williams)
applying every rwby song to the witcher (2/62)
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xxairo-dev · 4 years
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So I started making a 2D pixel art game. Welcome to my new Dev blog!
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No official name, but the unofficial name is Bowfish.
(TLDR and Dev log with pretty gifs at bottom)
Hello internet, friends, and 2020 -- those of you that have been following me all this time know that I’ve been doing art for a loooong time. Even before I got into digital art in 2010, I’ve been drawing with paper and pencil for as long as I can remember and probably started playing video games right at the same time. For reference, my earliest memories of video games consist of Lemmings 3D on PS1, followed shortly by Rayman and Spyro the Dragon. 
I’m still a big Spyro fan, also pretty sure this is how I became obsessed with dragons in general. 
Science based dragon MMO girl, wherever you are -- I feel you, I am you.
Basically, I’ve been playing video games all my life (to the detriment of my parents) and I owe it to gaming for igniting my early artistic ambitions. In fact, I remember learning how to draw by copying the character art of Neopets and Sonic Advance before one day stumbling upon one of my dad’s Game Informer magazines and being blown away by the art that I saw in there (particularly the WoW art). I’m pretty sure that was when I was first introduced to Big Boy™ game art and instantly thought, “Whoa, I want to be able to draw like that”.
Later, when I got my first drawing tablet and started making digital art, it became “I want to draw for a video game”.
Even later, when I learned that being a video game artist was not a very realistic career path and opted to pursue a bachelors degree in biology instead of art, it became “I want to draw for a video game... on the side”.
Even later-er, when I got my degree in 2017 and started working full-time and realized that work saps you of all energy and motivation to work on projects at home, it became “I want to draw for a video game... some day”. 
Well, today here we are in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, I got furloughed from my biology job due to the quarantine. I spent four months passing time, thinking that I’d go back to work soon. But by the end of July, I was at wit’s end of what to do with myself after getting burnt out on a number of hobbies, games, shows, books, etc. without spiraling into some very expensive hobbies (hello aquariums) with the money I wasn’t making. I badly needed to find something productive to do that I thought would also benefit me in the long run i.e. post-quarantine, and unfortunately I couldn’t work on wet lab techniques at home.
“Learn to code” is what my parents have said to me about a thousand times for the past 5 years. “Learn to code” is what I did try for about two weeks with Code Academy a few years ago before realizing that none of what I was learning was going to stick because I wasn’t programming in any part of my daily life. As a biologist, in evolution we like to call this “if you don’t use it, you lose it”. 
I know all too well about how coding is one of the best skills you can learn. However, I also know myself all too well to know that learning code for the sake of learning code wasn’t going to work for me. I wanted to wait to learn when the right situation presented itself, ideally when I would have an opportunity to use it almost every day at like a job or something.
Well, one of my good fellow artist (and biology) friends had recently taken the plunge into creating his first video game Meganura earlier in the year. I was (and still am) seriously -- and I cannot emphasize this enough -- impressed by his progress, dedication, and ability to learn coding for this game. Or more frankly, I was seriously impressed by his dedication and progress in to learning how to code for this game.
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Meganura in all it’s crispy pixel-y goodness. Man, my friends are talented.
I dwelled on this for a while. 
I always considered making a game to be out-of-reach because I absolutely could not muster up the motivation to learn a single drop of code without being paid to do so after 1) being beaten over the head by “learn how to code” for so long and 2) having already tried and given up in the past. 
But as it got harder to sleep well, eat well, and feel happy during the quarantine, I feel like I hit a rock bottom where I felt like if I didn’t make a big effort to find a new purpose, then I was probably going to become depressed. To preface this, I have experienced depression before, and ever since I got out it has been my goal in life to never experience it again. 
The only way I was going to survive this quarantine was to give myself a new “job”.
I already had a creative mind and the skills to create art and animations for a game. I already had a lifetime of game playing experience that had formed a detailed list of specific mechanics and visual details that I knew I wanted or didn’t want in a game. I already had an analytical and detail-oriented mind (thanks biology... or thanks videogames?) that liked to plan and build things. 
All it would take is just a little bit of code...
If you’ve read this far, thanks for listening and I hope some of you hear yourselves in my story.
TLDR;
I am just a daytime biologist and hobby digital artist with zero coding experience.
I’m extremely proud to say that since 07/29/20, I have been successfully developing and coding my own 2D pixel art video game in Unity and am in full swing!
This is the start of my dev blog, where I’ll be logging my progress and thoughts throughout this journey for like-minded and aspiring individuals. 
My Goals:
- To create everything from scratch -- art, scripts, etc.
- To create a game about bow hunting with intuitive drag/release controls
- To create a game that has cooking and campfires
- To create a game with pretty water graphics
- To create a game that has sushi and cats
- To have a playable demo by mid 2021 (my guess for the end of quarantine)
How I’ve been learning C#:
I have been following along with YouTube tutorials to create a base script and then looking up things in Unity’s scripting documentation to expand and modify my code to achieve exactly what I want. I’ve been learning C# and how to read documentation through almost entirely pattern recognition (e.g. mimicking and experimenting with code I’ve copied from tutorials and recognizing keywords in documentation) and turning to Google or my Tech Career Peers™ for help when I get stuck or to clarify things.
The key thing is that even after copying some code, I read the documentation and figure out how every line of code in my script works before moving on.
This is because after spending a few days of looking up YouTube tutorials, I realized there were no tutorials for the exact bow controls that I wanted. Instead, I ended up watching multiple tutorials and learned how all of their scripts worked before combining and modifying pieces together. Then, I started relying entirely on documentation to write lines of code. 
I don’t know how many original lines of code I’ve written so far, but there are so many now and I am so proud of all of them.
So anyway, here’s what’s happened over the past 2-3 weeks.
Dev Log:
7/29/20
- Came up with an idea for a game
7/30/20
- Installed Unity and started watching Unity tutorial videos
7/31/20 
- Created water shader via shader graph (no coding required!)
- Created a basic background, player sprite, bow sprite, and arrow sprite in Photoshop
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08/03/20
- First time coding in C#
- Struggle to code in Notepad++, switched to Visual Studio Code
08/06/20
- Created physics based slingshot controls for the bow and arrow with a line renderer bowstring
- Colliders!
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08/09/20
- Unable to find a way to pull arrow back horizontally (-X) regardless of mouse Y movement (OnMouseDown)
- Decided that slingshot controls are for slingshots, not bows and arrows
- Scrapped physics based slingshot controls due to overcomplication (rip)
08/10/20
- Created new projectile based controls that still include drag/shoot physics
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08/11/20
- Limited rotation of the bow while aiming to max 45° and min -45°
- Developed distaste for vector algebra
- Made it so that if you don’t drag far enough, you won’t release an arrow
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08/12/20
- Created a trajectory line coming off the bow
- Made arrows fade away after colliding
- Created git repository to keep all project files backed up on github (Don’t wait to do this! Should’ve been done on day 1)
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08/14/20
- Added physics and collider to player
- Allow you to face and move left/right with the A and D keys + updated bow controls to match
- Created left/right movement while aiming + updated bow controls to match
- Created mouse drag line for development use
- Created waterline
- Made it so the bow resets to it’s default position if you haven’t used the bow for over 2 seconds
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08/15/20
- Updated Player sprite in Photoshop
- Obtained Asesprite
- Created walk animation
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08/16/20
- Created  bow walk, bow equip, and bow unequip animations
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