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!
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
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
Day 6: It came from outer space
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!
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