01-24-2016, 05:00 AM
Yup, half a year doesn't seem like that long a time frame once you divide it into all these little tasks.
I like the idea of making this a kind of journal, but I don't think I'll update it more often than once every other week. It's much easier for me to focus when I don't feel like I have to keep blogging about what kind of progress I'm making all the time. Plus I think that once you've said something about your project it creates a kind of subconscious barrier to making changes. As long as you keep things to yourself you can easily change around what exactly you're trying to do as new things come up without feeling like an idiot for contradicting yourself.
For instance I'm starting to think that it'll be necessary to add descriptions and introspective segments to most of the scenes to even out the pacing and flesh out characters more. I'm aware that'll make it less of a faithful adaptation, but there's no way around it. The thing is that playwrights can leave a good part of bringing characters across to the actors, while sprites are more limited.
In any case, so far I've translated 3/4 of act one, tried implementing the first scene into the engine as a test, made conceptual charactersprites for the people appearing in that first scene, and I've come up with composition ideas for the main backgrounds. I still feel like I'm behind schedule, but oh well. There's only so much I can do in this amount of time without rushing things.
The thing that's giving me the most trouble at the moment is the programming. it's not that it's particularly difficult to understand, but there's a lot of things you need to look up, codes you need to remember, and if you mess up in any way it breaks everything... and I'm doing something as simple and straightforward as a single, linear story. If I had to program in complex choices I'd probably go insane.
If you're wondering what the skies are about, I wanted to figure out how to get across the surreal feel of the world the play is staged in. I figured I'd do it by stylizing the weather, so I tried to come up with an abstract way of portraying what the different weather conditions might look like. The thunderstorm isn't working at all so far, but other than that I'm okay with where it's going.
So yeah, I'm doing all sorts of things in parallel. I thought about approaching this 'one thing at a time' at first, but that would mean that I'd only get around to implementing the majority of the play after I have all of the art assets, so I'd have no good way of judging how many and what kinds I actually need. My plan right now is to program each act once I've translated it, put placeholders for backgrounds and sprites that I don't have and replace them with finished ones on the go.
If the perspective on the backgrounds looks a bit wonky in places so far, it's because I've been eyeballing, so don't worry about that just yet, but if y’all have critique points on the compositions or the values, if the poses of characters don't look right, or if something looks better than the rest and you think I should do more of that, etc. feel free to point it out to me.
I like the idea of making this a kind of journal, but I don't think I'll update it more often than once every other week. It's much easier for me to focus when I don't feel like I have to keep blogging about what kind of progress I'm making all the time. Plus I think that once you've said something about your project it creates a kind of subconscious barrier to making changes. As long as you keep things to yourself you can easily change around what exactly you're trying to do as new things come up without feeling like an idiot for contradicting yourself.
For instance I'm starting to think that it'll be necessary to add descriptions and introspective segments to most of the scenes to even out the pacing and flesh out characters more. I'm aware that'll make it less of a faithful adaptation, but there's no way around it. The thing is that playwrights can leave a good part of bringing characters across to the actors, while sprites are more limited.
In any case, so far I've translated 3/4 of act one, tried implementing the first scene into the engine as a test, made conceptual charactersprites for the people appearing in that first scene, and I've come up with composition ideas for the main backgrounds. I still feel like I'm behind schedule, but oh well. There's only so much I can do in this amount of time without rushing things.
The thing that's giving me the most trouble at the moment is the programming. it's not that it's particularly difficult to understand, but there's a lot of things you need to look up, codes you need to remember, and if you mess up in any way it breaks everything... and I'm doing something as simple and straightforward as a single, linear story. If I had to program in complex choices I'd probably go insane.
If you're wondering what the skies are about, I wanted to figure out how to get across the surreal feel of the world the play is staged in. I figured I'd do it by stylizing the weather, so I tried to come up with an abstract way of portraying what the different weather conditions might look like. The thunderstorm isn't working at all so far, but other than that I'm okay with where it's going.
So yeah, I'm doing all sorts of things in parallel. I thought about approaching this 'one thing at a time' at first, but that would mean that I'd only get around to implementing the majority of the play after I have all of the art assets, so I'd have no good way of judging how many and what kinds I actually need. My plan right now is to program each act once I've translated it, put placeholders for backgrounds and sprites that I don't have and replace them with finished ones on the go.
If the perspective on the backgrounds looks a bit wonky in places so far, it's because I've been eyeballing, so don't worry about that just yet, but if y’all have critique points on the compositions or the values, if the poses of characters don't look right, or if something looks better than the rest and you think I should do more of that, etc. feel free to point it out to me.