• (Mostly) finished forest maps
• Started planning out the maps for the second half of the game

Continued Slog

Things have continued on their recent slow trajectory. I meant to get back on my normal posting schedule by posting on Sunday, but I didn’t do that, so now it’s Wednesday. Ah well.

I’ve gotten all of the forest maps drawn (though not brought into the engine yet). I’ve got some more caves to draw to link up some parts of it, but I decided to instead finish up the planning/“blocky” versions for the maps for the rest of the games. They’re coming along! There are three (kind of four) distinct areas in the second part of the game (Black Mountain itself) and the biggest one is done(ish?), and I’ve got some preliminary sketches of the rest.

I’m actually starting to worry about the size of the game – Black Mountain was supposed to be a small game that helped me get a process worked out and some engine development out of the way. My map-focused development so far has made it easy to imagine larger (and more) maps than I probably need. For the time being, though, I’m going to keep on with the current plan and build out the draft maps. That was the point of the drafts, after all. I need to focus more on getting through them instead of getting bogged down in details while drawing them… but I’m also cutting myself some slack since this is a very personal project, I figure if I’m having fun doing the details then I could certainly be spending my time in worse ways.

I just need to balance that “having fun” against “taking forever”, because it’s ALSO fun to finish things.

Here’s a “work in progress” of the entrance to Black Mountain (that I thought was finished until I looked at it just now and realized I didn’t finish the ruined walls that are sketched out on the ground there). This is a small rest area between the last section of the forest (an abandoned, ruined road) and the first section of Black Mountain (the partly-flooded, lowest level of the interior).

And Art

I’ve also been spending some time doing some drawing. I realized that maybe I should warm up a bit each day before working on the maps, so I have been. Warming up is actually mostly pen/hand-control exercises, and then I do a bit of free drawing or some figure drawing or whatever. Lately I’ve been looking a bit at artists I admire and trying to break down what they’re doing and seeing if I can synthesize the bits I like into my own stuff. It’s nice to be drawing again, I think?