I have been putting a lot of time into improving my drawing and illustration skills. It was a need to improve and "see improvement". The other day I wasn't particularly happy with how much time it was taking or how it turned out, or how I had to stop drawing because of my hand not healing right. So I suffer through it I guess and I have been finding a style for my work.

I think you know that feeling of half-through dropping something because you felt you couldn’t make it look good. I’m feeling much better about it, I'm able to draw for longer but drawing is still causing my finger to stiffen and hurts when I bend it, so I’ve been trying to rest when I can.

I will be working on the Nano reno jam. it'll be expanding on the writing challenge that I am working on currently so that I can flesh out those characters and a story for it.

You can find the jam page here to find out more info:

https://itch.io/jam/nanoreno-2022/communityitch.io

Some of the goals will focus on:

1. creating a set of characters or storyline to create a visual novel/setting from the characters and the world building exercises I have been working on throughout the last year*.*
2. I won’t be joining a group for the game jam as I will be picky on the development and want to prioritise writing and improving my 2d illustration over the development of gameplay.
3. If people are interested in the project I will outsource some of the music and voice acting required for the game or even some of the concepts for the story and characters.
4. I know my friends wants to help with it for the voice acting and music side of things. Then there is others that might be interested in the project as well but I understand another game jam is a lot of pressure after just getting over the first one.
5. For the development of the visual novel I won’t be planning any game elements to start with as I think this might detract from the experience of the game jam, making a narrative game.
6. In the future I will keep an open mind about Bevy development to create some of the tooling needed that will help with creating shared worlds. Initially however I will be taking a break from Bevy and focus on prototyping the visual novel game in Unity and try my hand at creating animations in Live2D and a feature video.
7. With how the previous game jam turned out we will be looking at continuing that project on the side and possibly having a group to keep it updated with new updates. As my goal is to learn the Bevy game engine development, I don’t want to prioritize making games in Unity much so it might be necessary to attempt a recreation of the visual novel and port it from Unity to Bevy as an experiment after the game jam has finished.

Considerations:

Backgrounds: For the most part it's just having good reference at hand, like anime is based 1-to-1 on real life photos or scenes so a similar rotoscoping process can be used for backgrounds. Stuff set in a modern setting is always pretty much transferred to something that is more appealing as anime. I am starting to use the "shift" key more often for like weapons and objects that are difficult to draw straight edges consistently on and I think getting use to that as a habit may help me improve at doing backgrounds. I will take process-screenshots and share. It's been a while since I did a visual novel background, I'm feeling pretty nervous.

I will prioritize making the game as HD art instead of pixel art due to the accessibility of higher fidelity artwork as apposed to pixel art which can be quite limiting. If later on I decided I want to do the game in pixel art and can down-res the graphics to scale to a lower resolution output if needed.

I'm kind of divided between pixel art and full-rendered character and background illustrations as I don't have a preference one way or the other.

My heart was already set on making Fairfan an original character of 'The Hunt'. I think wanting her to be in the card game from the bevy jam was my attempt at making a multiverse or spinoffs. A very early attempt. If I want to create the world that she is a part of as a visual novel I am thinking of doing that as a side story with a word count limit to target for around 50,000 words.

When I do pixel art you'll start to see that I do have a particular style or aesthetic that I like, but I think with fairfan it was difficult for me to imagine what the sprite art might look like until I actually created a concept art, instead of scaling up, I tend to scale down instead which is not really an efficient workflow for pixel art. For the visual novel I don't really want to do any pixel art, it's not going to have the same feeling that I want it to have as a full hd rendered game, that's not to say that gameplay can't be pixel art, but specifically for the visual novel I would rather make it as illustrated as possible.

Here is the progress on the Bevy Game Jam Card Battler Page

Our ragtag group made a game, proud to be part of the first bevy jam event. It was great forming a team with you all, let's have a productive year of bevy development :sunglasses: :crab: Feel free to rate, rough around the edges but it's almost there.

Known bug: "I can click one of the 3 cards at the start but can't seem to do anything else"

The interaction for the buttons isn't setup yet that's why, only the cards are interactable at the start, we will have an update next week to improve it. In the words of our programmer: "I want to do the game justice". We are happy with it regardless.