I've been trying to resist the urge to dive into the comfortable and familiar world of just writing code, as the game is nothing without art.

In that vein, I created a fresh project and copied in some code from the sandbox I showed in the last post (with a bit of tidying up). I'll use this project as the basis for the game from now on.

I've created some extra art, I feel like the bulk of the work over the next few weeks will be just producing artwork.

Most urgently, I wanted something vaguely appropriate to represent the player. The sandbox video just shows a white circle being controlled, which isn't particularly appealing. This was my first stab at what the main character will look like.

I've also been thinking about what levels I want to create, the first being "London". Here we see the boss of the level, alongside some sample background art to represent London.

One thing I need to learn is how scaling works with these sorts of assets - I really want to ensure the pixels look crisp on all devices, so need to play around with scaling and test this on different device types.

This is what the new project looks like:

Process

I've also been battling with a few workflow issues, and have a semi-working process now for creating art, dropping it into the game, and getting videos out of that for showing off here!

My process is currently:

• Create pixel art on the iPad with Pixaki
• Export the art into a CreativeCloud directory on the iPad
• Pick the files up on my windows machine from that directory, and import into the game
• Use OBS Studio to capture my screen for videos/demos
• Use Davinci Resolve to edit those videos as necessary

It's a little long-winded, so I may need to optimise a little, but I'll try and crunch through a bunch of pixel art over the next week or two so I can do a bulk game import and get things looking nice.

Things that are coming up

One thing missing in the new project, is the poo! in the original sandbox version it was literally a gif with a physics modifier. I'm positive there's a better way to do it that'll let me play with things like colour, viscosity (eww) etc, and just feel more fun than dropping the same bit of pixel art everywhere.

I'm also conscious of the need to make the game vaguely difficult, so need to consider health bars, poo level bars etc. All things I may take a stab at as part of the next demo.