I put the basic gameplay together quickly enough, let's face it it's not exactly taxing, but then came the difficult bit. The graphics. Now I'm no Picasso, though there have been a few Sunday mornings in my younger days where my bedroom could have passed for a Tracey Emin, so I did what any aspiring game developer with no artistic talent would do and googled "free game assets". Clearly, being from Yorkshire, I wasn't going to pay for some proper stuff, that would be madness.
I trawled through the search results and came across 2 sites in particular that had some graphics I could use. https://opengameart.org and https://itch.io. Don't get me wrong, some of the stuff on there looks like it's been designed by a 3 year old after too many E's, numbers that is, but a lot of it is half decent and some of the best is free to use with some sort of attribution.
I picked what I though was a suitable graphic set for my main character and set about plugging it in to my gameplay. I won't share which it was because I'd have to admit it was actually better than the character I ended up with but there is a reason for that, which I'll cover later.
It's only been a couple of days since I actually started writing the game and already I'm getting the kids to test and putting together the menu and between level scenes. One of the personality disorders I do seem afflicted with is obsession. My wife will testify that when something new grabs my attention it can consume me entirely for a while before my interest inevitably starts to wane. Cycling was one such obsession. Had to have a good bike, lycra, special shoes, special pedals etc etc and be out on the road feeling like Bradley Wiggins but looking more like Boris Johnson. The bike's hung on the wall in the garage at the moment. Bet the tyres are flat.
I don't personally think it's all that unusual to have brief obsessions but, whatever, the point is I can quite easily shut myself away for hours and hours and focus exclusively, often to the detriment of those around me, and I'm very fortunate to have someone who can foster an environment that allows me to do that.
Labels: ambition, art, bucket list, composition, computer, cycling, game development, graphics