My fourth game is done, and it’s available to play on this very site! It also happens to be my second game for One Game a Month. The theme this month was “The Fair,” so I gave it some thought and came up with this: Madame Zarena Wants to Be a Clown, a heartwarming tale of a psychic who dreams of bringing laughter to people by hitting herself in the face with a pie.
This feels like it was by far my most ambitious game to date, if only because of the art. So. Much. Art. If I never have to draw anything ever again, that will be fine by me. The art in the game is pretty simplistic, but I am not an artist. Putting any discussion of innate artistic ability aside, the fact is that drawing things with a computer is simply not something I do. I have very little experience with graphics software, and as a result my workflow typically went as follows:
- I sit down to draw something and spend two to five minutes trying to figure out how to use the various drawing tools in the program
- I eventually give up and go to Google, searching, “How do I draw a triangle?”
- I spend several minutes reading tutorials because apparently drawing a triangle is not something you can just do in any piece of free software (grr)
This all culminated in me spending eleven straight hours on a work night drawing a Ferris wheel. Never again. Or so I say, but next month is right around the corner and the theme will probably be “Graphics Spectacular” or something like that. Oh well.
For some interesting background on what inspired this game, hop on over to String Trees and read my rather lengthy post there.