This is a postmortem written from Devtober 2019. This post can also be read at the Songs of Myara page on itch.io.
Songs of Myara is a personal project to create a modern MMO that embodies the experience I had as a child playing DOS adventure games, CRPGS, and graphical MUDS. During #devtober I was able to complete an early offline prototype, which I will build on over the winter into a pre-alpha small-scale MMO.
The biggest lesson for me from this #devtober was how to manage multi-tasking. Although at first it was necessary to program, make sprites, and bugtest all in the same day, as the project becomes more elaborate this process must be spread out over several days of weeks. At once point I had to take a whole week off to draw environmental sprites. In order to save time for programming, I opted not to re-draw the player avatar and NPC sprites. I also purchased some portraits assets online (from @misbug and CobraLab), and redrew them in my own style. This was to simulate having a small team, as sprite redrawing was a common practice among early CRPG art teams (according to some postmortems of Westwood Studios).
The original sprites as purchased (bottom), and my cleanups of them (top)
I got a lot of pixel art practice in. I worked my way up from 16x16 item sprites to 128x128 sprites for the large oak and aspens. I am learning a lot about drawing leaves in this process.
Some of the larger trees I had to draw by hand, up to 128x128
I was excited to use October to start using complex shaders on pixel art. This has allowed me to add subtle changes to seasons that dynamically change over the course of a year, sprites that can gain or lose foliage, random autumnal color changing patterns, incremental snow, and more. Unreal Engine is perfectly suited to these effects, although I must continue to focus on optimizing their implementations.
Random leafage amount scalar on pixel art
Another lesson I am learning is how to organize large bodies of research. Most of my research and development logs are publicly organized in the Myaran Development Discord server, which I find useful because it is so accessible and integrated with my daily communications. It is also easy to use as a pinboard, and more suited for sharing than Dropbox. I am still wanting a more comprehensive to-do system, though, and may be shifting to Trello or Hack'n'Plan in the future as needed.
A peek at the Discord pinboards
At this rate of progress, I am aiming to make a small-scale multiplayer release by Christmas.
NPC scripts need to be rewritten, but their implementation is fully prototyped