Like the title says….I’m struggling hard, with myself mostly. I thought I knew what I was getting myself into, considering I had done something similar before, but I completely underestimated 1. how much real life can get into your way (as in, things from outside you have no control over) and 2. how freaking hard it is, to every day, sit down at home and work!
It’s almost as if I forgot all the things I had learned the past years, treating it as if this was something completely different from all these ludum dares and trying to learn as much as I could and honestly it isn’t! But I made it to seem different, I started worrying so much again…about everything…I felt like paralyzed, thinking about all those things I don’t know how to do, about all the things that could possibly go wrong…I’m pretty sure that this “relapse” into old self also happened, because…well…I’m not really trained in using my relatively new skills and because I had to reflect a lot in the past months, also partly due to making the Business Plan, on what my skills and prospects are etc.
And I really really struggle to think good of myself.
All this relapsing, is also the reason why I didn’t really update my blog for a (in my opinion too long) while. I was just so frustrated and embarrassed, that I didn’t get where I wanted to be with the time I was supposed to have to work fulltime on my game, that I really felt uncomfortable even thinking about writing a blogpost….I know it’s silly, because in the first place, this blog is for me, to show myself how much and what I have done, the place where I can post anything and it has proven again and again that I’m not failing, but that my perspective is scewed.
I managed to get a bit of a foothold again, from all this tumbling around in my anxieties, so that’s why there IS a blogpost now….because this is what it’s for, to help me through good and bad times (hah! that sounds as if I’m married with my blog harhar).
We have a complicated relationship ;D
Oh well…so let’s get to the stuff I did get done, despite seemingly wasting a lot of time worrying the shit out of myself…>.<
Since my last blogpost I tested out various things, from grass placement on unity terrain (with own texture) to trying to figure out how to make everything move in wind, but I sadly need to put that on backlog for now, because there were problems with the shaders and my custom tree models 
I also tried to figure out how to make clouds fitting to the style of my game (stylized and simple) I’m thinking I want to make a shader for that too and probably stick to 3D clouds, which I can then rearrange, resize and recolor for weather effects 🙂 luckily I only mostly see them from the bottom, but the 3D has the advantage of throwing shadows on the ground and they are easy to make in Blender.
(the fern is not from me, was just a sample from AFS asset)
I also tried myself on a desert texture, which works surprisingly well in closeup 🙂
from the top it looks like smoothed diamond shapes XD
then I was also working on updating the Critter models and experimented with making the eye shape in 3D, while it would mean less cartoony expressions, I do think it will add a lot in terms of “lifelyness” and well…plasticity. I always felt like their faces were a bit too flat ^^ and wasn’t really liking the face plane I had 😮
Also I needed to rig them for animation purposes and prepare them to have switchable body parts (don’t have screen for all of them yet, will post some later when I got more body parts and textures ready)
Also, I wanted to try out the 3D eyes, because I liked the very much 3D eyes look I went for on my business cards 🙂 it made them look a lot more alien though 😮
And has a little bit of a fiendish look to it I think, especially with that red eyeframe XD
(ignore the hair floating XD)
I for some reason also got an urge to fix the berry bush spawn, so I can test the critters wherever without them starving and gameover 😀
(although I solved that later on by programming my very first cheating tools XD)
and another thing I was working on, is the promo art, which I will likely use on all my main social media sites, until I have something better. And just today I noticed that all this time I have drawn my own critters wrong lol
Good thing that comes out of it though is, I will definitely add the “mistake” as an option, to get as a mutation (the left picture) And it made me more aware of it, that when I implement the pattern system for Critters that I need to pay attention to how many layers I will need and in which order, since with the original pattern I didn’t just go darker with each iterations of detail on them, which seemed to be the intuitive thing when I was drawing them (how did I even come up with that pattern at the ludum dare?XD)
oh and…I decided “ears” will be a thing 😀
While I was researching a bit more about cat like animals for the proportions of critters, I actually found the “natural” form of critters in our world, they are called “marbled cat” and they have their ears pretty low on their heads, which *coughs* I can use as an excuse why I forgot them in the first place XD But now, the starting Critters version will have no ears, but they can mutate some 🙂 and it’s not just cat ears. In general, when I thought of critters, I actually always had the idea in my mind that they are a very adaptive species, that they can have scales, long fur, short fur, all the colors of the rainbow and body parts from all kinds of animals, but that their main body shape pretty much stays the same 🙂 and cats are just the “closest” appearance wise. Not to mention, that they eat fruits, nuts and mushrooms XD
They are like cat-squirrel-bears or something.
Well enough for now 🙂 I shall update again ^^ (hopefully not so long from now)
fartoindie 