Posted January 13, 2023 by Robocelot
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