June 7th weekly update! Paradigm shift (B I G post)

Hey gang,

Sorry for the low amount of posts lately. Have had a lot of things to do recently and I've been kinda scatterbrained on things so I have a lot of wip stuff but not much finished. So I've learned my lesson on that lol I'll try to focus more on one thing so I can get things done and out to yall sooner.  I also always get in my head a bit when I miss a post date or stop posting consistently and always feel the need to have a huge amount of content the next post to make up for it. I'll try to be better about that and just post things when I can and take the pressure off so I can just get things out to you guys when I can. Anyway let's break down what I've been up to. This is gonna be a LONG ass post since there's a lot on my mind, but hopefully it lets you all know what my plans going forward will be.

GAMES

So like I've mentioned before I've been learning about how important resolution in games are, especially pixel games, and how I can apply that knowledge to the games I'm making. Basically since I didn't have a hard resolution set outside of the aspect ratio and no pixel snapping grid, the graphics in the game could look a lot different that the way I've intended them to. I've been going over some solutions to this. In Unity, there's some ways to snap to a pixel grid and limit the resolution that I've been applying, and like before, I've changed the game's resolutions to be 16:9 ratios that scale to 1080 which have made all the images scale the way I've wanted them to, but like with everything else the change in resolution has provided some problems too.

For Getter Graffiti especially, I'm concerned that forcing the camera to move by pixel might make things a bit too hard to see in motion, but honestly I guess that problem might exist regardless of how the camera is reading things in. I'll mess around with the environment effects to try and make things a bit more visually clear. The other problem is how I'm going to do the CGs or more detailed pics. Since the new resolution I'd be using for GG is 384 x 2166, I'm debating how I'd do them since I couldn't do regularly drawn images, but can't really just pixel them out like my other stuff since it's a really big size for pixel art relatively speaking. I was thinking that I might just draw them out on a 384x 216 canvas on my tablet and lay everything out, then use Aesprite to do small fixes here and there. It might still take  a while, but it's probably the best solution. I'll mess around with it and see how I like the process. I also bought an app the other day that can be used to turn large resolution drawing into low res pixel art like pieces that might give me an advantage when making these, but I'll have to mess around with it a bit to see if I can really use it. You can find it here.

Since I primarily use pixel art for my games, I've also start to think that Unity might not be the best engine dfor me to use. I've used Unity as a main engine for all my projects for about 3ish years now, but since it's mainly a 3D engine, it's not always suited best for my needs. I also never really tried any other engine, so I figured it might be an alright time to try a few new things while I still can. Mainly I wanted to try out the Godot engine, which I've been hearing good things about. I haven't really sat down with it that much, but over the next week or so, I plan to try it out a bit a maybe make a small project since I'm still trying to make sure I understand pixel resolution, game scaling, and other nuances that come with pixel art games. I'll still most likely use Unity to finish Getter Graffiti, but since Renapet is still very early in it's conception and I'll have to redo it anyway, I might make it in Godot, if I can find some goo resources and get a good feel for the engine. REally it will just come down to which engine I think I can get the most work done in quickly and Unity has always been a bit of a slog when trying to get things right, so we'll see how things turn out with Godot.

PIXEL ART

I've been doing a lot of pixel art in between things, both for games and for practice/ fan art. A lot of it is still wip, but hopefully it'll whet your guy's appetite until I can wrap things up.

 ^ some more Getter Graffiti Sprays. Still trying to get a few of these out each week. Need to polish some of these to be more "graffiti" like. Let me know what you think of them so far.

Also finished the Sprint Cop's idle animation. Will be working on the sprint animation and the h-scene too in the upcoming days.

Another wip of Rena's idle animation for the beat-em-up portion of the game. Honestly I'm not sure if I'll stick with it. I feel like the 12 frame count make it feel a "sticky" for a lack of a better word and if I look at it long enough its almost as if the animation changes speed or hangs up at places. Idk, maybe it's just my imagination but let me know what you guys think of it so far! 

Rena tijob scene. I wanted some scenes where Rena might interact with other digimon or NPCs in some non hostile parts of the beat em up game ( specifically resting places like a bar or club where Rena can have sex to gain money at the cost of building up lust or something like that). There's still a bit I need to fix with it (Rena's tail color at the tip), but let me know if you guys like scenes like this. Trying to not have too many ass focused animations haha

Still plugging away at the Dark Magician Girls anim. It's actually almost done outside of some secondary movement and some fixing. at first it was going to be a simple loop, but I wanted to try to make my animations a bit more lasting/ memorable, so I added some more stuff to it that will hopefully make it more interesting to you guys. I'll try to have it out by next week if everything goes well. 

A little pic I did of a friend's OC for morning practice. It was used just to show that you don't need to make pixel art all that big or have a lot of colors to get a good amount of detail. 

That D.va sex arcade machine animation that I posted before is coming along smoothly. This a wip gif of one of the loops for it so it still needs some tweaking, but I still wanted to show you guys the progress I've made on it so far. I have quite a bit planned for it, so it might take a while, but I hope you guys look forward to it!

A super wip shot of the Lucina twerk animation I started about 2 days ago. If you're wondering why she has short hair, it's because I wanted to do 2 versions, one with long hair, and one with short hair (when she was pretending to be Marth) As you can tell it's still super rough and definitely needs to have the colors tweaked, but  I'll be working on it from time to time. It'll be in the same style as the other hip shake animations I've made. When I get done making a bunch of these I want to make a big post of them all together haha

Also just as a side note, I think I'm haphazard when it comes to my animation and usually don't have a good story board or key frames laid out before I start animating and just adjust things frame by frame as needed. So for future animations I'm going to try and plan them out more and hopefully this will take a lot of guesswork out of the equation and allow me to get things done quicker.

ARTWORK

I also found some time to work on more paintings. I want to keep practicing and eventually start doing some comics too once I'm more situated in life an projects since I think they will take quite a bit of time (honestly probably nowhere near as much time as making games) but I hope you guys till enjoy them. I know most of the people that follow me probably want pixel art the most, but I want to be able to deliver on this front as well so I'm going to keep at it and keep improving.

Had a little idea of BOTW Zelda getting her cheeks spread and wanted to convey it in a sketch haha I tried a different style of coloring since I think my old method takes a bit too long. Let me know what you guys think of it. 

A wip Widowmaker colored sketch. Usually it takes me too long to do lines so I'm looking at other was of going about doing them since I know a lot of artists that don't use super solid lines and instead let the paint and color do the work. I'll try to get this wrapped up by next week. 

another little idea I had of a Dragon Quest 3 party featuring Pokemon and of course Renamon haha ( she claims to be a Pikachu lol) I actually was thinking of making Pikachu the hero character but felt it'd be too easy, plus I have a real soft spot for Mega Loppuny so I felt she fit the role fine. She was originally going to be the monk, but since the party size is limited to 4 and you have to have a hero in your party, I figured I try to keep it somewhat accurate to the game haha

Some more sketches I did. Mostly of some Viera from Final Fantasy Tactics advance. Might make a small collection of the classes if I get the time. 

 PLANS

So I've been juggling a lot of things and I think that's what mostly been burnign me out on things so I'm going to try and limit myself more going into the future. Plus it's already Thursday so I won't have much time until the next post. But anyway, I want to work on:

- Dark Magician Girls anim
- Godot side project
- WidowMaker piece
- Cleaning up some stuff for GG and Renapet.

Well that's  it for now. Thanks for being patient with me while I figure all this stuff out haha see you next week!