Finished White Outlines (NEVER DOING THIS AGAIN!!)

     The time consuming process of outlining each up-scaled sprite is finally over. I am ready to cut out each sprite box and drag them all into Unity. It's a big relief to be done drawing everything and soon I'll be making code that turns these pixel monsters into living creatures. Like I've mentioned before, I don't plan on ever ding this stuff again. I'll keep my sprites small, manageable, and outline-free. I can focus more on color contrasting and non-black borders to make things stick out.

Wishful Thinking For My App Making Career

     Something that haunts me daily is the fact that I'm not making money off my hours of work and won't be for quite a bit longer. I see it as a long-term investment where working somewhere part-time will get me hundreds of dollars in the short-term at the price of misery on top of stress from working on my indie games. Working around the clock on my games multiplies the rate at which I'm improving which could get me to the point of creating something fantastic sooner, allowing me to make a living right after graduation.

White Outlines Are Not Finished

     There's a big time consuming thing I forgot to do for some of the new enemies and that's the white outline that helps them stick out from the background and gives that Paper Mario feel. At first it seemed like a great idea that was easy to pull off. To make it easier I even tried finding Gimp plugins that did it for me. Unfortunately the only way to get a clean looking outline is to do it by hand in MS Paint after upscaling the sprites to 300% size. Without these steps the outline will look too thick or the sprites will be blurry.

    I really dislike the effect now. Sprites take twice as long to finish this way, they consume 3 times the memory when I make them this big, some people have told me the outlines look distracting (characters look as if they're on another plane of existence), and drawing these outlines all day isn't quite as fun as making the sprites themselves.

     With the way I have things coded and animations set up, getting rid of the outlines and just being done with this would do more harm than good, delaying the game further. I simply have to finish what I started, which could take a day or too. So I'm not quite ready to import all the enemies just yet.
   

Scrapped: Cutting Corners On Enemy Designs

     To make things easier on myself I took a few (major) shortcuts on the project. The latest of which are the final enemy and boss designs. I made it so that they require fewer animation frames, simplified boss designs down to simple central spheres, and some enemies can't face certain directions. All these are done for the sake of time (and preserving game memory). With all this being done, I can get the game out faster and start from scratch with my mistakes behind me. It's all part of the learning process.

    In terms of entertainment, they get the job done behavior wise. I wish I had another year to flesh out all the crazy ideas I came up with originally, but those will have to wait until senior year. At this point I still don't know what I'm doing but I'm getting close to becoming knowledgeable.