I’m frustrated with being mediocre at art and depending on others. If I’m going to be successful as a game developer and jack-of-all-trades kind of guy, I need to improve my art skills. That’s why this month, art was my primary focus. These are some of the pieces I’m most proud of:

My primary mode of improving at art is by doing pixel dailies. Pixel dailies is a daily pixel art challenge that, much like game jams, provides a theme and a time restriction (24h). The response to your submission tweets is also a great way to get feedback on your work, although like counts shouldn’t be the end-all, be-all. Just putting something out there is itself enough.

Game Development

On the game development side, I tinkered with an expanded version of Into the Deep Web. However, I soon ran into many core issues that can best be summarized as: beginning a project with too many unknowns. It is a dangerous assumption to think you will figure things out along the way, because eventually those issues will surface and you’ll be in a predicament.

(This is a gif of the random event screen, which uses a random dither technique that I learned from Remy Devaux in his blog post here.)

YouTube

On the youtube side, I released a tutorial on turn-based combat. It’s my longest tutorial yet (clocking in at 30 minutes) but I think it contains some great techniques for handling turn-based systems without using a finite state machine.

Productivity

I read Getting Things Done by David Allen and highly recommend this book to anyone who feels like they need a better way to organize their work. The biggest takeaway is to externalize all your tasks. If you have something to do, write it down. Don’t leave it in your head. If it stays in your head, you might a) forget it, or b) let it add to your daily stress of things you have to remember to do, which impedes your ability to do other things.

Personal

I worked from Mexico City this month and consider it to be a great place to work remotely and enjoy life. It’s cheap, the weather is perfect (in February), the food is amazing, and there are plenty of activities to do. I would recommend staying here for a long period of time (1 month+) because there is so much to do and it feels like the kind of place you could settle into.

Thanks for checking out my first ever blog post! I hope to do these updates each month. Let me know what you found interesting or if there’s anything in particular you’d like to hear more about.

Cheers and have a wonderful day wherever you are!

Jon

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Pixel Art Journey