The Musician Search Ends

     The dust has settled and I have finally found the help I've been looking for. Stuntddude and Ai-shi-ter-u will be helping me out on the audio side of things for my upcoming RPG. I had them send me a test track each to see if they can get the feel down and produce something in a reasonable time. I was surprised when I got a sample track back the very next time I checked my email. It only took Ai-shi-ter-u 2 hours to make and sounded like a fantastic start!

     I can finally relax knowing that I'm in good hands on that side of things. I can even look forward to growing alongside someone else and having us all climb to ever greater heights. Like I said, 100% of the OST profit will go to the composers as payment, and when I become financially stable these guys will be the first ones I go to with payment upfront in addition to OST sales.

     You can find to those guys on SoundCloud to listen to stuff they made before.

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.