Dawn of a new day.

Okay, so I’m going to start posting more often, if anyone cares.

Considering an adventure game is going to take lots of content, ie backgrounds, animation, sound, and music, i’m going to at least attempt to be a bit versed in a few things. If I get to a point where you can see how the finished game will be, and I end up making a bit of money later I might hire out. Until then, I need to do everything myself. So I sort of instituted a plan.

Firstly is art. When I was a kid I used to have some aspirations of becoming a Disney animator. Of course back then all I could do is copy Disney cartoon characters out of books and things. Come 16 years later and that’s still really all I can do. I need to learn drawing. I mean really learn to draw. I probably need to get some schooling, but money is scarce for me and I’m pretty much nervous around anyone I don’t know. However we have these two wonderful things called the library and the internet. So I’m going to soak up what I can off of online drawing courses/tutorials and maybe even a few library books.

Furthermore, I do have a graphics tablet and since paper is sort of a hassle (you have to draw, then scan then animate, and find a place to keep all that paper), I’ve decided to go digital and forgo the paper. Maybe sometime in the future when I wax nostalgic, I can go buy myself some paper and do it old school, but until I get more room, more money, and more time, the graphics tablet is the way to go.

Next up, we have — cartoon characters. Well I used to could copy cartoon characters, but in order to draw like the classics, one must study the classics. To that end i’m going to be pulling out my dvd’s, freezing frames and copying pictures (on the tablet I might add).

Finally we have animation itself. I’m sort of a fan of animation. Not really a die-hard fan that has every single cartoon known to man, but I enjoy classic cartoons from the 40’s and 50’s. (some before, some after). It’s a natural fit.

See when I build Enchanted Lands it’s going to be a 2d cel-style animated point’n'click adventure game. It’s going to take a lot of animation, and I don’t have any money to hire anyone to animate for me. So for the time being it’s me.

I decided every Monday and Wednesday I would learn each of these 3 things, 1 hour each. The rest of the day could be spent working on my game.

This comes to the other side, audio, that is music and sound. Well for the time being music. I’ve got an acoustic guitar which I can’t really play, and an electronic keyboard (and old yamaha portatone which like over 10 years old), which I’ve never really played. So I decided I spend an hour on guitar, an hour on keyboard, and an hour learning music theory. Firstly though I’m just going to learn to read sheet music, and see where I want to go from there.

So the music thing is Tuesdays and Thursdays. This leaves me with Friday, for which I’ll allow myself to play 3 hours of games :-)

So today I was spending time installing programs mostly. Since I have no money I’m using some free art programs like Gimp - http://www.gimp.org/ — Pixia - http://park18.wakwak.com/%7Epixia/ — and Artweaver - http://www.artweaver.de/index.php?en_version

Pixia is a graphics editing program, and art weaver is a natural media paint program. (like Painter).

For animation I’ve been looking at Pencil — http://www.les-stooges.org/pascal/pencil/index.php

Also a good friend online who goes by the name of DrPetter ( http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/hp/index.html ) created a program called celsynth, which allows me to use a tablet to draw frames and animate them. Pretty simple program, but does what I need it to. (You can’t find celsynth unless you go into the forums and look under general feedback)

Well let’s hope tomorrow I can get setup to learn music as well. Should be fun.

Keith Weatherby II

2 Responses to “Dawn of a new day.”

  1. Stickman Says:

    Keep up the good work! The really hard thing is to make the adventure game exciting and funny. I recommend you finding midi music on internet that’s in the public domain as inspiration. Perhaps you could create a storyboard demo of the game first, and then add nicer graphics later? I would love to see an adventure game with traditional animation style!

  2. GBGames Says:

    Good luck! As for learning to draw, I’m sure you can pick up more than a few tricks just by reading about it. After all, whether someone tells you how to do it or you read it from a book, you’ll learn by doing, so who cares how you found out HOW to do, right?

    GameDev.net had an article on pixel art. It may be useful to read through and try the exercises. While you may not have Photoshop, I’m sure the GIMP will be more than enough, plus you’ll learn how similar or different the two applications are.