Getting Started

Lately I've been busy reading game development resources. I discovered the Phaser HTML5 game framework, and after spending a couple of days exploring the possibilities, found and followed a shmup tutorial. Around the same time, I found guides to 2D sprite art and started learning about the basic skills involved. This collection of vector art walkthroughs turned out to be useful, along with more detailed guides like this and this. Those and their many links helped me finally make some sense of colors and shading.

I made a few attempts to integrate that information and practice constructing basic combinations of shapes. I've found I presently don't have the slightest intuition for artistic composition, so it takes me many, many hours of trial and error to construct even simple things. For example, I managed to put together the following "TrivialSprite" after 6-8 hours. It's intended for a simplistic top-down shooter idea where I wanted to mimic a tiny portion of the design of the game Heat Signature (which looks interesting, incidentally).

I've started to think that composing a piece of artwork involves much the same level of design work as writing a program of similar scope. A trivial object may be as straightforward as a script. A person or other complex figure requires composing multiple trivial objects and carefully aligning things like color and shading. A scene requires balancing/connecting lighting, colors, emphasis and such across many figures. Improving my ability in this would take a lot of work, and since I'm not feeling much interest/pleasure/affinity for the process of composition, I'm thinking I probably don't want to go much further with it.

I've also started learning about roguelike development again. Went back to old resources and found many new ones. Between things like RogueBasin and /r/roguelikedev's FAQ Fridays, there's a lot of information to work with. I've been learning about terrain generation and trying to prepare a prototype to experiment with. I'm currently following the Python + libtcod tutorial to refresh my memory. I've found many potential platforms to work with as well:

• libtcod for console output
• SquidLib for Java
• pyglet for OpenGL in Python
• or even Godot, a full, open-source game engine with scene editor, IDE, and Python-like scripting language.

I've been seeing many examples of game designs and interfaces that seem simple enough to be accessible to me now. It's making many of my previous ideas more viable, so they keep cycling through my mind. I've got at least half a dozen clusters of fragments of ideas being formed. I have to figure out which one to isolate and focus on.