These illustrations, which were supposed to take a couple of weeks, ended up taking somewhere in the region of 3 months. This sucks! I’m quite happy with how these have turned out, but I can’t help but extrapolate this work rate out and imagine how long it would take to actually finish the project if it takes me this long to make a few relatively minor (in the greater scheme of things) components.
To a certain extent it’s unavoidable. These illustrations do contain a certain amount of detail, and I can only do so much, work so efficiently, and it does take a fair while just to put this detail in. Fine. However, a lot of the time I spent working on this was spent not working on it – that is to say, I would quickly get overwhelmed with details, possibilities, considerations, and only be able to work on it for a few minutes at a time, only be able to make some small amount of progress, before having to take a break and distract myself.
It was worst with the huge illustration I posted last month, but at no point was it not a problem. Well, I’m looking into ADD treatments now, and I’m hoping those will help – but, regardless, I’m done with illustrations for the time being.
Now I have to create the intro by artfully arranging them onto a timeline. I don’t expect this to take much time to implement except that I’ll also need to create some new art assets to make it work. Maybe a week or two, but I don’t want to guess too confidently under those circumstances. With that, maybe some sound and music tweaks, and a couple of simple special effects, the intro to the game will be basically done. Is that a big deal? I don’t know! It’s the smallest and in some ways least interesting part of the game, but it’s still a part of the game, and if it’s done then, well, part of the game Exists, in a concrete way – not as a rough sketch, a prototype, not as a wireframe, but as something finished (or close to it). It’s still so incredibly far from a complete game, and I’ve spent so much more time than I think I needed to to get to this point, but…
It’s a start.
