AutumMmmm!

 

The dark is drawing in earlier, there’s a slight chill, and the morning air feels crisp. Think of the Lo-fi Study Beats girl with chunky cardigans and woolly socks and you’re in my sweet spot, it’s almost like I’m not sure what to do with myself for the rest of the year. As always I have a to-do list that only an immortal could complete but let me catch you up on some of the most exciting stuff. (I’m not going to go on about gardening this time, I’ll save that for it’s own post! 😀)

Medium Cat Games

I’m currently working on two projects: a Medium Cat style space Invaders and a pre-adventure game. The plan has always been to get these into finished playable demos that I can put onto itch.io but recently I realised I’d fallen into that trap of not knowing when to stop. Some time away from working on my games helped me have a little brainwave. Both games are about 80% of the way there and I’ve probably already done the hardest bit, I was just faffing and adding more unnecessary jobs for myself. Over the past few days, I’ve opened up both games and drawn up a clear M.V.P. and already I’m writing useful code. I think sometimes you just have to remind yourself that you’ve actually done most of the work and you need to focus on delivering. Stop growing it into unachievable stuff and just deliver, deliver, deliver! So yeah, cool Medium Cat games coming to itch.io soon(ish)!

Verran Games / Video Editing

My boyfriend, Matt, has been working on games for many years. He’s already quite established with ‘Verran Games’ and has released a few titles on Steam. He recently ported ‘qrth-phyl’ to the Nintendo Switch and so I’ve been experimenting with a bit of promotion. I spent a few weekends creating videos for tiktok, youtube, twitter and instagram and have mapped out a bit of a sales schedule. It’s all very bare bones and there’s heaps more to be done but it’s really nice to see something that I’ve accomplished. It may be serendipity but he has made a few sales since I did all this, so (hopefully) watch this space!

Actually, I can go a bit more into this video editing lark (feel free to skip this section if the mention of frame rates sends you to sleep). The majority of game footage captured on the PC is 60FPS, so you can reduce that nicely to 30FPS, but the majority of free stock footage is 25FPS so I have to make a choice as to whether the game or the stock footage is jerky. One benefit to this is that I have slowed the game footage down a lot on some of the videos and it actually works really well.

Halloween

Last year I made a little comic book to give out to the trick or treaters. I made a little fortune teller and some stickers too. I definitely made way too many, I don’t know how many kids I was expecting! Anyway, I’d quite like to do it again this year. It was really nice getting stuck into a relatively small, achievable task whilst watching Halloween films. I have some more films lined up so it seems like it might be a new tradition of mine. I’m not sure whether to make another comic? I’d like to make another paper-craft kinda thing. Maybe some origami? Who knows.

Keep on Learning

It’s a bit of a slog at times but I’m really trying my best to keep on marching onward with my learning. I’ve found a mixture of training videos and reading books works best. Currently I’m focusing on The Cherno, C++ in 21 days, 3-D Computer Graphics and the OpenGL Red Book. Working on programming all week makes it kinda hard to fit any heavy thinking in the rest of the time but I figure every hour is another hour.

Inktober

Every year I take part in inktober and every year I give up after the 6th or 7th day. This year I'm having another go, I've made it to day 5 already. Check out my instagram if you're keen.