A New Jam has Entered the Game

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I need to hold myself accountable, but I'm bad at it. Instead, I make other people hold me accountable, and I do a much better job at sticking to a deadline. School always had an extra element to it that conditioned me to need deadlines and goals. I'm pretty good at that. I'm not so good at seeing a project through from start to finish without something official. I just tend to be content to wander around in the weeds convincing myself that I'm doing something.

I decided to already sign up for another game jam because it caught my eye. I want to be able to make a game that was more heavily focused on the story and I need to sit down and figure out some parts that are proving to be way more of a pain than I expected. A couple ideas I've had are centered around dialogue and I want to learn how to add dialogue and character portraits.

The PIG Squad is hosting a narrative game jam and it's not for another couple weeks, so that seemed like enough time to take care of learning some fundamentals while I also kick back and catch up on some games I've been wanting to play

My daily pixel art practice has taken a back seat, but it was beginning to feel like I was just drawing for the sake of drawing, and what I'd really like to do, is be good at drawing assets that I can add to a game. This week I was focused on trying to do some of the animation to give a little more life to BBBB. I've been dreading try to figure out how to begin animating because previous attempts took some time to make the smallest bit of progress.

Something I watched or read suggested not to squish down your sprite when you're animating for a game. Makes sense when you're concerned about giving the player fewer distractions when your game is concerned with timing. I'm a little concerned about fine tuning the timing and how to account for cutting a jump short. At least I haven't invested a significant amount of time into the animations. Kinda like the tilemaps, I'm not out a lot time, but I'd like them to look a little more cleaned up.

The distractions for the weekend included Diablo 4 and Final Fantasy 16. The past week was exhausting so I was falling asleep trying to play anything. I kinda suspect another player in Diablo4 realized I had fallen asleep and just said "Hello," which jolted me awake because I had my headphones on and it sounded so close. Even my sorceress probably telegraphed clearly that I was trying to figure out when I fell asleep and where I left off.

Final Fantasy 16 has been an impressive piece of entertainment. The cinematic sequences depicting conflicts between nations are so well done and the scale of the events paint a picture of a fantasy world full of lore. I just sometimes stop and marvel at what games have become, then I start furiously mashing the square button during fights. Boss fights are very satisfying and I keep looking forward to fights with bigger adversaries. My only gripe with FFXVI so far is when it's dark, I can barely see what's happening on screen unless it's pitch black in the room. I don't know if the TV just leans on the darker side, because the game brightness is maxed out. I suspect if I was playing on a monitor, I'd have some better control. Combat was more engaging when I removed a charm that just let you mash square and it would handle all the special attacks. To be fair, once you start adding new attacks, you really have to juggle some buttons. That doesn't bother me too much unless I'm switching between games. Although, the way things are going, I'm liable to pursue FFXVI primarily.