I'm back to work at the Gumdrop project. This time it wasn't burnout. I was actually pretty steady in progress until some psychiatric medication became unavailable to me. It took about seven weeks to get that corrected and I just wasn't able to create or communicate with anyone until a few days ago when everything was finally sorted out.
So what to do now? My first look at Gumdrop with fresh eyes led me to want to redo everything. But after a couple days I think I can resist the urge and make this version more complete first. I sketched out some idle animations in the style I'm imagining for version 3. The shading is the biggest difference but with Aseprite that part can actually go pretty quick.
It's hard to gauge community interest too much, but I have a hunch a greater variety of actions for the template & characters would do the most good at the moment. I have a few essentials I think should be covered and a few fun things I was already working on when I had my involuntary vacation.
Of the essentials I think we need :
Push & Pull for Large Objects
Lift, Carry, & Toss Medium Objects
Throw Small Objects / Items
Dodge
General Use for Doors, Switches, or Chests
So there's 8 animations in 3 directions which need to be knocked out. I'll be getting the costume layers aligned as I go which will slow things down a bit, though they'll mostly be recycled frames.
I've heard some requests for ranged attacks, and while I expect throwing to serve that purpose for the most part , there are a few animations I developed but never posted here on itch :
I'm not sure the audience I have so far would be excited for this (comment if you are!), but I'd really like Gumdrop to be viable for science fiction and modern settings. For what its worth if these are ever released they'd be fine for crossbows.
As far as tile sets, if I return to them in the immediate future they're going to be functional but won't permanently define the house style for Gumdrop Galaxy. I hope this takes off some of the pressure which paralyzed me for so much of last fall.
That about sums it up. Tonight I'll be continuing work on push and pull animations
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Since this post already has stuff I won't get around to anytime soon. Here's a little femme concept I did to unwind after I wrapped up the push animations.
I also believe you should resist the urge to redo stuff and work on completing your set. There are many 2d top down kits on itch.io, and the most popular ones seem to have huge amount of content.
The modern firearms may be fitting the clothes styles you have done so far, and they may prove useful for a zombie game.
Yeah I'm going to remind myself that another revision is coming eventually and hopefully that will let me ease up on the toxic perfectionism and be more efficient with my time.
Yeah, guns would be nice for horror. It would be nice to get into the most popular genre on this site. Horror makes a good use case for my normal maps. Plus these push/pull animations remix into zombie walks really easy...
Okay got to get back to work before I daydream about it too much, thanks for the feedback.
You have normal maps as well? I somehow missed that info, very nice feature!
Looks cool! Is it me, or are these normal maps in a different scale that your sprite? The shadows seems smoother than your pixel art.
I guess there are a number of things that cause that. The most intended part of the effect is that I use anti-aliasing filter and sometimes an overlay of 0.5px blurred mid-tone masks on the sprite sheets before having GIMP generate the map. Since they're trying to generate for model textures they treat everything like a bump, but all it takes to get a standing sprite effect like this is to apply a convex curve on the green channel and presto the light goes behind the character / prop
I did not get the meaning of the second sentence. But that's cool! B)