Week 40: Octobit: Part 1

I've been busy making art for Octobit!

tl;dr: I'm participating in Octobit this year, so I've been heads-down on making pixel art!

Octobit!

I'm doing Octobit this year! So I'm spending most of my time this month developing my art skills, rather than writing code!

Also, I've been recording time-lapse videos for each of my creations, so check those out too!

What is Octobit?

Octobit is a challenge to create one piece of pixel art per day during the month of October. Here is this year's daily prompt list.

There are many other similar do-a-thing-daily-for-a-month challenges, and this seems to be the popular time of year to have them in! In particular, I have known friends to participate in Inktober (for "inking" (art with an ink pen)) and NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I think Octobit is much less well known (but so is pixel art in general!), and there certainly doesn't seem to be as much of a official structure for it. Bruno Moraes started Octobit in 2016, and they continue to publish the "official" prompt list each year.

Day 1: You as an action figure

• UkuleleFury is my username for a lot of things.

Day 2: Origami

• Squirrel!

Day 3: Half human

• At first, I started making a half-tree-stump/half-human, but then I realized that is not at all original!
• So.... here's a pumpkin person!

Day 4: Latte art

• I make a lotta latte art!
• So I had very strong opinions about how this day's art should turn out!
• This design is a classic latte art shape called a rosetta.

Here's a rosetta I poured in real life!

Day 5: Medical procedure

• One of the most amusing medical procedures, testing the patellar-tendon reflex.

Day 6: It came from outer space

• Cue X-Files soundtrack...

Day 7: Garbage

• Eww, garbage floating in the ocean!
• This took me a long time to get the lighting and colors right for all the bits of trash, and the overall scene.
• Adding the simple animation at the end was easy, and makes it a lot easier to see the distinction in the different pieces of trash!
• Btw, this is a very real thing, in a big way, and you should use much less plastic in your life! Switch to reusables!

Day 8: Marble

• Ohhh, I spent way too much time on this one!
• I estimate (poorly) that I spent 19 hours on this.
• BUT, I'm really glad to have done it.
• I learned a lot about good techniques for all sorts of animation stuff in Aseprite (the editor I'm using).
• And I learned a lot about what is easy, what is hard, and how to design animations in the future!
• Also, I think it turned out great!
• But, I will definitely try to limit all my other Octobit art to each take much less than a full day to create!
• My first idea was to create a single-frame image of a marble pastry board, with some board and croissants.
• But then, I realized a marble track would be more fun!
• I was inspired by a Kickstarter I've been waiting for: Makeway.
• This track is real! You can buy and own these parts!
• This animation is 472 frames long.
• There are primarily two parts--one for each branch of the course--that are each looped three times.
• One ascent of the turning screw takes 466 frames.
• The most difficult bits were:
• The spacing for the parts
• The timings for the marble movement
• Getting the loop duration correct, with the positioning/height/duration of the screw.
• The camera pan and zoom were added last, and weren't too terribly difficult.
• I mostly needed to create some guidelines layers to help keep things moving somewhat smoothly.

Look at all these animation frames!!

Having camera viewport guidelines helped me handle the pan and zoom during the animation.

Code and other work

• Work on Ludum Dare 49: The Eye of Glower-On:
• Create some new promo art for The Eye of Glower-On.
• Polish my ldjam and itch.io pages for The Eye of Glower-On.
• Create a portfolio post for The Eye of Glower-On.
• Fix a breaking bug on all platforms: the spawn scheduler was using since-app-start-time rather than since-level-start-time, so all heroes spawn all at once on the second level.
• Add support for tracking the level-local scaled play time on level-session (in addition to the previous unscaled time).
• Played and reviewed a bunch of other Ludum Dare submissions.

What's next?

• More Octobit art!
• I'm a couple days behind, and I want to instead be a couple days ahead, so I don't think I'll have time for much more than art this week!
• :) That's ok, I like art.
• Here are the next prompts:
• 9. Your biggest treasure
• 10. Lunchbox
• 11. Don't touch
• 12. Luchador
• 13. Big bug
• 14. Matryoshka dolls
• 15. Typical food from your country
• 16. Beware of the dog
• 17. Sandcastle

🎉 Cheers!