In short, game development is hard (Patreon)

Hard? Yes. Too hard? Maybe. Burned out? At the moment...

This post is long and meandering. I'm trying to put to words the sheer difficulty of this animation feature; I'm coming at the end of two months with a lot of work put in, but a lot of nothing of viable note coming out: a lot of late nights, long weekends, sporadic lunch-time tweaks, and drowsiness feels a bit wasted. I want to give a progress report at least, so that you understand why it's taking so long, and to help give context to this.

What'd you do, RostalPoo?

It's complicated, but here goes...

I made limb visuals share the same data format, so that all the visible limbs in the game had a consistent data structure. That way, I could make them into animation frames and animate them while keeping the body connected. Before that, inventory avatar limbs and world avatar limbs had different classes and prefabs (complicated Unity3D talk). I even redid the tool for viewing them so I can edit the new data structure to not go insane (too late!)

I then ported all 116 preexisting assets to the new data format. This time not by hand! Yeah, I didn't realize there were 116 limb assets either til I wrote and ran the script to port them. I would have given up if I did this by hand (like I did last time)!

I made another new object library to handle the new data. This is just something nerdy that loads a bunch of files into the game so that I can fetch them by name. 116 assets needed to show up in the game, and this is how I do it.

I drew a walking animation... I didn't get far, but... I tried!

And I updated my freaky visual tool to let me load limbs on the fly and spin the character around. If I had more frames this thing would really look cursed!

Anyways, it's... a lot of work, but not a lot of value... yet.

Sadly, it feels like Cursed Game has been in a pattern of pushing really hard, taking some time off from my day job to crunch, and then I walk away with a crazy update. It's not healthy or sustainable, but in short bursts I can tolerate it. I like game jams for that reason. I enjoy how much I can pinch out when it goes well. This time not so much...

I still think animations are important to make a game feel like a game, and the last poll definitely hammers home its coolness. I also managed to put in a lot of good back-end work that will help carry this. It's just, y'know... it's not progressing well, or sustainable...

One character -> seven limb assets -> four x seven angle views -> 28 x 4 frames of walking -> 112 distinct images. Per. Character.

It's just ballooned too far.

I'm going to make a poll around next steps, but I need to take some time to think over it. Thank you all for being patient with me.